100 Mavericks # 23 Ray Davies

And from the French Ray Davies on this series to the English one. A true giant, though perhaps he's never quite recognised as one to the extent that he should be. The writer of so many wonderful, utterly distinctive and very English songs. This is one of my personal favourites. Sums up in many respects life's whole odd, mad journey. Neither Lennon or Jagger ever wrote a song as socially acute as this. Even Dylan and Bowie took a much more allusive route while Davies here just tells it the way it actually is.  In many ways a very angry song about what he saw happening to the people and the community he had grown up in, being farmed away from the places they'd lived all their lives in to apparently idyllic retirement towns. Strangely, (or perhaps not so strangely), not a hit,  The Kinks were going through something of a commercial hiatus when it was released in 1969. Maybe the conclusions it drew were too hard for too many to take. It did make it to # 24 in Holland however.