And so begins the slow, sad denouement of the Kinks’ career. The band gives up their ambitions (and some would pompous pretensions) and begin a comfortable groove, or rut, of arena rock. Not that it is entirely terrible, there are few good tracks scattered here and there amongst these albums. It’s just the commercial aspirations are so blatant that title tracks such as Low Budget and Give The People What They Want practically become manifestos.

And they were semi-successful in that arena, although nowhere nearly as influential as they were in the sixties. Like many bands of the era, the Kinks succumbed to disco-fever in the late-70s with (Wish) I Could Fly Like Superman. It’s certainly no more embarrassing than the Rolling Stones’ Miss You or Paul McCartney’s Goodnight Tonight. Definitely a notch above the Grateful Dead’s Shakedown Street or Rod Stewart’s Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?

In the nascent days of MTV, when the cable channel had more airtime to fill than artists had video to show, the Kinks experienced a minor career boost with the video for Come Dancing. It was an odd time for MTV, as it was inadvertently making stars out of such surprising acts as Devo and Herbie Hancock.

Other songs took a while to find a home and see success, such as Living On A Thin Line, which didn’t do much in 1985, but appeared on The Sopranos a number of times decades later. They also managed to create one of the most successful rip-offs of an earlier song since All Day And All Of The Night with Destroyer which steals the riff from that song while giving the character of Lola a belated sequel.

Still lots of these years feel like trend-chasing. There probably would’ve been enough material for two hour-long playlists if all these albums were available on Spotify, especially the underappreciated UK Jive. By the nineties, the Kinks made one last attempt at relevance by trying to cash-in on the “Unplugged” craze with To The Bone, after which the terminal and tempestuous in-fighting finally broke the band apart. Although there have been plenty of rumors and threats of reunions recently; we’ll see what actually happens.