Usually gruff critic Robert Christgau called it “the most beautiful song in the English language.” So maybe it’s not that terribly surprising it went unnoticed for years in North America. Or maybe it is shockingly so. Either way, The Kinks released the single “Waterloo Sunset” on this day in 1967.
Ray Davies had always shown a flair for writing fine character sketches and glimpses of British life but he was growing in his talents by the Summer of Love. Not only did he write the song and sing it (with his wife, Rasa, doing some backing vocals) he produced it himself too, the first Kinks song that he did. They were actually beginning to work on what would be their fifth album, Something Else By the Kinks, and had well-known producer Shel Talmy in but he and Davies didn’t get along well and Ray fired the veteran and did things himself.
The song was about someone staring out of a window at a bridge across a “dirty old river” – the Thames – near Waterloo station in London, watching lovers meet and walk off together. More widely he said it was “about the aspirations of my sister’s generation, who grew up during the Second World War. It’s about the world I wanted them to have. That, and then walking by the Thames with (Rasa) and all the dreams we had.” He said he’d had the melody in his head for at least two years prior. Of course, the Kinks were more than just Ray Davies, and his brother Dave played some solid guitar on it and noted “we used a tape delay echo, but it sounded new because nobody had done that since the 1950s…we were almost trendy for awhile!” He also remembered his brother being reluctant to share the song. Ray seemed to consider it “like an extract from a diary nobody was allowed to read.” Curiously, while rooted in London and its landmarks, Ray had originally called it “Liverpool Sunset” but changed it because there were enough Liverpool songs and references already from, well a certain other band of the 1960s!
The song won instant praise and success… in Europe and Oceania. It got to #2 in Britain – their tenth top 10 single – , #3 in Ireland, #4 in Australia and even #1 in the Netherlands for example. It went gold in his homeland. Over here though, it failed to chart at all in the U.S. or Canada. Although the song was great and sold, arguably pre-releasing it a couple of months ahead of the LP backfired, as the album sold poorly, only hitting #35 in the UK and far worse elsewhere.
Although it failed to hit over here, it’s now well-appreciated, Rolling Stone lists it among their top 300 songs of all-time for example, and it appears prominently in the American-made but British-set movie Juliet Naked, in which Ethan Hawke, playing an aging alt rock musician sings it and adds he wished he wrote it. Ray played it himself at the closing of the London Olympics, resulting in it re-charting there.
Although they dipped a bit in popularity after that at home for a few years, they never fell utterly out of fashion, but in North America they’d have to wait four years to be noticed again, thanks to the 1970 hit “Lola.”