The Kinks, 1972 © Barrie Wentzell
I didn’t really listen to the Kinks growing up at all — I was just vaguely aware of them, like everybody else — so when I was in my mid-20s I bought a couple of their records, just on a whim, and got sort of obsessed with them. There was something that they did in their work, or that Ray Davies did in his songwriting, that I wanted to apply to my comics, which was to have this pop exterior to his work — the surface seemed like they were sort of simple pop songs, like you could hear on AM radio — and yet underneath that was a very profound, idiosyncratic vision. I liked the juxtaposition: where he was sort of this dandyish pop star on one level and yet this seemingly very lonely, troubled man on the inside. That was just something I was drawn to, and he came closer to doing that than any cartoonist I can really think of.
– Daniel Clowes