Annie Lennox on the song that makes her “absolutely love” The Kinks
There was a moment in the early to mid-1990s when Scottish singer Annie Lennox was the UK queen of pop. Having dominated the 1980s as one-half of Eurythmics with Dave Stewart, the new decade saw her first solo efforts Diva and Medusa as mainstays in most British households’ CD collections, and both shooting to number one in the UK albums chart.
Alongside her original compositions was an acclaimed repertoire of covers she lent her powerful contralto voice to—featuring hugely successful covers of The Lover Speaks, Procol Harum, Bob Marley, and Paul Simon.
During the tumultuous days of lockdown and everybody finding novel ways to pass the time, Lennox treated her fans to an upload of a unique performance of a pop classic that she’d loved since she was a teenager. “One of my favourite bands of all time are The Kinks,” she declared on Facebook in 2020. “I grew up ladling in love with every song they released…so…this is just me in my room with no fancy microphones and a piano…but I thought you might enjoy just a small flavour of why I still absolutely love them…”
One of the 1960s most essential singles was also its most atypical. Dropped during the ‘Summer of Love‘, The Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’ keeps its lyrical romanticism firmly planted on the ground at odds with its peers’ LSD-soaked psychedelia. Embracing some of the baroque pop stylings of the day on 1966’s Face to Face, the follow-up album Something Else by the Kinks furthered frontman Ray Davies’ wistful retreat into his love for English culture in all its sentimentality and eccentric character.
Written in his Muswell Hill, semi-detached and far removed from the kaleidoscopic excesses of Swinging London, the leafy suburbia city north was charged with the childhood memories of his Fortis Road upbringing that helped lay ‘Waterloo Sunset’s’ thematic foundations. Nursed at St Thomas’ Hospital for a tracheotomy, a 13-year-old Davies would be wheeled out to the balcony to overlook the Thames, sowing in his mind the seeds of its glittering magic as the sun set across the capital’s famous river.
“It’s about the two characters in the song and the aspirations of my sisters’ generation before me, who grew up during the Second World War,” Davies told The Independent in 2011. “It’s about the world I wanted them to have.”
A concern for England’s wayward slide away from the quaint aura Davies held so dearly would be fully fleshed out in 1968’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, but ‘Waterloo Sunset’ captures his pining for the English idyll with pitch-perfect storytelling.
Adopting subtle devil-may-care isolationism to the song’s tender appreciation of two lovers by the river—viewing lyrical protagonists Terry and Julie’s passionate embrace through the window-lens of the old hospital as a boy or the cautious fringes of a counterculture he felt increasingly alienated by.
Cutting an innocent presence during 1967’s heady pop climate, ‘Waterloo Sunset’ has endured as one of the UK’s essential songbook entries and a poetic capture of South London’s distinct quality. From Lennox to David Bowie, Davies’ eternal document of the Thames’ evocative mysticism is sure to fascinate for many more years yet.
