‘Dead End Street’: How The Kinks soundtracked the era of angry young men
In the wake of the industrial revolution, the class divide which had always existed within Britain became utterly unavoidable, reflected in every aspect of life and culture. The upper classes maintained a monopoly on art forms like theatre, literature, and music, and this remained true for much of the early 20th century. However, during the 1950s and 1960s, a pioneering group of writers and artists sought to change that, ushering in the age of ‘angry young men’. For the first time, a focus was being placed on working-class stories, told by working-class people in film, theatre, literature, and, eventually, music.
This profound cultural shift resulted from the efforts of working-class writers like John Osborne and Kingsley Amis, among various others. Works like Look Back in Anger and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner opened up an entirely new world of artistic expression, told through the lens of working-class stories, which would have previously been ignored. Before too long, the era of the ‘angry young man’ was palpable in virtually all forms of cultural expression, including music.
By the mid-1960s, a multitude of working-class voices had emerged within British pop and rock spheres, but very few of them reflected working-class stories within their music, opting instead for generic pop ditties about romance and heartbreak. The Kinks offered a magnificent alternative to all of that. First emerging from Muswell Hill in 1964, the band’s early offerings immediately established their rebellious rock and roll sound, taking major cues from the mod subculture and beat rock scene dominating London’s nightclub scene at the time.
Pretty quickly, though, songwriter Ray Davies began to incorporate the influences of his working-class upbringing into his work with The Kinks, the 1966 single ‘Dead End Street’ being a prime example. Disinticly more downbeat than many of their previous pop-centric offerings, the song reflects the bleak reality of working-class life, detailing a couple struggling to make ends meet in a difficult living situation.
Its bleak atmosphere and social realist lyricism evoke the ‘angry young man’ era of literature and film expertly; the song could easily soundtrack a film like Billy Liar or This Sporting Life. What’s more, the band constructed a groundbreaking early example of music video for the song, shot largely on hand-held cameras in black-and-white. Seeing members of the band act as pallbearers in a funeral, walking through rows of terraced housing dressed in black, the video reflects the mood of the song perfectly, and acts as an unlikely entry into the British New Wave style of filming.
The accompanying film also suits the emotional weight of Davies’ songwriting, which is at its most profound and beautiful on ‘Dead End Street’, owing to his own experiences growing up in a working-class family in London. Its melancholic atmosphere is somewhat masked, however, by the influence of music hall. Those influences became increasingly present within The Kinks’ work as they progressed, culminating in the masterpiece album The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, but they are particularly impactful on ‘Dead End Street’.
The optimistic sounds of the style reflect the popular image of British society at that time, with Davies contrasting that phoney image of England with the bleak reality faced by most ordinary people. Although he is rarely given credit for it, tracks like ‘Dead End Street’ make Davies one of the great satirists of the era, its satirical take on the class divide evoking the same kind of message as the likes of Jonathan Swift.
“It was written for the winter,” Davies once said of the song. “It was that thing of living in England and having had a great summer, and now the light was closing in and the mood just shifts.” The mood of The Kinks’ output seemed to shift with the track, too. Subsequent efforts delved further into Davies’ knack of social realist songwriting, with songs like ‘Victoria’ taking aim at misplaced nostalgia for the Victorian era, during which working-class people were treated as little more than fodder for the factories and cannons.
Ray Davies is among the greatest songwriters to ever emerge from Britain and, while it was his era-defining youth anthems like ‘You Really Got Me’ which first gave him a name, it was his social commentary on tracks like ‘Dead End Street’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, and even ‘Victoria’ which cemented him as a profound writer and satirist. The era of ‘angry young men’ changed cultural expression in Britain forever, and nobody reflected that change in music quite as adeptly as Davies and The Kinks.
