Reflecting on the cross-generational appeal of his band in an interview in the mid-90s, Ray Davies said The Kinks were immune to the backlash that some of their 60s peers suffered when punk arrived. “The great thing about The Kinks,” marvelled their frontman and chief songwriter,” is that none of the new punk bands said anything about us being boring, old farts. They knew we could out-punk them.”
There is almost a version of that for each decade. The Kinks were a band who could match any melody during the sweet, harmonic highs of 60s pop, rock with the hardest of them in the 80s and the group who set the blueprint for Britpop in the 90s.
