THE KINKS ARE NO STRANGERS to our national conversation. Having played their last note in 1996, they’ve now been defunct for nearly as long as they were together. Yet their stock continues to rise. At the 2012 London Olympics, their signature song “Waterloo Sunset” was given a place of honour in the closing ceremony. Five years later their main songwriter and singer, Ray Davies, was knighted for services to the arts. Meanwhile Sunny Afternoon, a West End musical based on their career, picked up a clutch of Olivier awards.
Regularly cited today as the third wheel in a Sixties pop holy trinity completed by The Beatles and Stones, and regarded as hugely influential on subsequent musical generations, The Kinks have joined the likes of Judi Dench and Alan Bennett as national treasures — or, in the more euphonious words of their fellow Londoner William Blake, “jewels of Albion”. So how did all this happen?
I WAS THERE, AGED NINE, AT THEIR ERUPTION in July 1964 The moment I was pinned to the wall by the bulldozer riff and unhinged vocal of “You Really Got Me”, I took The Kinks’ shilling. Within three months they’d unleashed the frenzied “All Day and All of the Night”. Then with their next chart-topper, “Tired of Waiting for You”, they slowed the whole thing down and made menace beautiful.
