Waterloo Sunset 40th Anniversary Edition coincides with The Kinks' Pye Catalogue available digitally for the first time.
Castle Music are making The Kinks Pye Catalogue available digitally in the UK and Europe. This includes such classic Kinks hits as early singles You Really Got Me; Tired Of Waiting For You; Sunny Afternoon; Waterloo Sunset; Days, through to their final hits with Pye, Apeman and Lola.
This period also takes in all the classic Kinks albums including Something Else; Face To Face; Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) and the seminal The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society.
Castle Music are also releasing a facsimilie edition of the original Waterloo Sunset 7" (backed with Act Nice And Gentle) as a limited numbered edition of 1,000 along with a CD facsimilie of a rare and collectible original French EP - which also included the tracks Holiday In Waikiki and Little Miss Queen Of Darkness.
Ten facts you (probably) never new about The Kinks' Waterloo Sunset long-player:
A few days after The Kinks played Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, on April 1st , 1967 - later to be used for the Live At Kelvin Hall album - Ray Davies secretly booked into Pye Studios to re-cut Waterloo Sunset, producing it himself. A version had been tried out a few weeks earlier with Shel Talmy producing and with Nicky Hopkins on piano.
On 13 April the backing vocals were recorded with Ray, Dave, Pete Quaife and Ray’s first wife, Rasa. This was the first single on which Ray effectively assumed the role as the band’s studio producer, although it wasn‘t until Autumn Almanac in October that any label carried the credit 'produced by Ray Davies'. The UK version of Waterloo Sunset carries no production credit, in America it misleadingly says 'Shel Talmy Productions'.
Mister Pleasant was originally, albeit briefly, considered as The Kinks follow-up single to November 1996’s Dead End Street. Mister Pleasant was only released as a single at this time in the Netherlands in April 1967.
Waterloo Sunset was released 5 May 1967. The B-side, Act Nice And Gentle had been recorded at the same time as the first, aborted Waterloo Sunset session. In the US Waterloo Sunset would not be released until July and was then backed with the track Two Sisters. Remarkably, Waterloo Sunset actually peaked at Number 2 in the UK charts. It would also be included on the album Something Else by The Kinks released in September 1967.
At one point, the recently recorded track Village Green was considered for the B-side. It would not be until November 1968 that Village Green became the centre-piece of The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society.
In a 1969 Rolling Stone interview, Ray commented: ”I wanted to use the names Bernard and Dorothy, but it wouldn’t work.“ Legend has it that the characters Terry and Julie in the song were named after the film stars Terence Stamp and Julie Christie. In his 1996 autobiography X-Ray, Davies denies this.
Ray Davies allegedly began writing the song a year before it was recorded. At first, it was called Liverpool Sunset and it’s said that he changed the words after The Beatles released Penny Lane.
In Jon Savage’s The Official Biography, published in 1984, Ray recalled that as a child, he was in St Thomas’ Hospital in Waterloo, by the Thames. After an operation he was wheeled out onto a balcony where he could see the river...”it was just a very poetic moment for me so (when I wrote Waterloo Sunset) I thought about that time - I wanted to write a really good London song.”
In 2004 a BBC London Radio poll named Waterloo Sunset 'The Greatest Song About London' while, last year, Time Out magazine named it 'The Anthem Of London'.
Waterloo Sunset has been covered by - among others - David Bowie, Def Leppard, Damon Albarn, Cathy Dennis, Elliot Smith and David Essex and is Paul Weller’s 'favourite' song. The Jam, of course, famously covered David Watts from the Something Else album.
This re-release has been timed to coincide with the first chart entry for Waterloo Sunset forty years ago - May 1967. Ironically, Waterloo Sunset, one of the The Kinks' greatest and most enduring singles, only reached Number Two in the charts.
Waterloo Sunset 40th Anniversary Edition is in the shops now - and available digitally, along with the rest of the band's back-catalogue.
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