“Big Sky” (1968) – The Kinks * Written and Produced by Ray Davies * LP: The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society * Label: Pye
Head Kink Ray Davies crafted an exercise in nostalgia as understated as it was grand with the Village Green Preservation Society album, focusing on the real and imagined cultural touchstones of an English upbringing. A certain archness, though, bends his delivery in every song. While it was clear in “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” (1966), for example, that he was poking fun by taking on an aristocrat’s accent near its fadeout, the subject matter in VGPS feels heartfelt if only for its very outpouring. So sportive is Davies’s voice, that you wonder if he’s feeling self-conscious about the project. (His face on the album cover, far right, makes you wonder doubly so.)
“Big Sky,” halfway through, is the biggie, where Davies rolls out God Himself as one of his album’s endangered curios. “Big Sky feels sad when he sees the children scream and cry,” he sings. “But the Big Sky’s too big to let it get him down.” He sounds like an imperious, inaccessible monarch who refers to himself in the third person. Davies once expressed regret over his delivery, and one wonders if he’d have rather sounded more sympathetic, angry, or less affected.
The band does the rest of the heavy lifting, giving the track all of the pent-up emotion, release, puzzlement, and memorialization the subject calls for. Being so big, the song can be taken a number of ways, a believable consensus being that it rouses the listener’s spiritual awareness. This brings to mind Tolstoy’s Andrei Bolkonsky, who lies inert on the War and Peace battlefield and discovers that “everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky.” It’s an observation that sounds at first like mockery or disappointment, but in fact gives Bolkonsky new life, and for this he thanks God, a.k.a. Big Sky.