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You Really Got Me was Britain’s Tutti Frutti, a brutal thunderbolt of teenage lust that explosively changed the game. Ray Davies was the singer-songwriter of The Kinks’ first hit, but it was kid brother Dave who created its fuzzed-up guitar sound by slashing his amp’s speaker with a razor in hooligan frustration, to finally express his adolescent rage. Thereby inventing hard rock, Hendrix was among those who listened in awe, and later asked Dave how he did it.

Subsequent tracks such as All Day And All Of The Night and Who’ll Be The Next In Line were templates for The Who and US garage-rock, while a sequence of innovative singles stretched from See My Friends’ use of sitar-like sounds to Lola’s sly gender-play in 1970, which rode in on a last great riff to predict the new decade’s glam themes, and surely influence the same year’s Layla.

In between, A Well Respected Man introduced local subject-matter and literate satire to British pop, Waterloo Sunset was a dream-like hymn for lonely Londoners, and Sunny Afternoon soundtracked England’s World Cup win.

The Beatles or the Stones? For many misfit listeners, the answer was always The Kinks. Pete Townshend for one rates them above even The Who...

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society: 1968

“With Village Green,” Ray said of the flop that now defines The Kinks, “I wanted to write something that… if we were never heard of again, this is where we came from. This is what we like, and who we are.”

Turning North London’s parks and woods into a mythic kingdom where nostalgia for childhood and a rustic past are subverted by harsher adult emotions, this was, Ray has said, “a final stand”. Working up the varied, gentle music in Ray’s back room after years of studio rush, the original band peaked here.

Arthur: 1969

Soundtrack to a TV film never made, and beaten to the punch by ‘Tommy’ as the first rock opera, ‘Arthur’ — subtitled ‘The Decline and Fall Of The British Empire’ — continued a period of commercial freefall for The Kinks, filtering themes of imperial decay through the Davies’ bitter post-war years. Its chief glory is Shangri-La, an epic single which chucks in the kitchen sink, firing brass and guitar barrages as it demolishes the suburban dream.

Muswell Hillbillies: 1971

Ray was hanging out with Warhol in New York by 1971, his roots in Muswell Hill unravelling fast. His response was to add a pub-jazz brass line-up and write a raw English country-rock album about his working-class family. Though Dave’s screaming guitar has been silenced, this is one of rock’s most rebellious albums. It also contains maybe the most gorgeous Kinks song, the ballad Oklahoma U.S.A., about the dreams which make hard lives bearable: ‘She walks to work but she’s still in a daze/ She’s Rita Hayworth or Doris Day.”

Something Else by The Kinks: 1967

The Kinks’ most perfect recording, Waterloo Sunset, is of course the towering highlight. Elsewhere, this is the sound of The Kinks slipping away from the new psychedelic mainstream of Sgt. Pepper and the Summer of Love, instead favouring quietly profound songs about small English things: cigarettes, toy soldiers and tea. As their peers’ minds cosmically expanded, The Kinks became mature miniaturists.