HOWZAT

5 Mr Pleasant

A non-UK single in 1967, Mr Pleasant’s rollicking, Weimar-cabaret style sat perfectly with Davies’s razor-sharp dissection of his target, a rich bigwig gliding around town in his limousine while a younger buck sees to Mrs P behind his back. The first sniff of unease that Davies lets into the song occurs as he sings, over a creepily calm and pastoral suspension, “Life is easier, so much easier now.” It’s only then that you notice quite how doom-laden the main tune’s chord progressions seem, as they hurtle the song – and very possibly Mr Pleasant too – towards oblivion.

6 Situation Vacant

A harridan of a mother-in-law engineers a break-up between her darling daughter Suzy and the cowed young Johnny, of whom she so disapproves. This fabulous, piano-percussed standout from Something Else is Davies at his scabrous best – appearing to sympathise with Johnny, but tempted to laugh as he does so. A real period piece, it fades out in a squall of drums, Nicky Hopkins’s Hammond organ and spaced-out guitar – and then, for no clear reason at all, returns for a second fade.

7 Polly

Young Pollyanna Garter goes careering off the rails here, on this superb 1968 B-side. “She’s so darling,”

Davies sings with menacing lightness, “all the fellas do agree / And half a million can’t be wrong.”

Everything you love about the Kinks is here: madcap melody, the sugar-coated sarcasm of the lyrics, the plangent, descending chords, the extended-ooh backing vocals. A B-side, mind: many bands struggle for years to write an A-side as good as this.

8 Some Mother’s Son

The deliberately plodding, even dirge-like tempo and repetitive chord sequence here underpin a remarkably non-opaque Davies. He used this track from 1969’s Arthur (or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire) to preach an anti-war message whose impact is reinforced by the sadness of the tune, which finishes on a cloud of Beach Boys-like harmonies, wafting the dead soldiers – and some mother’s sons – into silence.

9 Top of the Pops

For Lola Versus the Powerman and the Moneygoround, his penultimate album with Pye and the Kinks’ first of the new decade, Davies dispensed with the la-di-dah and instead took the nib of his pen to the jugular of the record industry. Firing a broadside here at music journalists and the star-maker machinery he had observed so closely and come to despise, Davis opens the song with a circus-turn drum roll, before Dave fires into a furious and brutally simple guitar riff.

It can’t help but remind you of You Really Got Me, which is where, of course, all the madness began.

10 The Moneygoround

Another Lola track, this song is half chirpy music hall and half grand, Gothic melodrama – talk about a split personality. But there is nothing remotely conflicted about Davies’s intentions, as he dishes it to the music publishers he felt had given him a raw deal: “Do they all deserve money from a song that they’ve never heard?”. Well, probably not, but the music industry, then, as now, took it anyway.

Quintessential Davies, in that it cuddles you with the tune and then coshes you with the lyrics.

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