Mark Doyle's The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-detached joins a growing body of English cultural studies that take the Kinks as their focal point. Doyle states that he wrote the book while being silently observed by a Ray Davies doll complete with hunting pink Edwardian jacket, clutching a guitar, a sly grin on his face (7). Yet Songs of the Semi-detached is not a band biography, nor a “love letter” to the Kinks, but rather “historically informed rock criticism” (9). Doyle filters Ray Davies's observant lyrics and brother Dave's angry guitar work through a lens of sociological observation and comparative literary criticism. He places his study of the band not only within a social context, but also within the context of the art, music, and literature that had an impact on their formative and creative years. The world of the Kinks provides the historian of mid-twentieth century Britain with a view into a complex world of rapid change; they were products of the time, yet they—Ray Davies especially—remained separate from the cultural phenomena around taking shape around them.

Doyle calls his work “stories from the semi-detached”—a play on “Million Pound Semi-detached,” a track off the Kinks’ 1966 Face to Face album. It is a song about suburban aspiration and social climbing, and Ray Davies's own brief residence in such a house forms a case study in “The Kinks vs Swingin’ London” (66–68). The principle semi-detached entity throughout this study, however, is the man himself: Davies as the aloof observer of all things English, watching the world around him with a smirk and an arched eyebrow. As Doyle puts it, Davies was “both there and not there, travelling down well-worn paths but not always keeping to the road, a working-class kid with ideas above his station, and an intellectual who can never quite shake the mud from his high heeled boots” (15).

The book mainly covers the band's output from 1964 through to 1972, and this chronological framework provides a good introduction for social historians. Covered here are early musical influences on Ray and Dave Davies especially, the importance of family, and the world they occupied in the aftermath of World War II. He charts the band's early success, then the famous ban on performance in America for four years. Ray Davies's embrace of Englishness and lyrics follow, then substantial chapters each on Village Green Preservation Society (1968) and Arthur (1969) The study wraps up with a discussion of the early 1970s and the Kinks’ return to the United States, and the one-two punch of Lola (1970) followed by Muswell Hillbillies (1972). Doyle leaves his work with Muswell Hillbillies although he touches on what is yet to come—the extravagant theatre shows of the 1970s, the Kinks’ renaissance as an arena band in the 1980s, and then as grandfathers of Britpop in the 1990s.

Doyle argues that the original four Kinks were all part of the same social milieu of working class, north London/British and were participants in a distinctive cultural moment (the British music scene of the 1960s) yet remained not quite fully part of either world (10). His goal is to explain this detachment—he does so along the way with excursus into art, music, and cultural context not readily available or known to outsiders that shaped the band and its music. Rather than focus on the literary meaning and thematic context of the Kinks’ work to answer these questions, Doyle complements these literary and cultural studies from an historian's perspective, looking at, he says, “the deep historical currents upon which the Kinks music draws—not just the immediate context in which it was produced, but the structural changes to which it was responding and the traditions of English though upon which it was crafted” (11). Running as a focal theme throughout the study is the effects of the transformation of Ray Davies's London (and Britain) from working-class solidarity to postwar suburban isolation.

What enriches Doyle's explication of the band's output is that he digs deeply into the historical and contemporary context behind these tracks and albums. If Ray Davies thrived as a songwriter due to his acute talents as an observer of human nature, so Doyle observes the Kinks’ Englishness as an American outsider: his investigative academic background shines as he seats his explication of songs such as “Village Green Preservation Society” and the storyline of Arthur, the rock opera that never was, by providing discussion of the influences of British and English art, television, and literature that might not be readily apparent to foreigners. Examples include a comparison of the Kinks’ tracks that show the perils afforded to young girls who leave their cozy homes for the big city with Victorian and Edwardian depictions of London as the city of “dreadful delight” (80–83); why the very American Donald Duck appears on a list of quintessentially English things on “We are the Village Green Preservation Society” (116–21); the fragmentation of working-class life lamented in the tracks of Arthur as indicated by the immense popularity of Coronation Street (99–102); and substantial explication of “Shangri-La” that includes a brief history of London/English suburbs from the 1820s, a comparison with Diary of a Nobody (1892), and a discussion of the impact of postwar urban renewal on the older working class (147–65).

The Kinks are frequently held up as paradigms of Englishness and in this carefully researched study, Doyle peels back layers of cultural baggage to reveal how deeply ingrained ancient elements of Englishness—a bricolage of music, poetry, and art—had an effect on Ray Davies's observation and expression. The Kinks: Songs from the Semi-detached initially takes us down a comfortable well-worn path about the band, its history, and its hits, but then digs deeply to point out what is beneath it, underneath the context of the words and music. Doyle explicates the Kinks’ ambiguity, confusion, detachment, passion, anger, self-effacement, and vulnerability—the bigger picture behind the familiar smirk on dolly Ray's face.