The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset": Great But Overrated?

It may not be the best Kinks song or even the best song off the album, but it has a certain quality that is beautiful and poignant.

It's both sad and uplifting at the same time.

I want it played at my funeral (hopefully a long time from now).

"shangri-la," on the other hand, has pretty trite words (suburban middle-aged male angst ho hum), but the execution is obscenely beautiful. their greatest moment, i think.

I was in a grocery store the other week and they played "Who'll Be the Next in Line" in their rotation of barely audible background music! I was so excited I started singing along, probably making me sound like some sort of freak to the shoppers around me. But I guess that was from '65, so it doesn't really count. Dunno. Isn't "Days" from that time period? For some reason, I feel like "Days" and "A Well Respected Man" are trite and overplayed, but I don't know how often I've actually heard them on oldies radio here in the US. It's weird.

I once visited a friend who was working at a "classic rock" station. Hanging out in the studio, I convinced him to put on the Kinks when he had to do a "three in a row" thing... Got him to play "You Really Got Me" and "Waterloo Sunset", but then he balked at my third choice (whatever old sixties Kinks hit it was, it wasn't too weird) and played "All Day and All of the Night" instead, which sounds incredibly stupid when played shortly after "You Really Got Me". He said "nobody knows any Kinks songs, aside from 'You Really Got Me', 'All Day', and 'Lola'"!

Anyway, I think "Waterloo Sunset" is a mite overrated, but I wasn't around when it originally came out, so I can't really judge.

I agree. It's nowhere near the Kinks' tritest track lyrically, though.

**but that mix of ordinary-bloke singing, isn't-London-great, celebrate-the-everyday etc etc seems pretty toxic now.**

Agreed. But WS is a million miles away from this. Far more subtle and totally different. Britpop never *got* The Kinks - the likes of Albarn et al bigging up the music hall 'stroike a loight guv' simply disguised their inability to even imagine writing something with as much *longing* as WS. (To be fair Yuko and Hiro is good) Likewise See My Friends, Where Have All The Good Times Gone, I Go To Sleep....and on and on.

Yeah, if I were actually from the UK or had at least lived in London for a while, I might be able to better appreciate that point of view. As it is, I still think it's a great song, but I have to take it on faith that it's the greatest British song ever. I don't think that it's my favorite Kinks song, but then I wouldn't be able to name one particular song as my top Kinks favorite anyway.

1) My Dad had "Golden Hour of the Kinks" when I was about 2, and taped it when he got rid of the album a few years later. "Waterloo Sunset" was track 2 on side one, if I remember correctly (I bought a copy of the album a few years ago, it's the only place you can get "Wonderboy" in stereo, y'know). And the record stuck during the intro, and this is where I'm going to sound like a prat. You know the proper intro where Dave's playing the vocal melody on the guitar? Imagine the first three notes of it played repeatedly for 20 seconds. That's how I heard "Waterloo Sunset" until I was 13. So I always have the 'stuck' version in my head and I was quite disappointed to find it didn't do that in reality.

2) Ray Davies and Damon Albarn singing "WS" on "The White Room", circa 1995. Yuck.

And "Love me 'til the sun shines" rocks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLia0ejUfLk

I'm partial to "Strangers," myself. Written, of course, by the lesser Davies brother.

This is in no way overrated.

It’s properly rated.

Overrated by Christgau, who calls it the "most beautiful song in the English language".

You meant it isn't?

I'm sure I'm in the minority but I would say it wasn't even the best song on that single (I prefer the b-side "Act Nice And Gentle").

That's a singular opinion! It never even got put on an album until 1984.
In its favour, it's possibly the most polite 12-bar blues recorded by a British Invasion group.

Black Keys also do a nice cover of it.

But to get back to the topic at hand, I think one tell that "Waterloo Sunset" isn't really the most beautiful song in the English language is the fact that it hasn't been covered very often or very successfully. Now if you wanted to argue that Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay" (another song from 1967 with a similar theme to "Waterloo" of looking out on water and feeling at peace, and with a gentle country/blues lilt similar to "Act Nice And Gentle") was that song, maybe you'd have a case. At least its been recorded by just about everybody, which is a good indicator.

I thought everyone who tried to cover "Dock of the Bay" got pilloried, or was that just Michael Bolton? Bryan Ferry said he wouldn't dare to.
"Waterloo Sunset" is probably about my tenth- or fifteenth-favourite Kinks song, but I'm not especially eager to hear it sung by anyone other than Ray Davies.

I don’t take Xgau’s assertion literally.

Lots of covers of it here: https://secondhandsongs.com/performance/2966

I sampled a few, it's kind of hard to record a bad version of "Dock of the Bay".

I take the English language part as being about a certain idea of England at a certain time and the beautiful part as about the physical beauty of Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, even if maybe it isn’t actually about them.

Beautiful part also about Rasa’s high harmonies.

It’s part of the same England-inflected melancholy that runs from Poor Cow to The Limey.

This is the same debate as “Ringo wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles!”

Sha-la-la, man.

I dunno, Xgau tends to be fairly literal in his opinions. For myself, I couldn't tell you specifically which song it is, but I'm about 99% sure the most beautiful song in the English language was written before the dawn of the recorded music industry.

Right. Some Buddy Bolden thing, no doubt, except that might not have had words.

Or some old hymn or spiritual maybe.

How Grebt Thou Art?

Or maybe an old folk song or some ragtime, vaudeville or Tin Pan Alley number. There's just so many great old songs.

Michigan J. Frog to thread!

But I think perhaps one reason Xgau selected that song is because its a lovely and striking harmony that is fitted well to an ingenious lyric, that could be interpreted as an analogy to the experience of listening to music, both alone and socially (including the social practice of music criticism). The lyric starts out about a solitary person who doesn't need any friends because they find pleasure in a private aesthetic experience (think of listening to a record alone at home) but then in the last verse it switches to a couple sharing the same experience together (think of Christgau and his wife bonding over their shared love of listening to and arguing about music).

I think this song is just too idiosyncratic to have generated many cover versions.

that could be interpreted as an analogy to the experience of listening to music

This is why I often think of "Roadrunner" as the suburban/American "Waterloo Sunset," though it lacks the element of third-person storytelling with the other characters sharing the same experience.

Have you read that recent book about “Roadrunner”?

Not yet, have you?

Yup

Is there a non-album Kinks tracks poll / thread somewhere? I seem to remember there being one around the time of the Kinks poll, maybe as a side poll, but am having trouble tracking it down.

Occasioned by a Saturday late morning spent listening to the 3xCD VILLAGE GREEN deluxe ed. with what is, without exaggeration, basically an album's worth of equally good songs. And it sounds especially good to me because most of this stuff I've basically only heard once or twice and quite a long time ago at this point.

https://www.discogs.com/release/586438-The-Kinks-The-Kinks-Are-The-Village-Green-Preservation-Society

sorry, i meant to post that in the village green thread, but i spose this will do, too

maybe i was thinking of this:
Kinks Deep Cuts: B-sides, rarities, etc.

realizing that i've had multiple versions of this epiphany over the years, one of them on ILX even, lol. sometimes we post before we think. there's evidently lots of good discussion of non-album stuff (and varying conceptions of "the great lost kinks album")

That 3 CD package is really the only one of its kind that I own. It's thorough, though I guess we could have lived without hearing "Spotty Grotty Anna" or "Mick Avory's Underpants".

Amazingly, I was playing that same Kinks set last night. The deluxe 50th Anniversary box set may be even greater, but there's also a ton of overlap and it's a lot more $$$ - pretty hard to justify the purchase when you have the 3CD set that's far cheaper.

I skipped the 50th anniversary Village Green for the same reason — I already have most of those songs, and the few things unreleased things (or new — wasn’t there a new Ray vocal over a ‘60s track or something?) didn’t seem worth the dough. Similarly, with the upcoming combined Muswell Hillbillies/Everybody’s In Showbiz set: the best outtakes are already on those albums’ 2CD reissues from a few years ago. And as much as I love Muswell, swap “Skin and Bone” for the “Waterloo” rewrite/update “Lavender Lane” and you got a stone classic album there.

I'll have to try that. I do have the Legacy edition of Muswell from Sony/RCA - supposedly the best sounding one though I've never been able to compare it to past reissues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFbQQzkZuqU

wow.

great performance of an absolute classic, don't believe the "don't believe the hype" people

What are the supposed flaws in this song again?

fcc otm fifth post in.