A Well Respected Man

"A Well Respected Man" — The Kinks

Ray Davies Turns a Razor on the English Middle Class

Sometime in 1965, while the British Invasion was at full roar and every major act was either chasing American audiences with R&B energy or writing love songs with Merseybeat bounce, Ray Davies sat down and wrote something quietly subversive. "A Well Respected Man" was a character study delivered with a smile that did not reach the eyes, a portrait of the kind of person who is very careful to be seen doing the right things by the right people while being considerably less careful in private. The tone was observational rather than angry, which made it more devastating than any straight-on attack could have been. Davies had found his satirical register, and it would serve the Kinks for the rest of the decade.

The Kinks in 1965

The group had established themselves in 1964 with "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night," both built on a guitar sound so distorted and aggressive that they essentially invented hard rock on the way to the pop charts. By 1965, Ray Davies was already moving in a different direction, writing songs that were more interested in social observation than in the three-chord assault that had made the band famous. "A Well Respected Man" was released on the American Reprise Records label in late 1965, at a moment when the Kinks were still primarily known in the United States as an R&B-influenced British Invasion act. The song's wry, specifically English quality made it a surprising American hit.

The Production and Sound

Where the early Kinks singles had been built on the raw electricity of Dave Davies's guitar work, "A Well Respected Man" operated in a more acoustic, folk-influenced register. The arrangement was spare: acoustic guitar, rhythm section, and Ray Davies's deadpan vocal delivery. The production allowed the lyrical content to carry the weight, an approach that reflected confidence in the song's satirical observation. Producer Shel Talmy, who had worked on the band's earlier hits, understood that the song needed to sound clean and polished to heighten the irony of its subject matter. A ragged sound would have let the target off the hook; the genteel production made the portrait more precise.

Fourteen Weeks to Number Thirteen

The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on December 4, 1965, at position 84, and spent fourteen weeks on the chart, eventually peaking at number 13 on February 12, 1966. That top-fifteen showing represented a significant American commercial success for a song that was, by any reasonable measure, a piece of class satire aimed at a specifically British social type. American listeners may not have recognized the target with the same precision that English listeners did, but the song's comic energy and melodic directness crossed the cultural gap with ease. The chart performance confirmed that Ray Davies's satirical wit was commercially viable in the world's largest music market.

The Seeds of the Village Green

In retrospect, "A Well Respected Man" reads as an early prototype for the extended social portraiture that would reach its fullest expression in later Kinks albums like Something Else by the Kinks (1967) and The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968). Davies's method, establishing a character in vivid, specific detail and then allowing the accumulated specifics to indict rather than argue, was already fully developed in 1965. The song's commercial success demonstrated that this approach could work at the pop single level, not just in the album format that would later allow Davies to expand his satirical canvases. The subject of the song, the English gentleman whose public virtue is a performance, remains a recognizable type half a century later.

The next time you encounter someone whose propriety seems a little too studied, a little too on display, you will hear this song in your head. That is exactly what Ray Davies intended.

"A Well Respected Man" — The Kinks' singular moment on the 1960s charts.