On an early American tour, during which Blur struggled to make their mark on a music scene dominated by grunge, Damon Albarn fought off depression with the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset. On their return to Britain, Blur made Modern Life Is Rubbish, inspired by the Kinks’ mix of rock and music hall and Ray Davies’s paeans to the lost traditions of an England of old. They polished the trick on Parklife, and 1990s Britpop was born. But the Kinks had been influencing an astonishing variety of British and American bands for the previous three decades. In 1964, a teenage Dave Davies cut the cone of his amp with a razor blade in an attempt to change his standard guitar sound. The result was the distorted, snarling riff that helped propel You Really Got Me to the top of the UK charts. The Rolling Stones borrowed the trick. The song is at the root of garage-rock and heavy metal, and 14 years on, Van Halen launched their career with a cover of it. Among the Kinks’ biggest fans in the 1960s was a young David Bowie, who tried to pastiche the band on his early records and hired their producer Shel Talmy. By the late 1970s, the Kinks could be heard in the very English punk-pop of the Jam, who covered the band’s David Watts, and the Pretenders, whose first hit was with a Ray Davies obscurity, Stop Your Sobbin’. In the 1980s, the Kinks inspired Ian Dury, Madness and Dire Straits, whose singer Mark Knopfler spent his school-days carving “the Kinks” onto desks and aped Davies’s vocal style. Recently, they have cropped up in the the Libertines’ Englishness. Their latest flag-bearer is Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell, who duets with Ray Davies at the BBC Electric Proms next weekend.

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