The first deliberately moronic British pop record. The Kinks had already had two records fail to climb the charts (one of them a Beatle style version of Long Tall Sally) and manager Larry Page with producer Shel Talmy called a meeting to discuss where the band ought to go from here. One of the motions carried was that they needed to get session men in to address the lack of musical skill within the band. Some sources say that guitarist Dave Davies kicked a hole in an amp after being told that he was being replaced on record by a young Jimmy Page. However, this has been found to be a myth and it is indeed Dave Davies playing guitar on the record, the grungey sound being the result of his cutting the amp's speaker with a razor blade. This resulted in the amp sounding like a fuzz box and The Kinks were inadvertently to create the first Brit Punk record with 'You Really Got Me'.
Jimmy Page plays a guitar solo of gonzoid proportions, making his later work seem wasteful and pompous, Ray Davies sings like a man who needed his teeth fixing and the whole makes for a glorious mess of a record. Manager Larry Page was dumped by The Kinks and went on to repeat the whole process a year or so later with his new protogés The Troggs.
