"Waterloo Sunset" | ||||||||
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Single by The Kinks | ||||||||
from the album Something Else by The Kinks | ||||||||
B-side | UK: "Act Nice and Gentle" US: "Two Sisters" |
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Released | 5 May 1967 | |||||||
Format | 7" single | |||||||
Recorded | 1967 | |||||||
Genre | Rock | |||||||
Length | 3:16 | |||||||
Label | Pye 7N 17321 (UK) Reprise 0612 (US) |
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Writer(s) | Ray Davies | |||||||
Producer(s) | Ray Davies | |||||||
The Kinks singles chronology | ||||||||
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"Waterloo Sunset" | ||||
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Single by Cathy Dennis | ||||
from the album Am I the Kinda Girl? | ||||
Released | 1997 | |||
Genre | Pop music | |||
Length | 3:41 | |||
Label | Polydor | |||
Writer(s) | Ray Davies | |||
Cathy Dennis singles chronology | ||||
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"Waterloo Sunset" is a song by British rock band The Kinks. It was released as a single in 1967, and featured on their album Something Else by The Kinks. Composed and produced by Kinks frontman Ray Davies, "Waterloo Sunset" is one of the band's best known and most acclaimed songs in most territories, later being ranked number 42 on "Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". It is also their first single that is available in true stereo.
The record reached number 2 on the British charts in mid 1967 (it failed to dislodge the Tremeloes' "Silence Is Golden" from the number 1 position). It was also a top 10 hit in Australia, New Zealand and most of Europe. In North America, "Waterloo Sunset" was released as a single but it failed to chart.
The lyrics describe a solitary narrator watching (or imagining) two lovers passing over a bridge, with the melancholic observer reflecting on the couple, the Thames, and Waterloo Station. The song was rumoured to have been inspired by the romance between two British celebrities of the time, actors Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, stars of 1967's Far from the Madding Crowd. Ray Davies denied this in his autobiography and claimed in a 2008 interview, "It was a fantasy about my sister going off with her boyfriend to a new world and they were going to emigrate and go to another country." In a 2010 interview with Kinks biographer Nick Hasted, he said Terry was his nephew Terry Davies, "who he was perhaps closer to than his real brother in early adolescence." Despite its complex arrangement, the sessions for "Waterloo Sunset" lasted a mere ten hours; Dave Davies later commented on the recording: "We spent a lot of time trying to get a different guitar sound, to get a more unique feel for the record. In the end we used a tape-delay echo, but it sounded new because nobody had done it since the 1950s. I remember Steve Marriott of the Small Faces came up and asked me how we'd got that sound. We were almost trendy for a while." The single was one of the group's biggest UK successes, reaching number two on Melody Maker's chart, and went on to become one of their best-known.