(Credits: Bent Rej)
Thu 23 October 2025 8:00, UK
Even though The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were hailed as the two most important bands of the so-called ‘British Invasion’ of the US music market, there’s always debate over who takes place as the third-most significant group of this movement.
Minor arguments can be made for bands like The Animals and The Zombies, who, while nowhere near the levels of success that the previously mentioned acts achieved, made an impression across the Atlantic with a handful of hits. Above both of those, and perhaps the most righteous claimants of the final place on the podium were The Who, who managed to sell out arenas in the States and only continued to grow throughout the 1970s after a promising introduction in the previous decade.
However, perhaps an equally deserving act would be The Kinks, who continually stuck to their identity of writing from a uniquely British perspective and ventured into various different genre territories, exploring early garage rock, psychedelic pop and folk over the course of an illustrious career. The only issue is that The Kinks were never as successful in America as their counterparts, and their restless approach to genre exploration often got in the way of them ever keeping a consistent audience at home as well.
There’s no denying that Ray Davies was an exceptional and imaginative songwriter, but this was perhaps what also made the band come unstuck at certain points of their career. Wanting to create more elaborate and conceptual works may have worked for The Who, but there were arguably a lot more whimsy and experimental approaches to production in what The Kinks were offering up at the same time, and albums like Village Green and Arthur failed to perform commercially, despite now having achieved ‘classic’ status.
Not only were the record-buying audiences not completely sure what to make of the band, but in Davies’ eyes, their peers didn’t quite understand what they were up to. However, there was one musician who seemed to be entirely on board with their artistry and was way ahead of the rest of the field when it came to finding things to appreciate in their work.
“The only person who gave us credit for what we did was Jimi Hendrix,” Davies told Mojo during a 2012 interview. “He, Mitch [Mitchell] and Noel [Redding] all said the greatest band they ever saw was The Kinks. A lot of our peers said we were finished, but we were still making records. You had to tour the States to get on American TV shows. If you didn’t get a foot on that continent, you couldn’t get promoted.”
The fact that their work was so unabashedly British during the latter part of the 1960s may have been one thing that dissuaded the American audiences from taking note, and as a result, they struggled to get booked for shows in the States. Hendrix, on the other hand, had found his success while living in London, and was completely on board with what they and the other British acts were producing at the time, and considering how much of an affinity he had for the UK, it’s hardly a surprise that of all the American greats, he’s the only one to have truly recognised the greatness of The Kinks from the start.
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