No one ever married the raucous and the wistful the way Ray Davies and the Kinks did, as this overdue six-disc box set, the first cross-label overview of their long career, repeatedly demonstrates. Their influence still resonates across the decades — that instant classic No One Knows by those declared admirers Queens of the Stone Age was surely a noisy tribute?

Uniquely the Kinks were blamed for both heavy metal and music hall rock. But this reappraisal of their back catalogue makes it clear that not only did Davies’s songwriting match that of the Beatles but, at their best — especially the early sides so brilliantly produced by the expatriate American Shel Talmy — they could rock as hard as their contemporaries the Stones, The Who and the Yardbirds. The swing of lesser Kink klassics such as Come on Now (here in unfinished form) and Who’ll be the Next in Line is irresistible. The pounding She’s Got Everything defined hard rock half a decade before sound equipment caught up.

But Davies never denied his sensitive and sardonic sides, perfectly displayed on the beautiful I Go to Sleep, later a hit for his ex-lover Chrissie Hynde, and the wickedly snotty Where Have All The Good Times Gone?, often covered, never improved.

That was a mere B-side, as was his brother Dave’s brilliant juvenile howl on I’m Not Like Everybody Else, a virtual template for a generation of American garage bands. Yet, due to bureaucratic snafus, the Kinks never toured the States during their Sixties pomp, staying at home and creating a distinctly Engish form of rock’n’roll — as intended, songs such as Lola and Waterloo Sunset expanded our native culture.

Their eventual American success drained their creativity, yet the frantic invention of that first eight years could never be sustained.

Imagine a similar overview of Paul McCartney’s career that insisted on giving equal space to his post-Beatle efforts. “Patchy” would barely cover it. Despite sometimes bewildering sequencing, too many inglorious latter-day offerings presumably aimed at an American audience and too few genuine discoveries (the odd radio session and a muffled alternate take of Dead End Street anyone?), as a summation of a life in music this is monumental. The familiar highlights are all present while overlooked gems such as Sweet Lady Genevieve and All Night Stand are as seductive as the imaginary English villages Davies once evoked.

(Universal, TS £39.99)

www.timesselects.co.uk/music

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