Waterloo Sunset: The Very Best of The Kinks & Ray Davis

In the pantheon of great bands of the British beat boom, the Kinks seem to occupy a perennial fourth place, just off the medal podium. After the all-embracing musicality of the Beatles, the sexy grooves of the Rolling Stones and the art-school power of the Who, the Kinks don’t even qualify for bronze. A comprehensive five-CD box set of their recordings for the BBC from 1964 to 1994 provides plenty of evidence for why this might be. Captured live in session, the Kinks were often a bit of a mess, with variable timekeeping, dodgy tuning, sloppy harmonies, shabby arrangements and sometimes quite atrocious singing, frequently applied to songs whose conceptual and musical ambitions seem beyond all of their abilities, including their own chief songwriter. For every perfectly observed vignette of English life (Sunny Afternoon, Autumn Almanac) and pithily satirical narrative (Village Green Preservation Society, Dead End Kids) there’s a clunking, unwieldy, elaborate novelty song (Supersonic Rocket Ship, Skin & Bone). The band just aren’t brilliant enough to carry off Davies’s duds.