LONDON CALLING ME
From The Indy archive: the 1967 hit ‘Waterloo Sunset’ by The Kinks and how the song’s lovers Terry and Julie were nearly Bernard and Dorothy, as Robert Webb discovers
Despite the plunging bassline, the sound of “Waterloo Sunset” is indefatigably that of a vibrant, mid-Sixties London. Yet the lyrics are more nostalgic than swinging, describing, as they do, a chilly evening watching the sun sink over a polluted Thames. Two lovers, Terry and Julie, emerge from the Underground, their lengthening shadows shivering on the concrete span of Waterloo Bridge as they disappear into a brave new world. “As they cross the river, darkness falls and an innocent world disappears,” said the song’s writer Ray Davies.
The choice of names was assumed to be after Sixties icons Terence Stamp and Julie Christie. “I wanted to use Bernard and Dorothy,” he once claimed. “But it wouldn’t work.” The idea for the song came earlier in
the decade, when Davies detected a transition in British pop. “I started writing a song about Liverpool, implying that the Merseybeat era was coming to an end, but I changed it to ‘Waterloo Sunset’, not only because it gave me a bigger canvas to work on, but because it was about London, the place where I had grown up.”