STROLLING across the 'Village Green', The Kinks were looking back to an olde England, a faded Albion later encapsulated by The Jam's All Mod Cons and Blur's Modern Life Is Rubbish... and John Major's Warm Beer Speech. Letting loose his Diamond Dogs, David Bowie was looking forward, to George Orwell's 1984, a rotten place of sterile skyscrapers and rats the size of cats.

These concept albums, newly reissued in expanded, epic editions, marked the closing of a chapter for both The Kinks's cussed Ray Davies and the chameleon Bowie.

Banned from touring the States for four years, Davies stood aside from the psychedelic fixation of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, taking time out from the pop frenzy to pen his paeans to English melancholia and suburbia.

Lennon had been venturing in Strawberry Fields; Davies craved strawberry jam and village greens, and his antediluvian album was dismissed as a music-hall folly, failing to chart upon release in 1968.

Time lends it enchantment, and now The Kinks' preservation society can delight in a re-mastered triple pack with stereo and mono versions and a heavenly host of rarities and ironically American-only releases.

Like Davies in '68, the ever futuristic Bowie was calling time on one phase of his pop career with 1974's apocalyptic Diamond Dogs, his epilogue to glam rock and prologue to his soul-boy conversion from Ziggy Stardust into the Thin White Duke. "This ain't Rock'n'Roll - this is genocide", he proclaimed, as he ruthlessly killed off his past, but not before Rebel Rebel defined his transvestite tightrope act one last time (just as Davies had done with Lola).

Rebel Rebel is so much the stand-out that it appears in three versions, two on the second disc of eight outtakes, remixes and curios. The US single version is an urgent, distorted, funked-up revamp; the 2003 remix, a veteran showman biting his thumb.

Where 'Village Green' was Luddite in its time but fits today's confused English identity, Bowie's Orwellian vision is now as dated as his red mullet.

Updated: 09:40 Thursday, August 05, 2004