Waterloo Sunset
by The Kinks
- 107
- BPM
- C# minor
- Key
- 12A
- Camelot
- 52
- Danceability
- 26
- Acousticness
Ray Davies said in May 1967 that he had carried the melody in his head for two or three years. He first called the song "Liverpool Sunset". He scrapped the Liverpool idea when the Beatles released "Penny Lane". The place that replaced it was Waterloo, which Davies said had been important to him since he was in St Thomas' Hospital, very ill at 13 after a tracheotomy, and nurses wheeled him onto the balcony to look at the river. It was also about a trip to the 1951 Festival of Britain and about walking by the Thames with his first wife.
The two lovers are Terry and Julie. In 1967 he said they could be Terence Stamp and Julie Christie. In 2008 he described the song as a fantasy about his sister Rosy going off with her boyfriend to a new world, since she had moved to Australia in 1964.
It was the first Kinks recording produced solely by Davies. Shel Talmy's contract had expired that spring. The arrangement was complex, and the sessions lasted ten hours. Dave Davies said they used tape-delay echo to get a guitar sound that nobody had used since the 1950s. The single came out on May 5, 1967. It was their first available in true stereo and reached number two in Britain.
Waterloo Sunset runs at 107 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.24 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 561 ms. It is in C# minor, Camelot 12A, which shares its notes with E major and mixes cleanly with F# minor and Ab minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.