Andy Miller

Even in the Swinging Sixties, Ray Davies was feeling nostalgic

At their artistic peak in 1968, the Kinks released a magical collection of songs dealing explicitly with the bittersweet lure of the past

Ray Davies — sounding jocular when he’s actually sad, sounding sad when he’s actually uncertain

At first glance, nostalgia does not seem like a subject much suited to exploration via the medium of the pop song; after all, this is the topic which inspired, at least in part, Ulysses and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, two of the greatest and longest novels of the 20th century. What can one say in three minutes that hasn’t already been said in six volumes?

On the one hand, we have such warnings from history as ‘Those Were the Days’ by Mary Hopkin or Terry Jacks’s implacably awful ‘Seasons in the Sun’, a rendition of Jacques Brel’s ‘Le Moribond’ which loses not just something but everything in translation. On the other hand, during the 1980s both The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys looked back on their lives, often with a sense of shame, to melancholy yet memorable effect: ‘Back to the Old House’, ‘Cemetry Gates’, ‘This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave’. Ah the 1980s, the good old days when bands really knew how to write nostalgic songs.

In fact, the great pioneer of looking back— in three minutes or under — was Ray Davies, the chief singer and song-writer of the Kinks. Only 20 when the Kinks topped the charts with ‘You Really Got Me’ in 1964, Davies grew increasingly preoccupied with nostalgia when all around were raving in discotheques or fighting in the streets: ‘Where Have All the Good Times Gone’; ‘Autumn Almanac’; ‘Do You Remember Walter?’; ‘The Way Things Used to Be.’

Davies was preoccupied with nostalgia when all around were raving in discotheques or fighting in the streets

The Kinks’ 1968 single ‘Days’ and LP The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society are the summit of this theme and arguably the group’s artistic peak, a magical collection of songs which deal explicitly with the bittersweet lure of the past.

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