artist british

The Kinks

formed 1963 · London

Ray and Dave Davies's London band: British Invasion songcraft with slashed speaker-cone guitar tones and a sharp eye for English social detail.

The Kinks sit at the rougher edge of the British Invasion. “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night” reduce rock to riff, beat and distorted urgency; later Ray Davies songs turn toward character sketches, nostalgia and small English scenes.

That split makes them useful to the web: they point backward to rock ‘n’ roll and forward to hard rock’s riff logic, garage rock’s blunt force and a distinctly British mode of pop songwriting.

Part of

British Invasion
mid-1960s · genre
British guitar groups returned American blues and rock 'n' roll to the US charts as a new pop language: Beatles melody, Stones grit, mod attack.

Sources

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: Pop from the Beginning — Nik Cohn (1969). Weidenfeld & Nicolson · Book
Rock and roll ↗ . Encyclopædia Britannica · Encyclopedia

Part of

British Invasion

Sources

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