The 1970s File Feature
Lola
Lola: The Kinks and a Gender-Bending Classic The Kinks released "Lola" in June 1970 on Pye Records in the United Kingdom and on Reprise Records in the United…
01 The Story
Lola: The Kinks and a Gender-Bending Classic
The Kinks released "Lola" in June 1970 on Pye Records in the United Kingdom and on Reprise Records in the United States, and the single climbed the Billboard Hot 100 over a 14-week chart run before reaching its peak position of number 9 during the week of October 24, 1970. The track debuted on August 29, 1970, entering at number 65 and ascending through 60, 40, 36, and 29 over the first five weeks before continuing its rise into the top 10. The song represented one of the biggest American commercial successes of the band's career, and its chart performance confirmed the continuing vitality of Ray Davies as a songwriter of genuine mainstream impact at a time when many British Invasion acts had seen their American fortunes decline.
The song was written by Ray Davies, the band's primary creative force, and produced by Ray Davies himself with Raymond Douglas Davies credited on early releases. The recording took place in two distinct sessions, an unusual production circumstance that arose from a lyrical requirement. The original recording made in London contained a reference to Coca-Cola in the lyric, and BBC Radio, which had a policy against advertising specific brand names on its broadcasts, required that the reference be changed. Accordingly, Davies flew to New York in May 1970 during a North American tour, re-recorded the relevant vocal line at Crosby Street Studios, and substituted a generic reference. This small but logistically demanding revision ensured that "Lola" would receive BBC airplay and the significant British sales boost that came with it.
The subject matter of "Lola" was notable for its time: the lyric describes a narrator's encounter with a woman named Lola in a Soho nightclub, an encounter that eventually reveals the woman to be a man in female presentation. The narrator's response to this revelation in the lyric is one of bemused acceptance rather than outrage or disgust, a handling of the subject that was considerably more progressive than contemporary mainstream norms would typically have required. Davies has described the song as based in part on an actual experience involving the Kinks' manager Robert Wace, though the specific details have been modified in the song's fictionalized treatment.
The release of "Lola" coincided with a period of creative reinvention for The Kinks. The band had spent much of the late 1960s developing ambitious concept albums and theatrical projects, including The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968) and Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969), which received strong critical attention but limited commercial returns. "Lola" appeared on the album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, released in November 1970, and represented the band's ability to operate at a high level within the three-minute pop single format even while pursuing more extended compositional ambitions.
The musical arrangement of "Lola" is built around a classic rock and roll structure with an acoustic guitar-driven rhythm, a melody of immediate catchiness, and a production approach that preserves a certain looseness and warmth. The acoustic guitar texture, somewhat unusual for rock singles of the period, contributed to the song's accessibility and distinguished it sonically from the heavier British rock contemporaries with which it competed for airplay. The singalong quality of the chorus gave the track unusual memorability and helped sustain its radio presence across its 14-week chart run.
The song's chart peak of number 9 in the United States was accompanied by an even stronger performance in the United Kingdom, where it reached number 2, and in several European markets where it topped the charts entirely. The transatlantic success of "Lola" established it as the defining commercial statement of The Kinks' late career, and the song has retained a prominent place in the band's legacy in the decades since. It has been widely covered, sampled, and referenced, and its relative candor about gender nonconformity has given it a particular resonance as social attitudes have evolved. The track is consistently listed among the most important singles of the classic rock era.
02 Song Meaning
Identity, Illusion, and Acceptance in "Lola"
"Lola" is a song about encounter, surprise, and the recalibration of expectation, and what makes it remarkable is the equanimity with which its narrator accepts information that many songs of its era would have treated as a crisis. Ray Davies' lyric constructs a narrative in which the narrator's discovery that the woman he has met is biologically male does not produce rejection or revulsion but something closer to philosophical accommodation, a recognition that the connection he has experienced was real regardless of the circumstances that produced it.
The narrator of "Lola" is not presented as sophisticated or worldly in matters of gender or sexuality. The lyric takes pains to establish him as something like an ordinary young man, inexperienced and easily impressed, who stumbles into an unusual situation. The effect of this characterization is to locate the song's acceptance of its unusual subject matter not in radical ideology but in ordinary human feeling, in the simple recognition that the emotional experience of the encounter had value independent of its complications.
The lyric's handling of ambiguity is particularly deft. The song does not moralize about its subject matter in either direction; it neither condemns Lola for deceiving the narrator nor constructs her as a figure of tragedy. She is presented with sympathy and even affection, as a person of decisive and attractive character who knows what she wants and pursues it. The narrator's confusion about his own feelings in the aftermath is treated as genuine emotional complexity rather than dysfunction or weakness.
Contextually, "Lola" appeared in 1970 at a moment when questions of gender expression and sexual identity were beginning to enter mainstream cultural conversation in ways they had not previously, driven by the broader social movements of the 1960s and the emergence of visible LGBTQ communities in urban centers. The song did not emerge from within those communities or advocate for them explicitly, but its matter-of-fact treatment of cross-dressing and its refusal to treat the narrator's encounter as either disgusting or traumatic placed it well outside the cultural mainstream's default responses to such subject matter.
Ray Davies has noted in interviews that the lyric's tone of acceptance reflects his genuine view that human experience is more various and complicated than the categories available to describe it, and that the appropriate response to that complexity is curiosity and openness rather than rigid categorization. This perspective, communicated through a pop song of great catchiness and commercial accessibility, reached a mass audience in 1970 that academic or activist discourse about gender and identity could not have reached.
The song's continued relevance across more than five decades reflects how effectively Davies located a genuinely universal element within a specific and unusual narrative. The experience of encountering someone or something that does not fit one's expectations and choosing engagement over rejection is not limited to the particular circumstances of the lyric; it describes a more general human challenge. "Lola" argues, through the voice of its bemused and ultimately accepting narrator, that openness to the unexpected is a form of wisdom, and that the heart's responses often exceed the mind's categories.
→ More from the 1970s File
View all 1970s hits →
Keep digging