dave Davies recalls brother Ray playing a song-in-progress for him in the spring of 1967. The band was in the studio recording "Something Else." "It was incomplete and needed a bridge," he writes in "Kink," "but immediately we started ad-libbing vocal parts around the chorus ... Like 'Sunny Afternoon,' it had a wonderfully hypnotic descending bass line contrasting magically with rising vocal harmonies, gentle but stirring textures." That musical tension Dave heard in the song that became "Waterloo Sunset" -- the descending bass line, the rising vocal -- fit the lyric Ray still had under wraps: Backing vocals were put on the track before he sang the lead. "I still didn't tell them what the lyrics would be about," he recalled in "X-Ray," "simply because I was embarrassed by how personal they were and I thought the others would burst out laughing when they heard me sing. It was like an extract from a diary nobody was allowed to read." That diary was a work of fiction, a recounting of events that never happened. "Terry meets Julie at Waterloo Station every Friday night," Ray sang, "But I am so lazy/Don't want to wander/I stay at home at night." He sang the lines "with such indolence," Charlie Gillett wrote in "The Sound of the City," "it sounded as if he could hardly open his eyes to describe what he could see." The Davies' sister Rosie was visiting from Australia, where she had fled with her husband, Arthur (who served as the inspiration for the Kinks' song cycle of the same name); it was her son, Terry, that Ray was immortalizing, and he brought an acetate of the recording for her to listen to. "I thought that she would get a kick out of hearing Terry's name used as one of the two characters in the song," Ray wrote. "Terry meets my imaginary Julie on Waterloo Bridge, and as they walk across the river darkness falls and an innocent world disappears." The innocent world was one of his imagining, and the truth is that there are three characters in "Waterloo Sunset": Terry, Julie and the narrator, too lazy to venture on to the streets of London ("Every day I look at the world through my window"). The spirit of the song has been described as valedictory, but the farewell glances are not completely romantic: "Millions of people swarming like flies 'round Waterloo Underground." Yes, Terry and Julie walk away from the squalor, but Ray confesses he was trying to unify more than young lovers in the song: He was trying to bring his sister back from Oz, take every disappointed British subject the world round and reunite them with their homeland, forge a more perfect union. His enervated voice (which the singer himself compared to "a man standing in front of a microphone holding his nose") bespeaks the futility of the undertaking. The simple, orchestral beauty of "Waterloo Sunset," with its '50s-style tape-delayed electric guitar shimmering like light on water, is slow and final: the sound of a rose being pulled apart. Months after recording it, deep in legal battle for the rights to his songs, feeling every bit a member of the underclass, Ray left a counsel's chambers with the composition going around in his head. "The lyric told how the imaginary Julie, who suddenly symbolized England, met my nephew, Terry, on Waterloo Bridge," he wrote. "A reunion of past and future that had obviously never happened. I thought about Terry's father, Arthur, and how his bitterness and sense of betrayal by Britain had forced him to emigrate to Australia to a new life. For the first time, I considered the possibility that Arthur may have been right." This was the spring of 1967, remembered by many now as a utopian time. In a few months the Beatles would release "Sgt. Pepper" -- "I get by with a little help from my friends," as opposed to "Waterloo Sunset's" declaration: "And I don't need no friends." Neither do Terry and Julie; they have each other. The narrator has his
sunset.
-- Sean K. Elder |
