(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 29 June 2025 8:00, UK
As spectacular as The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society is, it’s a record that didn’t get anywhere near enough praise at the time of its release, and was overlooked due to how it unfortunately had to compete with The Beatles’ White Album and The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, which were released on the same day and a week later respectively. It’s a shame that this is the case, as it is frequently regarded as being the finest album that The Kinks ever recorded.
One of the key elements that makes it such a special record is how it saw Ray Davies’ songwriting elevated to another level, with a greater focus on lavish arrangements and bringing in a conceptual aspect to the lyricism. It felt far removed from a considerable amount of the music they had released as a group up until that point, and was a significant step towards the more experimental works that the band would release in the subsequent years.
In the build-up towards the release, the band released the standalone single ‘Wonderboy’, which hinted at the direction the group would be taking on Village Green. However, the poor commercial performance of the track, which only peaked at number 36 in the UK charts and was the first Kinks song that failed to reach the top 20 in four years, meant that the band were scrambling to release another single to try and recover from the disappointment.
‘Days’ was the song that the band opted to put out, although the band hadn’t anticipated that there would be any need to release it as a single prior to the failure of ‘Wonderboy’. When taken outside of the context of the album, it does appear as though it would work best as a single in comparison to the rest of the album which falters without the conceptual elements propping them up, and the fact that it propelled the group back into the higher tiers of the charts at number 12 suggests that it was the best choice.
However, the song itself was one that Davies wrote out of frustration, and he revealed to Q Magazine that the origins stemmed from the possible end of the band arriving due to the poor commercial reception for ‘Wonderboy’. Written while in this jaded state, the singer claimed: “I didn’t care anymore. So I thought, ‘Say goodbye nicely,’ and wrote ‘Days.’”
“I started writing it in a hotel on tour,” he continued. “Strangely enough it was the rhythm I wanted to get first, the sustained chords. The actual tune came later. And then I wrote some of it in a phone-box while I was phoning somebody I shouldn’t be phoning. The song wasn’t about the person on the other end of the line. Well, not really. But I suppose it’s the ultimate kiss-off, isn’t it? ‘Thank you for the days.’”
While he may not have cared a great deal about the song at the time, Davies concedes that it has risen in his estimation in the years since its release. “I didn’t think much about the song when I wrote it,” he claimed. “Sometimes songs occur like that. You don’t think about it, but it’s built up quite a lot of mystique over the years. It certainly left me. It belongs to the world now.”
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