You know, for all the talk that the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society album gets about it being threaded by a theme of looking back on the past, thinking of the good times and trying to maintain those good old-fashioned values in the present day – the second half of the album deviates from all of this quite drastically, containing songs about the local prostitute, Ray Davies’s account of an embarrassing period of his life and a spooky witch-like character. ‘Phenomenal Cat’ also arrives in this half of the album and is about what it says in its title.

From observing a lot of artist/band interviews from the 1960s, I’ve come to gather that the word ‘cat’ was generally used to refer to another person. “I saw that cat walking down the street the other day…”, “He’s a cool cat, man.” Etcetera, etcetera. Well, in this song’s case, Ray Davies has written the track as a story about a literal cat who has travelled the world and spends its days in a tree. Sort of in the spirit of the Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’, I think it’s meant to be a bit of a children’s song. In the land of idiot boys, the cat lived in a tree and ate a lot, but wasn’t shy in telling the people who were willing to listen all the places that he had been to in its life. To anyone who can’t decipher the lyrics, the locations are: Cowes, Sardinia, Kathmandu, the Scilly Isles and the Sahara.

Gotta love those Mellotron flutes that are a mainstay throughout the entire track. Those flutes at the beginning that are sort of unrelated to the rest of the song that follows are a bunch of preset samples on a Mellotron that could be activated just by pressing the right keys. You too can play the song’s intro if you own one yourself. But a big nod has to go to the band’s performance too. Everything about the track is so softly and tastefully delivered, from those flutes to Davies’ vocal delivery, capped off with pitched-up wordless vocals courtesy of Dave Davies who provides the voice of the cat during the choruses. All the components provide a hazy, psychedelic fairytale feel. If only we could all be as content with life as this fat cat.