What we have here, as Hughesy attempts to figure out why he never twigged to one of his favourite bands from the halcyon days of the mid-sixties as album artists, is essentially, an exercise in archaeology.
Not, in other words the sort of thing that can be just rushed through to have something that sits at the top of the discography. We need to have something there, though, and in the interval between the forensic examination of The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, a similar exercise on Something Else By The Kinks, a cast backwards and forwards through the studio albums and a completed and reasonably concise potted biography, this will have to do.
It's an interesting conundrum.
Here we have a band that was consistently hitting its straps, delivering a string of quite remarkable Ray Davies penned songs to the upper reaches of the charts yet failed, like some of their notional peers, to move on to mega-stardom.
It's easy enough to place them in the pecking order, though. Follow a fairly conventional wisdom and you have The Beatles pointing the way ahead, and, consequently, leading the way as far as British beat groups who wrote their own material were concerned.
The Rolling Stones followed, shooting to a particular prominence by being the anti-Beatles and a slew of other acts appeared from the same basic background, delivering the kind of strong competition that kept everyone on their toes as they explored what was both possible and commercial.
Among the outfits populating that second tier alongside The Kinks you'd have (rattling off a few names, we're not looking to be exhaustive here) The Who, The Small Faces, The Yardbirds and, say Manfred Mann. There were, of course, others, but stick with that quartet alongside The Kinks and you have five significant acts, one of which (The Who) rose to prominence in the seventies. Another, The Small Faces, provided not one, but two acts that didn't quite reach the same heights, but were major names for a while (Steve Marriot's Humble Pie and the Rod Stewart fronted Faces).