The Kinks

The Kinks came out of London with brothers Ray Davies on lead vocals and rhythm guitar and Dave Davies on lead guitar, Pete Quaife on bass and Mick Avory on drums, and in 1964 they detonated. "You Really Got Me", their third single and a Ray Davies song, hit number one in Britain and went top 10 in America, and that raw, grinding riff is garage rock, proto-punk and hard rock all at once. "All Day and All of the Night" hammered the point home.

Then the US door slammed shut. Trouble on their 1965 American tour got them banned from touring there for several years, and while their peers worked American stages, the Kinks turned inward, toward England itself. Ray became rock's sharpest observer of English life, satirical, wistful and dead-on, and the band added music hall, folk and country to their R&B roots. Face to Face in 1966 gave us the languid, sardonic "Sunny Afternoon", and Something Else in 1967 held "Waterloo Sunset", as gorgeous a song as rock has produced, plus the sly "David Watts". Arthur (or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire) in 1969 went at the idea of the rock opera, with the jaunty "Victoria" on board.

Quaife came and went and came again before leaving for good in 1969, with John Dalton taking the bass, and keyboardist John Gosling joined in 1970. That same year brought Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, with "Lola" and "Apeman", and Muswell Hillbillies and Everybody's in Show-Biz followed, the latter with the aching "Celluloid Heroes". After a slow patch in the mid-'70s, albums like Low Budget, Give the People What They Want and State of Confusion brought a second wind, and State of Confusion's "Come Dancing" became one of their biggest US hits. From 1979 the lineup settled around the brothers, Avory, bassist Jim Rodford and keyboardist Ian Gibbons, until Avory left in 1984.

The feuding between the Davies brothers finally ended it in the '90s. By then the original four were already in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted in 1990, and the UK Music Hall of Fame followed in 2005. Van Halen, the Jam and the Pretenders all covered their songs, and Blur and Oasis called them a major influence.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.