“Waterloo Sunset” by The Kinks

"Waterloo Sunset" came out as a Kinks single in May 1967 and turned up again that September on Something Else by the Kinks, and it's Ray Davies at his most quietly devastating. He wrote it, arranged it, sang lead and produced it himself, with Alan McKenzie and Alan O'Duffy engineering, and the result sounds like a man watching the world drift past a window and deciding that's all he needs.

It doesn't push or strut; it floats, gentle and unhurried, the melody hanging in the air like the last of the evening light. British buyers took it to number 2, and it went top 10 in Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe while North America shrugged. It was also the band's first single you could hear in true stereo, and Rolling Stone put it at number 14 when it revised its 500 Greatest Songs list in 2021.

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