100 Greatest Songs of the 60’s #24 The Kinks – Waterloo Sunset

Released: 1967

Sometimes in researching these pieces you can search forever to get an introductory hook workable enough to draw readers in. This time however I simply give you Ray Davies, as quoted by Nick Hasted in the 2009 issue of Uncut. After Van Morrison put his freshly minted copy of Sgt. Pepper on for the pair to listen to on release in 1967, Davies was unmoved to the point of apathy: “I knew I’d put out the best song of the year, so it didn’t matter to me.”

That level of hubris is usually the domain of somebody with the surname Gallagher, but although Davies felt he’d had some unfinished business with Merseybeat, Waterloo Sunset has come to transcend the confines of any faddish spat.

Despite the whirl of psychedelia and Swinging London, it was deliberately sparse and free from ostentation as Davies had wanted. Originally written on a piano, it had a feeling of antiquity when set against both the future and the past, that Terry and Julie were ghosts and the Thames was a spiritual as well as a physical barrier. Arguments are rarely made to be settled, so let it just be said; Ray had a point.