Monica

Album: The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
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Songfacts®:

  • The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society album features several vignettes of characters from Ray Davies' youth in London. There is Johnny Thunder, the local hoodlum; an old friend, Walter; and the witchy Wicked Annabella. Here, Davies sings of his love for Monica, the village prostitute.
  • Ray Davies told Q magazine that many people hadn't noticed that Village Green is a very sexy album. "It's about a lot of sex. Monica, Annabella... All these women that will bring you down, disgrace you," he said. "Make you leave your wife and family for a little leg over in the woods. It's about repressed sex."
  • The song has a calypso style, one that had previously featured on the Kinks' 1965 track "I'm On an Island." Ray Davies later re-appropriated the Trinidadian folk music genre again in 1970 to represent the jungle for the single "Apeman."

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