Just finished watching Julian Temple’s film about Ray Davies and The Kinks: “Imaginary Man”.
It’s incredibly tender toward it’s subject – which is at once Ray, his music, the band – and London.
The Turner-esque, painterly imagery alternates with more graphic compositions of Davies’ peregrinations around North London.
It’s a series of psychographic sketches, punctuated by Kinks songs – in archive footage, in cover versions and most affectingly perhaps, hummed, sung and stumbled through by Davies as he strolls.
He’s cast by the film as a flawed-heir to Blake – wandering London, inventing his own sung-systems rather than be enslaved by another man’s.
This blog goes into far more detail and appreciation.
If you can hunt it down online do.
If only to revel in London as Temple and Davies do.
My thanks to both of them.
Petafloptimism 
Bono ( from U2 ) told me that it was the greatest Documentary he ever saw about another musician.
Although it bugs me like hell that we get here from another site (thank you Warren Ellis, the writer from England, not the Musician from Australia), we have to click on another link to learn more, and though that’s nice, it’s on Blogger, and not here at WordPress, there’s a link to another thing that just gives up saying; “It took too long”. Hell, I was willing to wait a bit.
Although I already knew some Kinks’ songs, my husband gave me a premier, personal instruction in all things “Kinks,” in the musical sense. Soon after we started college in Boston, MA. The year I graduated happened to be the 20th anniversary of this really, great urban university and the Kinks came to play at our school. It was so incredible – how could this happen? It was a tremendous day for both my husband and I – though the school was not stadium size; oh, we had such a blast and will never forget that day. You know, “come dancing;” it’s only natural.
I love the images from the Ray Davies Preservation Society.
Thank you for being such a great part of our lives.
to wneal5796, as the writer of the blog linked to above, can I suggest you google the word “pismotality”? That may be a quicker way to access my blog, which also has posts about the Kinks in general and a detailed analysis of Waterloo Sunset.