Waterloo Sunset

A-Side: Waterloo Sunset
B-Side: Dedicated Follower Of Fashion

Record label: Old Gold OG 9140
Producer: Shel Talmy

Released: 27/11/81
Purchased: 06/11/82

“Waterloo Sunset” is a song by the English rock band the Kinks. It was released as a single on 5 May 1967 and featured on the album Something Else by the Kinks in September that year. Written and produced by Kinks frontman Ray Davies, “Waterloo Sunset” is one of the band’s best-known and most acclaimed songs, and was ranked number 14 on the 2021 edition of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. It was also their first single that was available in true stereo.

“Waterloo Sunset” reached number 2 on the British charts in mid-1967. It was a top 10 hit in Australia, New Zealand and most of Europe. While also released as a single in North America, it failed to chart there.

Interviewed in May 1967, Davies stated that “if you look at the song as a kind of film, I suppose Terry would be Terence Stamp and Julie would be Julie Christie”, referring to the popular British film actors romantically linked at the time. Latterly, Davies has refuted this connection; in 2008, he described the song as “a fantasy about my sister going off with her boyfriend to a new world”, referring to Rosy Davies, who moved to Australia in 1964

“Dedicated Follower of Fashion” is a 1966 song by British band the Kinks. It lampoons the contemporary British fashion scene and mod culture in general. Originally released as a single, it has been included on many of the band’s later albums.

Musically, it and “A Well Respected Man” marked the beginning of an expansion in the Kinks’ inspirations, drawing as much from British music hall traditions as from American rhythm and blues, the latter of which served as the inspiration for breakthrough Kinks songs like “You Really Got Me”. While it was quite scornful toward them, many of the fashionistas the song mocks would later take its title to heart.

In the mid-1960s fashion in Britain was becoming increasingly daring and outrageous, driven by the youth-oriented culture of Swinging London. Boutiques such as Biba, designers like Mary Quant, and the television personalities like Cathy McGowan who popularised them became celebrated as much as the entertainers who wore their mod clothes.

Fashion trends changed rapidly, and the Carnaby Street shops did a brisk business, from those trying to avoid seeming out of step with the latest craze. Ray Davies saw all this and satirised the hypothetical extreme, a superficial dandy whose “clothes are loud but never square / It will make or break him so he’s got to buy the best . . . He thinks he is a flower to be looked at . . . In matters of the cloth he is as fickle as can be.”