Waterloo Sunset

Released as a single by The Kinks in1967, and featured on their album Something Else, Waterloo Sunset was composed and produced by Kinks lead songwriter Ray Davies.

Ray Davies started writing this a few years before The Kinks recorded it. At first, it was called "Liverpool Sunset," but when The Beatles released "Penny Lane," he changed the words so it wouldn't look like a rip-off.

The lyrics are from the point of view of a solitary man on the south bank of the Thames watching (or imagining) the romantic encounters of a couple at Waterloo Underground, then crossing Waterloo Bridge. Davies, in his 1966 autobiography X-Ray, says the inspiration for the song came from an incident when he was hospitalized as a boy. On the BBC radio show The Davies Diaries, Davies stated that "I can't tell you who they are because they're good friends of mine". The recording features Davies' first wife Rasa on background vocals. “When the record was finished and it was coming out", Ray Davies remembered, “I got my wife Rasa to drive me down to Waterloo Bridge to see if the atmosphere was right… I’ve never worked with a song that has been a total pleasure from beginning to end like that one”.

The record reached number 2 on the British charts in mid-1967. Davies considered the song a professional milestone, where he managed to blend the commercial demands of a hit single with his own highly personal style of narrative songwriting. The elaborate production was the first Kinks recording produced solely by Davies, without longtime producer Shel Talmy. In subsequent arguments with Kinks management over the direction of the band, Davies would say "I've done 'Waterloo Sunset', now I want to do something else".

See the band before Waterloo Sunset: http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=kEL_YfIYAdw