“This Is Where I Belong”—Identity, Social Class, and the Nostalgic Englishness of Ray Davies and the Kinks

Abstract

Among the artists and groups in the vanguard of the “British Invasion” of North America in the period 1964–67, perhaps none more consistently represented, and to a major extent consciously played up to, stereotypical notions of “Englishness” than the Kinks. As the '60s gave way to the '70s, the band's music, and Ray Davies's songwriting in particular, focused increasingly on close, wry, and sometimes satirical observations of English society, manners, and class structure, culminating in a series of concept albums which worked through Davies's obsession with identity. In this article, I examine the tensions inherent in Davies's representation of a particular sense of English identity—caught between tradition and modernity, between nostalgia and realism, and between competing senses of class and nation—in short, his construction of an imagined community that might have been “England,” or some portion thereof, at some moment in time, in which even he might feel he could belong.

Notes

1. It is acknowledged that female singers were given almost equal billing with the band members on such mid‐1970s albums as Preservation Act 1 and Preservation Act 2, but these were among the band's more “theatrical” recordings in which Ray Davies sought to provide listeners with a close simulation of what the album would sound like as a staged, fully cast musical performance.

2. In British slang, “fags” is first and foremost a synonym for cigarettes (derived from “faggots,” one meaning of which is a bundle of sticks used to light a fire). Its second most common usage—at least for those acquainted in any way (for example, from reading Tom Brown's Schooldays or the “Flashman” novels) with customs at British “public,” i.e. private, schools—is to refer to a junior boy who is forced to run errands for more senior pupils. Certainly in Britain of the 1960s, any conversational use of “fag” to refer to a gay man would have been unusual and would probably have identified the speaker as (North) American, not English.

3. There is no village green in Fortis Green.

4. In the 1970s I lived in Muswell Hill on Dukes Avenue, just off The Broadway, about a mile from Denmark Terrace and the Clissold Arms, where the Davies brothers made their first musical appearances in public for an audience larger than immediate family members.

5. The sentiments of “Have a Cuppa Tea” are particularly resonant for all those who have heard the music‐hall jokes and television skits about the mythical healing properties (more psycho‐social than medical) of that beverage in times of trouble, typified by the wonderful send‐up of life in World War II by the Beyond the Fringe troupe (Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller) in which, even after the tea ration ran out, Londoners could find consolation in “a nice cuppa hot water.”

6. The expression “Close your eyes and think of England” is a traditional form of advice given to women confronted by the sexual demands of their husbands or humorously to anyone required to undertake an undesirable task. Its most likely source is Lady Hillingdon's Journal (published in 1912) in which the Lady welcomes the fact that her husband visits her bedroom less frequently than in the past, then continues, “when I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs and think of England” (Rees).