The Kinks

THE KINKS: Sixty Years of English Songcraft, Brotherly Friction, and Unresolved Genius

The Kinks, the London rock band formed in 1963, built one of British music’s most consequential catalogs — and never quite received their due for it. Ray Davies wrote songs the way a sharp-eyed Muswell Hill flaneur might record field notes: closely observed, dry-witted, occasionally devastating. Dave Davies played guitar like a man with something to prove and nowhere particular to prove it. Together, they dragged British rhythm and blues into something more argumentative, more English, and — on the best days — more honest than almost anything their contemporaries managed. The results hold up. The brothers still haven’t entirely sorted things out. That tension, it turns out, was probably the point.

From Muswell Hill to the British Invasion: Formation and Signature Sound

Formed as a rhythm-and-blues band in 1963 by brothers Ray and Dave Davies, the Kinks originated in Muswell Hill in northern London.
The original lineup — Ray on vocals and rhythm guitar, Dave on lead guitar, Pete Quaife on bass, and Mick Avory on drums — arrived at a specific and irreproducible chemistry, one that was as likely to combust as to cohere. That instability was structural. The brothers had been fighting since childhood, Dave being the youngest of eight Davies siblings, Ray the second-youngest. The band’s internal friction became its distinguishing characteristic: there’s a kinetic antagonism in The Kinks’ best recordings that no amount of studio polish could manufacture.

Their early recordings with producer Shel Talmy placed them squarely within the British R&B boom.
Built on power chords, their third single, “You Really Got Me,” provided their big break — it stands, along with the work of the early Rolling Stones, as a landmark of creative exploration of rhythm and blues by white musicians.
Dave Davies’ distorted guitar on that track — achieved, legendarily, by slashing his amplifier cone with a razor blade — predates the formal vocabulary of hard rock by several years.
The single was released in August 1964, and, boosted by a performance on the television show Ready Steady Go!, quickly reached number one in the United Kingdom. Hastily imported by the American label Reprise Records, it also made the Top 10 in the United States.

What came next was more interesting, and considerably less commercially tidy. Ray Davies began writing songs that had no obvious American antecedent: music hall-inflected character studies, pastoral English miniatures, sardonic social comedy.
The band’s music drew from a wide range of influences, including American R&B and rock and roll initially, and later adopting British music hall, folk, and country.
By 1966, the Kinks were making records that sounded like nothing else in the British Invasion — which partly explains why the American market, still expecting “You Really Got Me” energy, increasingly looked elsewhere. The band’s US touring ban between 1965 and 1969, imposed by the American Federation of Musicians after an alleged onstage altercation, compounded the problem considerably. It also freed Ray Davies to become the songwriter he actually was, rather than the one the market wanted.

The Catalog: From Village Green to Low Budget and Beyond

The Kinks’ most critically admired period runs from 1966 to 1971, a stretch of records that has aged better than almost anything produced by their British contemporaries.
The band gained a reputation for reflecting English culture and lifestyle, fueled by Ray Davies’ wittily observational writing style, made apparent in albums such as Face to Face (1966), Something Else (1967), The Village Green Preservation Society (1968), Arthur (1969), Lola Versus Powerman (1970), and Muswell Hillbillies (1971).

The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968) was, commercially, a disaster.
The Kinks’ prior compilation had been certified gold for sales totaling one million dollars — six days before the release of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, which failed to chart worldwide.
The critical reassessment took decades. Today it is widely regarded as one of the finest British albums of the 1960s — a suite of songs about English nostalgia, village culture, and things disappearing faster than anyone planned. Ray Davies was 24 years old when he wrote most of it. The prescience is faintly alarming.

By the end of 1971, the Kinks had secured a five-album deal with RCA Records, which brought them a million-dollar advance. Released in late 1971, Muswell Hillbillies, the band’s first album for RCA, marked a return to the nostalgia of the Kinks’ late-’60s albums, only with more pronounced country and music hall influences.
The album barely charted. It is now, with some justification, treated as a touchstone of eccentric British rock — one of those records whose commercial failure was inversely proportional to its eventual influence. Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s assessment of the Kinks’ RCA period captures something important: the band was making their best American-facing records precisely when America had stopped listening to them closely.

During 1976, the Kinks left RCA and signed with Arista, and refashioned themselves as a hard rock band.
This earned them a second commercial life in the US stadium circuit. Low Budget (1979) and Give the People What They Want (1981) both went RIAA gold — the former their first such certification in over a decade.
“Come Dancing” (1983), inspired by Davies family history, was a hit in both the United Kingdom and the United States,
their last proper crossover moment.

You can explore the breadth of this catalog — from the Pye singles through to the Arista-era arena rock — in the Waterloo Sunset: The Very Best of The Kinks & Ray Davis (2012) compilation available on Get Music, which draws a clear line through the band’s commercial peaks without over-explaining them.