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Ray Davies and his younger brother Dave began gigging around North London as teenagers, playing with other future stars such as Rod Stewart and Charlie Watts before settling into a quartet called the Ravens with drummer Mick Avory and bassist Pete Quaife. Manager Larry Page suggested the group’s name change to the Kinks in January 1964, and a couple months later, Ray wrote the song that launched the band to stardom, “You Really Got Me.” By the end of the year, they were one of U.K.’s most popular bands, leading the “British Invasion” of the American charts alongside the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
However, the Kinks were plagued by internal conflicts, and their bad behavior got them banned by the American Federation of Musicians from performing in the U.S. between 1965-69. And while they continued making increasingly brilliant albums full of vividly drawn characters and social commentary such as The Kinks Are the Village Green Society, their status as consistent hitmakers faltered. The Davies brothers would spend the next couple decades changing labels and the lineup of the band, while evolving their sound with more high-concept albums.
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Indeed, the Kinks have made roughly the same number of studio albums as the Rolling Stones, but they did it in half the time. On multiple occasions, it seemed like they were a spent force, only for them to return to the charts with hits such as 1970’s “Lola” or 1983’s “Come Dancing.” The Kinks finally disbanded in 1996, and the Davies brothers have periodically both encouraged or dismissed the possibility of the band ever reuniting.
The Kinks released their self-titled debut album on Oct. 2, 1964, featuring the classics “You Really Got Me” and “Stop Your Sobbing.” In honor of this 60th anniversary, SPIN explores where it ranks in the band’s massive, daunting catalog.
24. UK Jive (1989)
As the producer of most of the Kinks’ albums, Ray managed to steer clear of most of the excesses of ‘80s rock production trends. UK Jive, unfortunately, sounds like it was made in 1989 in all the wrong ways, with garish gated snare drums and hair metal guitar tones that make an energetic set of songs sound obnoxious. Dave has a more natural voice for hard rock than his brother, and “Dear Margaret” could conceivably have been a hit with metalheads. On the second half of the album, “War is Over” comes out of nowhere with the kind of thoughtful lyric and gentle midtempo arrangement that recalls the band’s best ‘70s work. UK Jive is the only Kinks studio album not presently available on streaming services, but you could probably live without tracking it down on YouTube.
23. Percy (1971)
Percy was the eighth highest grossing film of 1971 at the British box office, starring Hywel Bennet as the world’s first recipient of a penis transplant, from, naturally, a well-endowed and prolific womanizer. For some reason, Kinks management decided that the band’s first project after the successful Lola Versus Powerman album should be the soundtrack. To the band’s credit, you wouldn’t know from listening to Percy that this music was composed to accompany a 103-minute dick joke, and Ray is in a philosophical mood on “God’s Children” and “Moments.” Half of the album consists of rambling instrumentals, including a bluesy vamp on “Lola.”
22. Think Visual (1986)
Ray says his original concept for Think Visual was inspired by the unnamed character he’d played in a series of Julian Temple-directed Kinks music videos for “Come Dancing,” “Don’t Forget To Dance,” and “Do It Again.” Ultimately, the album’s title track casts a decidedly cynical gaze at the MTV era (“Flash those teeth, competition’s on the rise / Open those eyes, better get computerized”). The jangly, bittersweet “How Are You?” was the last Kinks single to chart in the U.K., while American rock radio preferred the B-side “Working at the Factory,” a Ray salute to the working class that sounded like a Bruce Springsteen outtake.
21. Give the People What They Want (1981)
In the early ‘80s, Ray dated Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, and her band’s covers of his “Stop Your Sobbing” and “I Go To Sleep” became U.K. chart hits. Hynde provides backing vocals on four songs on Give the People What They Want, but the Kinks were still making hard rock far removed from Pretenders’ sleek, stylish sound. The horrid single “Destroyer,” which features musical and lyrical callbacks to past glories such as “Lola” and “All Day and All of the Night,” is a low point in a frequently self-referential catalog. Still, the title proved prophetic, as Give was the Kinks’ third consecutive gold album in America.
20. Everybody’s in Show-Biz (1972)
Everybody’s in Show-Biz was a hybrid double album, with new studio songs on one LP and a live recording of the Kinks at Carnegie Hall on the other. Ray wrote songs about fame and performing to tie it all together thematically, including two great singles, “Celluloid Heroes” and “Supersonic Rocket Ship.” While there are thoughtfully direct songs that puncture the pomposity of rock stardom, you can’t get around the fact that “Sitting in My Hotel” and “Here Comes Yet Another Day” are not exactly thrill rides. The Carnegie Hall recording has a few great performances of early ‘70s Kinks album cuts, but it would be subpar as a standalone live album. “Lola” is edited down to just the audience chanting along with the end of the song, while Ray introduces songs in silly voices and smirks through covers of Tin Pan Alley oldies such as “Baby Face” and “Mr. Wonderful.”
19. Preservation Act 1 (1973)
The strangest thing about the Kinks’ two-part album Preservation is that the title track that explains the premise of the duology (“Once upon a time in a faraway land lived a villain called Flash”) doesn’t appear on either album. “Preservation” was instead issued as a standalone single, sort of like an unsuccessful trailer for the whole story. Without it, the narrative is even harder to understand on Preservation Act 1, although there is a link to some early Kinks lore (“One of the Survivors” features an older, paunchier version of Johnny Thunder, a character from The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society). Preservation Act 1 was a particular favorite of Lou Reed’s, and the single “Sweet Lady Genevieve” is a delight, but it’s not an album that lives up to Ray’s reputation as one of pop music’s great storytellers.
18. The Kinks Present Schoolboys in Disgrace (1975)
Schoolboys in Disgrace is essentially an origin story about Mr. Flash, the villain of the Preservation albums, as a rebellious kid in a strict and unforgiving school. RCA couldn’t have been too pleased to release a concept album that was a prequel to the band’s other commercially unsuccessful concept albums, and it was the last Kinks project for the label. Several songs are pastiches of ‘50s rock, but the standout “The Hard Way” harkens back to the sound of the Kinks’ mid-‘60s hits, and Avory has often mentioned “No More Looking Back,” the album’s sublime, groove-driven second single, as one of his favorites. In 2010, actor/director Bobcat Goldthwait said he’d written a feature film adaptation of the album that would be executive-produced by Ray, but the project never came to fruition.
17. Phobia (1993)
Some good things were happening for the Kinks in the first half of the ‘90s. The band were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, signed a new deal with Columbia Records, and sold out London’s Royal Albert Hall, all while being cited as a major influence by most of the top Britpop bands of the era. Phobia, however, came and went with barely any notice, and proved to be the band’s final studio album. With the expanded running time afforded by compact discs, Phobia is the band’s longest at 71 minutes. Even with some excellent songs and polished production, it starts to get a little monotonous after an hour-plus. “Hatred (A Duet)” feels like a fitting sendoff for the partnership of Ray and Dave, who harmonize on the chorus, “Hatred is the only thing that keeps us together.” The band were subsequently dropped from Columbia, and performed together for the last time in 1996.
16. The Kinks Present a Soap Opera (1975)
Of the Kinks’ many theatrical concept LPs, which Ray has sometimes called “visual albums,” Soap Opera is the only one that was turned into a TV special concurrent with its release. The stage musical version of the album, titled Star Maker, co-starred Ray and June Ritchie and aired on British television (an earlier attempt by the same network, Granada TV, to produce a teleplay of Arthur was aborted when funding fell through). Davies plays Star, a man who believes he can turn any dull regular person into a celebrity, and sets his sights on a file clerk named Norman. Without the added humor and narrative context of the TV special, though, Soap Opera sometimes feels like a retread of the fame-centric Everybody’s in Show-Biz, but with stronger tunes. “It’s a bit of a bizarre plot. But that’s the Kinks, and there are some marvelous songs along the way,” wrote Nathan Cobb in the Boston Globe review.
15. Preservation Act 2 (1974)
It speaks to the Kinks’ questionable commercial instincts that the band’s only studio double album is the sequel to one of their least successful records. Your mileage may vary on how much you enjoy Act 2, a 67-minute album full of genre pastiches and character monologues, but it simply feels like a much more fully realized concept album than Act 1. A series of brief tracks titled “Announcement,” narrated by Welsh actor Christopher Timothy, help get the story across without stalling the momentum of the musically adventurous collection of songs. The sleazy, swinging lead single “Money Talks” is the Kinks’ best attempt at the glam rock sound that was all the rage in London in ’74.
14. Word of Mouth (1984)
Avory, the longest tenured member of the Kinks outside of the Davies brothers, left the band after clashing with Dave during the recording of Word of Mouth. Avory played on three songs before the band finished the album with a drum machine and Argent’s Bob Henrit, who’d remain for more than a decade. With their late career resurgence losing steam, Word of Mouth was the Kinks’ lowest charting album in America in nearly 10 years. The album’s third single, “Living on a Thin Line,” has come to be regarded as one of Dave’s best songs, particularly after its prominent appearance in a season 3 episode of The Sopranos. “Word of Mouth falters when Ray’s canny self-plagiarizing eclipses the songs themselves,” David Fricke wrote in the Rolling Stone review.
13. Misfits (1978)
In the ‘70s, it became something of a custom for white rock stars to derail otherwise good albums with possibly well-intentioned but tone deaf or offensive songs about race. The Kinks’ “Black Messiah” isn’t quite as problematic as certain infamous songs by John Lennon, Reed, or Patti Smith, but it’s a low point on Misfits, which otherwise features a nuanced and poignant portrait of a cross dresser in “Out of the Wardrobe.” The opening title track is one of rock’s greatest tributes to outcasts and rebels, a gentle midtempo song with a Ray lyric that radiates empathy and warmth.
12. State of Confusion (1983)
Ray played up his London accent on “Come Dancing,” a sweet and nostalgic song about the English dance halls of his youth and his sister Rene, who died in 1957. Arista was anxious about releasing such a thoroughly British song as State of Confusion’s lead single, and even asked Davies to re-record his vocal with less of an accent, but he refused. Ironically, “Come Dancing” was a massive success in America, their first top 10 hit in 13 years, and only did well in the U.K. after it had already climbed the charts in the U.S. From the title track to “Don’t Forget To Dance,” State of Confusion represents some of the best work by keyboardist Ian Gibbons, who joined the Kinks in 1979 when the band was making more guitar-heavy albums. “Heart of Gold” is a tender ode to Ray’s newborn daughter with Chrissie Hynde, and he keeps his acerbic political edge on “Young Conservatives.”
11. Low Budget (1979)
If you were to rattle off the five or 10 most famous Kinks songs, you wouldn’t name anything on Low Budget. Surprisingly, it’s the band’s highest-charting proper album in America, peaking at No. 11 on the Billboard 200 and going gold (it’s also the only one they ever recorded in America, at New York’s Power Station). Even though Low Budget’s singles didn’t do big business on the charts, the Kinks had steadily been building momentum since signing to Arista, and had returned to prominence on AOR radio and the touring circuit. It was also the band’s first album with Argent bassist Jim Rodford, who shows off some impressive fretwork on “Pressure” and would remain with the band until their 1996 dissolution. Surveying the dismal headline news of the late ‘70s, Ray wrote topical songs such as “Catch Me Now I’m Falling” and “A Gallon of Gas,” and the Kinks were at their peak of their powers as a hard rock band.
10. Kinda Kinks (1965)
“I remember when we did our second album, after the first one went to number one in England,” Ray told Elliott Smith in a 2003 Filter Magazine interview. “We came back off a world tour and they said, ‘Your new album is coming out in six weeks.’ I said, ‘Well, we haven’t even recorded it or written it yet.’” As is often the case when a band is rushed into following up a successful debut, Kinda Kinks is no equal to its predecessor. Given the circumstances though, an album with songs as impressive as “Tired of Waiting for You” and “Look for Me Baby” can hardly be called a sophomore slump. The acoustic “Nothin’ in the World Can Stop Me Worryin’ About That Girl” enjoyed a resurgence in the late ‘90s thanks to its inclusion on the soundtrack for Wes Anderson’s Rushmore.
9. Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One (1970)
Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One is not the Kinks’ best or worst concept album, but it’s the one that demonstrates the least commitment to its theme (they never even followed through on Part Two, unlike the Preservation albums). Indeed, the songs that stray from critiquing the music industry (“Lola,” “Apeman,” “This Time Tomorrow”) are generally better than the ones that stay on topic (“Denmark Street,” “The Moneygoround,” “Top of the Pops”). John Gosling became the first full-time keyboardist to join the Kinks in 1970, contributing to the richer, more expansive sound of many of their albums that decade. Anderson raided this album to help soundtrack his film The Darjeeling Limited, including Dave Davies’ “Strangers,” frequently covered by acts including Norah Jones, Golden Smog, Wye Oak, Lucius, and Black Pumas.
8. Sleepwalker (1977)
Music industry legend Clive Davis is a master of the comeback, having presided over albums that returned Santana, the Grateful Dead, and Whitney Houston to chart success after fallow periods. In 1976, the Kinks signed to Davis’ Arista Records, and the label urged them away from theatrical concept albums, brass sections, and background singers and back towards being a conventional rock band. The result is almost startingly simple and direct compared to their mid-‘70s work, but “Stormy Sky” and “Life Goes On” feature some of Ray’s finest vocal performances. Throughout 1977, the Kinks toured hard, performed on Saturday Night Live, and closed out the year with the release of an instant classic holiday single, “Father Christmas.”
7. Kinks (1964)
Ray says “You Really Got Me” was one of the first five songs he’d ever written, and Dave says it was “out of frustration” that he cut the speaker cone of his amp with a razor blade and inadvertently created the massively influential distorted guitar sound heard thereon. All of the British Invasion bands’ debut albums mix tributes to American influences with originals that demonstrate early flashes of songwriting genius, and in that way, “You Really Got Me” sits alongside the Who’s “My Generation” as the greatest songs on those debuts. The Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley covers on Kinks merely demonstrate that the Davies brothers were able to hit the ground running because they’d already studied the greats. Fortunately, there are enough songs such as “Just Can’t Go To Sleep” and “Stop Your Sobbing” to prove that the first hit wasn’t a fluke.
6. Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969)
Ray negotiated the end of the Kinks’ U.S. concert ban in 1969, and the band were allowed to tour America for the first time in four years as Arthur’s lead single, “Victoria,” ended a long absence from the Hot 100. Released a few months after the Who’s Tommy, Arthur was often compared favorably to Pete Townshend’s rock opera by critics, but the two albums illustrate completely different ways of creating a narrative out of a set of rock songs. Ray’s version of a concept album is certainly less operatic than Townshend’s, but it’s brimming over with lyrical detail, social commentary, and clever musical structures.
5. Muswell Hillbillies (1971)
Many of the Kinks’ albums have a unified lyrical theme but little musical cohesion. Muswell Hillbillies, however, has a thoroughly executed vision, with a slightly lo-fi, antiquated sound and instrumentation heavy on accordion, banjo, trumpet, and tuba. In paying tribute to the neighborhood where they grew up, Muswell Hill, the Davies brothers fused their late ‘60s celebrations of Englishness with their foundational American influences to make a deeply original musical statement. “Most of its charms are in the casual-to-messy eclecticism with which it revives time-honored effects from the music hall and the mod era and even the mountains, and the dotty good humor of Ray Davies’ singing,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice review.
4. Face to Face (1966)
Each great British band of the ‘60s had a key moment when they finally took off the training wheels and released an album of all-original material – ie., no covers of their American rock and blues forebears. For the Kinks, that album was Face to Face. Like Paul McCartney, Ray drew heavily on British music hall influences when his band began to depart from standard rock quartet arrangements, but Face to Face rocks much harder than, say, “When I’m 64” or “Honey Pie.” The clumsily deployed sound effects on “Rainy Day in June” and “Holiday in Waikiki” are remnants of the band’s temporarily stifled ambitions to make an album that was more than just a collection of unrelated songs.
3. The Kink Kontroversy (1965)
The Kink Kontroversy represents the apex of the Kinks as a no-frills rock combo, although producer Shel Talmy was still farming out some of the rhythm section’s duties to session musicians. A cover of “Milk Cow Blues” to showcase Dave as a lead guitarist is quickly dispatched as an opening act for 11 subsequent original songs. Ray gets one last riff monster out of the “You Really Got Me” formula with “Till the End of the Day,” but also presents more creative and dynamic material such as “The World Keeps Going Round.” By the end of 1965, the Kinks had written more than 50 songs in two years, and it’s dizzying to consider that the early albums could have been even greater if so much of the best material hadn’t been released on singles and EPs.
2. Something Else by the Kinks (1967)
Dave had written and sung lead on several songs on the Kinks’ early albums, but his three contributions to Something Else mark his true arrival as a songwriter. “Death of a Clown” was a major chart hit and kicked off an unusual tradition: singles that were credited to Dave as a solo artist but were recorded by the entire band and appeared on Kinks albums (he didn’t release his first proper solo effort until 1980). Not to be outdone, Ray wrote some of his greatest songs for Something Else, bookending the album with the masterpieces “David Watts” and “Waterloo Sunset.”
1. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is the band’s most impressive union of ideas and performances, an ambitious song cycle that’s also charmingly droll and crammed with memorable hooks. In addition to taking over from Talmy as the band’s producer, Ray reaches his pinnacle as a songwriter, with character studies such as “Johnny Thunder” and the heavy psych rocker “Wicked Annabella” deftly woven into a panoramic portrait of England’s past. Village Green Preservation Society didn’t even appear on the U.K. charts upon its initial release, although a 2018 reissue reached No. 47, a sign of how the album had grown into a cult classic over the years. Generations of musicians have borrowed liberally from the album, including Electric Light Orchestra’s lift of the “Do You Remember Walter?” intro on “Mr. Blue Sky,” and Green Day using the riff from “Picture Book” for “Warning.”
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