Pressed to name my all-time favourite
song, I’d be struggling, but a strong contender – alongside The Beatles’ ‘Don’t
Let Me Down’, The Beach Boys’ ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ and David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ –
would have to be ‘Waterloo Sunset’, surely The Kinks’ and Ray Davies’ greatest
song. In the Kinks’ biography he wrote for Omnibus Press three years ago, You Really Got Me: The Story Of The
Kinks, Nick Hasted obviously felt the
same way, devoting a whole chapter to it, which I think belongs on my blog
in its entirety. Here’s the first part, second tomorrow.
Ray
Davies was in Van Morrison’s Belfast flat when he first heard the record which
dominated the Summer of Love. Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band indicated a turning tide towards mystic
whimsy and psychedelic rock. It was joined by radical debuts including The Velvet Underground And Nico, Pink
Floyd’s Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
and The Doors. The hip singles which
chimed were Procol Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’ and The Beatles’ ‘All You
Need Is Love’. The new rock mainstream was drifting away from The Kinks. The
hippie counter-culture bloomed around them on both sides of the Atlantic, with
the hope of upending the straight world, and, in the US, avoiding conscription
into Vietnam’s bloody jungles. Their own personal counter-culture in 1967
fought for Fortis Green’s verities; restorative cups of tea after a hard day,
not LSD to unpick its existence. “I didn’t listen to it all,” Ray says breezily
of The Beatles’ magnum opus. “I was just passing through. It was alright. I
knew I’d put out the best song of the year, so it didn’t matter to me.”
Sgt. Pepper sounds like a brilliant sonic artefact
now. The Kinks’ greatest song, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, is a spell cast every time
you press play, drop a stylus, or hear a snatch of it on a radio as you wait in
a shop. It has made millions contemplatively pause around Waterloo, a busy
urban area to which it has given a sacred glow. The place already had that
resonance for Ray. Previous Kinks singles had moved from roaring teen desire to
satires about others. Personal feelings more complex than being in love had been
tucked onto B-sides and albums. Though only he knew it, ‘Waterloo Sunset’ drew
on Ray’s past, spilling fragile memories.
Even if you don’t quite grasp the
lyrics, you catch the narrator’s condition. He is a lonely, wounded animal who
doesn’t dare leave his room, scared by the restless flow of the Thames and the
crowds “swarming like flies” around Waterloo tube. Even the cold spring air is
too much. So he contents himself with watching the young lovers Terry and
Julie, and the beauty of the sunset from his window. “And I don’t feel afraid,”
he sings, staring at and holding onto the view of his “paradise”. The comfort
the record finds for this understated pain is one reason hearing it can feel
like healing.
“I
didn’t think to make it about Waterloo, initially,” Ray says. “It came to me as
being not the death-knell, but a statement about Merseybeat. But I realised the place was so very significant in
my life, and it’s always best to write about what you know. It’s not nostalgia
for me. It came from good and bad feelings. I was in St. Thomas’s Hospital when
I was really ill [when he had his tracheotomy aged 13], and the nurses would
wheel me out on the balcony to look at the river. I used to go to Waterloo
every day to go to college as well. It was also about being taken down to the
Festival of Britain with my mum and dad. My dad took me by the hand and said
something very poignant. I said, ‘What does this mean?’ He said, ‘This is the
future.’ It was a fifties version of what the future was. I seem to recall they
had a very strange tower.”
The
Skylon tower did give the 1951 Festival, which would later grow into the
concrete canyons of the South Bank Centre, a science-fiction edge. There’s a
short film made at the time, Derek York’s Festival,
in which a working-class kid playing with his mates on a bomb-site gets one of
the free tickets the Festival’s organisers floated over London inside balloons.
He has a tiring day cheekily cadging food and rides, before returning home to
be thumped by his mum. It was revived for a 2010 screening at the South Bank’s
National Film Theatre, in a compilation of shorts called Bow Bells And Waterloo Sunsets (though every film predates the
song). In the black-and-white footage, the concrete South Bank is almost
unrecognisable as it gleams with possibility. Ray’s dad didn’t imagine it.
“I’ve
thought about it a lot,” he continues. “It’s also about the two characters in
the song, and the aspirations of my sisters’ generation before me, who grew up
during the Second World War and didn’t have all the advantages I had growing up
in the Sixties. I used their character. It’s about the world I wanted them to
have. That, and then walking by the Thames with my first wife, and all the
dreams that we had. Her in her brown suede coat that she wore, that was
stolen.” He laughs quietly. “And sometimes when you’re writing and you’re
really on good form, you get into that frame of mind and you think, I can
relate to any of these things. That’s when you know it’s something good.”
“Everything
was right for it,” he said in a TV interview at the time which seems to
describe a visionary state. “If I stopped writing, I went out, and I went past
buildings that reminded me of the song. Everything happened. I saw rivers and
things. And I had to do it.”
“I’ve got a sense of researching
myself,” he says now. “It’s my way of dealing with emotional content. Maybe
it’s something I learned through art school. Rather than absorb all the ideas,
let them flow out, and some sort of sense comes out of it. It’s certainly the
case with that song. ‘Waterloo Sunset’ works on many levels of memory, but not
consciously. It’s a subconscious thing at work, on a level that none of us know
about. That comes through in the record, that’s what people pick up on. But if
you listen to the words without the music, it’s a different thing entirely.
People go on about the song - I love the song, I
always loved it the first time I played it and finished it. But no-one else in
the world knows what that was like. So why talk about it? It’s the record,
actually, and being able to make it myself. And I took
care, because I knew what I had.”
The Kinks have strong, sometimes
diverging memories of making their delicate masterpiece. “It was just in a
chord-state, at first,” Ray says. “I remember I bought a little mini-grand
piano, and I wrote it on that. What was missing was the sound, the arrangement.
I probably didn’t play it to Dave till we were in the studio.”
“Ray introduced us to it the front room
in Fortis Green,” says Mick Avory. “That’s where we heard all his songs. He played
it on the piano, and we’d get the general tempo, and a feel for it. Dave
thought of a riff, then I played the rhythm in semi-quavers on a high-hat to
accompany the intro - dang-danga-dang-danga-dang. Then when it goes into the
song, you do the right thing together. You have to be careful with songs like
that. They’re not bashed-out rock’n’roll. They’re quite subtle. Anything that
stands out too much takes away from the mood. But at the time we were working
quite well together, and it fitted into place quite easily. Everyone thought
about their own part, conscious of what the others were doing. That’s the way
we did things then. We mixed more socially, so we were closer together as
people.”
“How things used to work,” says Dave [Davies],
“was that Ray often got ideas sitting around the upright piano he had, like the
one in my mum’s front room. Often Rasa [Ray's wife] would be there too, and we’d exchange
ideas. I think a similar thing happened with ‘Waterloo Sunset’. Pete [Quaife] was there,
too. The first time I heard it, it was a verse and a chorus. The first verse
was the important one.” In Dave’s memory, everyone chipped in devotedly. “It
was Pete who came up with the ‘sha-la-la’ bit. I think the descending bass-line
was his too. Apart from the vocal lines and the guitar riff at the beginning, I
think the arrangement evolved from playing it. It was Ray’s song, of course.
But we were all so in love with its atmosphere that every embellishment
contributed to the outcome. That unity of spirit is very important to songs
like that. The Kinks had that then, without question. When we got in a room
with each other, we were charged with ideas. It was an unconditional, inspiring
creative situation. Me and Ray were very close. When Rasa and Pete were with
us, there was a great bonding. We all loved each other.”
Shel Talmy maintains this was the last
Kinks single he produced. “I think the last
thing Shel was involved with was ‘Dead End Street’,” demurs Ray. “I think his
getting credit was more to do with his deal with the record company [no
producer is named on the single’s label]. ‘Waterloo Sunset’ was mine, I think.
Alan MacKenzie engineered it for me. Those staff guys at Pye contributed a lot,
because they knew what The Kinks wanted. They knew where to put the
compressors.”
“Shel was a vibe
person,” Dave says. “But I don’t think he really understood what we were doing.
Ray was protecting his song from getting damaged by him, like it was his
child.” Avory agrees. “‘Dead End Street’ didn’t really
work with Shel’s style of recording. He over-produced it. On the more subtle
things he wasn’t so good. Ray took over after that.”
“Visually, I knew exactly what I wanted
it to sound like,” the former art student says of his first production. “It’s
like the singer Laura Nyro said: ‘I can draw what I want something to sound
like.’ Sound and images work together. It works on that level for me. The song
has a lot of emotional depth to it, and I wanted the sound to echo that depth.
That’s why I took care.” The days when whole albums would be done in three days
were suddenly gone. The song drew out Ray’s perfectionism.
“I did the back-track over the course
of two or three sessions,” he continues. “I did it in Pye No. 2, a smaller
studio, while making an album. I did it on the end of sessions. I said, ‘Let’s
go back to that, and do the next bit’, and gradually built it up. I tried it
out at the beginning with Nicky Hopkins on keyboards, and it felt too
professional. So I put it down with bass, one of those old Fender acoustic
guitars, drums, and piano I played. I kept it as a band
track. I think it’s one of the last real band’s tracks we did. All the effects
went down as we recorded it. Then I went on a separate day and put Dave’s
guitar down. That was a rarity for us then. It went down first usually with the
back-track, because it was a guitar-driven band. But I wanted a certain part.
It’s one record where Dave really sat down and we worked together as a team,
and he played what I wanted him to play.”
“We were looking for a sound for the
guitar-line,” Dave says, “and Alan MacKenzie came up with this Fifties idea –
that Elvis echo, with a triplet tape-delay. It was a lovely feeling of
liberation, hearing that echo on my guitar. Something big, inside a little
idea. That Danson guitar playing one note at the beginning is the glue that
holds it together, like when football managers talk about a side’s spine. When
you’ve got that back-bone, you’ve got a chance. I love the counterpoint, where
the bass and my guitar go down as the song rises. It’s like tunes I loved as
kid, that went up and down like snakes and ladders – it’s sad, but you know
it’s going to erupt into something good. The way Bert Weedon would dampen off
the string at the bridge, getting that little plucking noise, Chet Atkins too –
we combined all those things. In situations like that, where you don’t have a
lot of time, you draw on everything you’ve learned. And my mum and my sister
and Uncle Frank are in it too.
“It didn’t have a bridge, at first. I
added that inspired by the shifts in Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons,
those Fifties pop songs. ‘Waterloo Sunset’ was derived from an earlier time
musically, with bits of the fifties – that ‘sha-la-la’. Inspirations from our
childhood, in current metaphors for what was happening in 1967.”
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