Terry and Julie, who were not those two
The guitar states a small, perfect descent, and the river appears without being described at length. Ray Davies sings as if he were at a window he has used for years, not performing the view, keeping it. Waterloo Sunset, from Something Else by the Kinks in 1967, is a London song that refuses the tour-bus version of London. Dirty old river. Taxi lights. Two people meeting at Waterloo Station, and a narrator who is happy, almost shyly, that they are happy. The drums of Mick Avory and the bass of Pete Quaife walk them home. Dave Davies’s guitar is the lamplight.
Davies produced it himself, at Pye Studios, in a season when the group was pulling inward after the bans and the fights and the American absence. He has said the song began as a thought about Liverpool and moved to the Thames, and that as a child, ill, he had watched the river from a hospital and found it calming. Terry and Julie were widely assumed to be Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, the beautiful couple of the moment. He has denied it, more than once. They are people he made, ordinary enough to cross a bridge without a headline. The denial is part of the tenderness. A private city is more generous than a celebrity one.
The single reached number two in Britain and did not need America, which was not listening anyway. On the album it sits among songs of village greens and tired afternoons, the Kinks becoming a band that could write England without shouting Rule Britannia or burning it down. Live, in later decades, the crowd sings the la-la-la as if it were a civic anthem. The studio version is quieter than that choir. The vocal is close. The sunset is not a metaphor he strains. It is the hour when the city looks briefly arranged, and he is grateful not to be in it, only near it.
Everyone thought Terry and Julie were Terence Stamp and Julie Christie. They weren’t. I made them up.
(Ray Davies, on the song, including in X-Ray)
Other London songs of the decade are faster, funnier, more in love with their own slang. This one has time. It watches a couple and does not follow them into the flat. That restraint is why it has aged without becoming a postcard. You can still stand on the bridge and hear the taxi lights in the guitar. You can still misunderstand the names, and the song will correct you without raising its voice. Davies kept writing long after. He rarely wrote a window this clear.
What remains is the narrator’s relief. Not their love, his. He is glad the river is flowing, glad two people have found each other, glad he does not have to cross. Waterloo Sunset is a song about looking, which is a kind of love if you do not grab. The dirty old river keeps its appointment. The la-la-la is the sound of a man who has decided the view is enough.
