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By the time the Kinks left Pye Records for RCA in 1971, they were one of the most admired bands in the world. Albums such as Face to Face, Something Else and The Village Green Preservation Society, and a sequence of hit singles that included You Really Got Me, Tired of Waiting For You and Lola, had cemented chief songwriter Ray Davies’s reputation as a chronicler of British follies and oddities without equal. The Beatles and the Stones may have carried off the riches, but, in terms of influence, Davies’s Pye releases have been every bit as enduring as those of Lennon and McCartney. This 10-track selection, which ignores the big hits in favour of some of Davies’s lesser known songs from that period, is a reminder that, even on B-sides, he was a formidable talent. And you can hear the echoes of those songs even now, in the melodies, cadences and verbal constructions on his new album, Working Man’s Café.

1 Come on Now

This 1965 B-side to Tired of Waiting For You seems lyrically and musically straightforward, a charged-up garage rocker with fabulously scrappy backing vocals and a pre-Day Tripper repetitive guitar motif. All still seems set fair as Davies sings, “Come on, baby, the sun is shinin’”, and a nice little tale about the urgency and passion of true love beckons. Hang on, though, this is Ray Davies we’re talking about. Sure enough, things aren’t as they seem, and he puts the relationship in an altogether sharper perspective with the biting, if rather forlorn, follow-up line: “Put your coat on and stop your whinin’.”

2 Ring the Bells

“Ring out, I feel fine / This girl said she’s mine.”

Again, a celebration seems in order; again, Davies confounds expectations. In this case, on the Kinks Kontroversy album’s most beautiful song, he sets the hang-out-the-bunting lyric to a melody that is so mournful it’s like a musical suicide note, and at a pace more suited to a funeral march.

3 I’m Not Like Everybody Else

I’ll say he isn’t – or rather, wasn’t, back in May

1965 on this B-side to Sunny Afternoon. And the reason for that was that he was 12 months into one of the greatest runs of singles in the history of pop. Just reading the titles – among them See My Friends, Dedicated Follower of Fashion, A Well Respected Man, Sunny Afternoon, Waterloo Sunset, Autumn Almanac – should be enough to make most of the corporate indie-boys infesting the charts today hang their heads in shame.

4 Dandy

This oompah-pah of a tune, from 1966’s brilliant Face to Face album, is another case of Daviesian contrast – melodically it’s a jolly, jaunty affair, with Davies rasping out the lyric in an ominously benign way. The story of a compulsive womaniser, forever “knockin’ on the back door / climbin’ through the window”, it could quite easily be taken as another example of Davies’s affectionate, indulgent social-observation writing style. But there’s something inescapably scathing in his tone, and there has been speculation that the song is addressed to his brother Dave, who at the time was something of a party animal, while Ray sat minding his baby in north London, and churning out the hits at night while the child slept.

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