to date. Ray further shifted his approach with the band's 1966 album Face to Face, conceptualising an LP made up of songs connected through the use of sound effects and segues. Though Pye Records's objections forced him to reestablish the traditional separation between tracks, retrospective commentators often regard the album as one of rock music's first thematically linked albums, dealing loosely with themes of English class and social structures. Despite these later sentiments, Ray was unsatisfied with Face to Face; in interviews after its release, he disparaged the album as lacking in cohesion. Inspiration and conception In November1966, as the Kinks started sessions for their next album, Something Else by the Kinks, Ray began envisioning an LP unified around his newest composition "Village Green". He considered numerous concepts over time, including writing a piece of musical theatre or pantomime or filming a television special with live bands and an orchestra. The band shelved the idea while they worked on Something Else after they deemed it more appropriate for a potential solo album than a Kinks LP. Ray spent early and mid-1967 increasingly thinking about the form his solo project would take; press releases in June announced that his solo LP would be released in September, and magazine articles in July and August reported that the album would be made up of "orchestra and things like that", "ideas and songs" or one with "the songs linked up in a musical story". In later interviews, Ray has regularly cited the Kinks' five-year ban from American performance as producing his pivot towards English-focused lyrics. Author Andy Miller instead connects Ray's writing to a broader tradition of English pastoral poetry – made up of authors like William Blake, William Wordsworth and Oliver Goldsmith – which often yearned for an idealised past rural England. Academic Carey Fleiner writes that his idealisation of both rural and home life fitted in the revival of the "heritage escapism" trend, which surged across English popular culture following the Second World War. Ray has also discussed his childhood as influencing his lyrics' sentiments towards village life. Both Ray and his brother Dave grew up in Fortis Green, a suburban neighbourhood of Muswell Hill in North London; though the area did not have a traditional village green as a common area, Ray has regularly described the area in rural terms and has compared its atmosphere to that of a village. He