The Albums That Soundtracked My Life

For a start it's the one with Waterloo Sunset on it so that's worth the price of admission alone.
After buying the Golden Hour of The Kinks I started looking for more Kinks albums. K-Mart had a few cheap ones in horrible sleeves on labels like MFP or Music For Pleasure. The first one I picked up was in a horrible purple sleeve with the worst photo of the band. I actually made my own cover for it when I find out it was actually Something Else (not Waterloo Sunset as was the name on the cover). I built the cover from bits of cardboard and photos from an old pop annual. Though I wish I'd kept the annual now.
The Kinks work as been endlessly compiled and resold which is a great shame because they are right up there with the Beatles, the Who and The Stones.
Anyway after Village Green this is arguably their best album. It is just so English and in the early seventies when I started getting into the Kinks I was also getting back into my Englishness. I couldn't listen to Crosby Stills and Nash or James Taylor or hear about endless highways and golden beaches. I had become focused on wet streets and old buildings and would watch old films like Billy Liar and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. My pin-up girls were Julie Christie and Chrissie Shrimpton. Not a Californian girl in sight. And this is what Ray Davies wrote about and their music reflected. There are no better songs about London than those by Ray Davies.
And what songs! Apart from what I beleive is the best song ever written in Waterloo Sunset there is the sibling rivalry of Two Sisters, the ode to smoking which is Harry Rag..Death of Clown (a song I once based a painting on during High School art).. brilliant album!