Mark Doyle
THE CONSOLATIONS OF WATERLOO SUNSETS
This is a song about finding yourself alone and being okay with that.
This is a song about finding hope in endings.
[0:00 descending bassline]
One night in Washington, DC, my younger brother Joey fell on some subway tracks and died. He was alone, it was late, and it was the Fourth of July. It’s why I hate the Fourth of July, and it’s also, in a roundabout way, why I write. It’s a common thing with sibling deaths, I’m told, to feel that you must carry the dead with you, that you started down a road together and you must continue down it together. When Joey died I felt this very strong need to live, like really live, with purpose and joy and whatever else I could muster, because I was living now for the both of us.
I rarely feel more alive than when I’m writing, so that became one of the ways I dealt with Joey’s death. This is not an unusual way to grieve, but it is a funny way to really live, since the act of writing requires you to shut out the world and forget the self – at least, that’s how it is when you’re on a roll (writing is a little bit like sex in that way). So you could see writing as the opposite of living, as an escape from living, and my impulse to write through my grief as a desire to escape from a world where my brother no longer lived. Sometimes we write, sometimes we create our own little worlds in words, because we can’t bear the world as it really is.
Escape or not, I needed to do it. First I wrote a sort of grief blog that I shared with friends and family. Then I pulled myself together and finished an academic book I’d been picking at for years. Then I wrote a few other things. Eventually, I wrote a book about the English rock band the Kinks, something well off my usual beat and probably the most satisfying thing I’ve written. I never would have tried it had it not been for Joey’s life and death, so I dedicated it to him.
One of the chapters I wrote for that book was about the song “Waterloo Sunset.” It talked about sunsets on the Thames and the inspiration artists have drawn from them. It also talked about death and rivers and smog and painters. It was a pretty good chapter and it took a lot of work, but it didn’t fit with the other chapters – it was too personal, too much at odds with the detached intellectualism of the rest of the book – so I cut it. I have no idea how Joey felt about this song, and until recently it was never a particular favorite of mine, but while I was writing the book I became strangely attached to it.
One memory stands out. On a research trip to London I felt a very strong need to go to Waterloo Bridge and watch the sunset there, like this was what Joey would have done. So I went there on a bright June evening and listened to the song on my headphones and cried over Joey for the first time in years, not really in grief but in a kind of solidarity, like when you see someone at a funeral and you fall into their arms and sob together. That’s what the song sounds like to me now: two people coming together in their loneliness and telling each other it will be okay. It’s my song of consolation.
[0:08 one brother plays a looping lick on the electric guitar – it runs like a bridge over the other brother’s strummed acoustic]
In the way of smart, introverted kids, Joey and I didn’t open up much about the deep stuff. We’d be too embarrassed. But we did talk about music. If I was telling him about a new English band called Spoon that I really liked because they sounded serious at first but were actually quite funny, then I wasn’t revealing anything deep about myself, except maybe I was. And when he was telling me that he already knew about Spoon and that they weren’t from England but from Texas, then he wasn’t revealing anything about himself, either, except that he liked it when I got things wrong.
We especially liked English bands (I’m certain I wouldn’t have paid attention to Spoon if I’d known they were from Texas) and we liked English writers. We weren’t queen-and-crumpet Anglophiles of the sort who buy checkout magazines about royal weddings. We liked a certain idea of Englishness that was eccentric and knowing and understated: not high-posh, more like mid-posh. Our adolescent tastes ran to Wallace and Gromit, Mr. Bean, Monty Python. When we were a bit older it was Richard Curtis and P. G. Wodehouse, Blur and Oasis, and Morrissey before he turned into a troll. A bit older still and Joey was gravitating toward Waugh while I took up Orwell. Joey was always a little snobbier than me and quicker to pronounce sweeping but lightly held judgments. I was always more of a class warrior, my own sweeping judgments informed more by Marx-and-Engels than by Oxford-between-the-wars.
If you imagine Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell rattling along a busy interstate in a battered Chevy Blazer somewhere between America’s empty middle and its crowded east, sliding a Smiths CD out of a cracked jewel case and turning it up so the lyrics come in clear over the wind and engine roar, then you have the Doyle brothers in their mid-Oughts heyday. He’s in a blazer and loafers and I’m in a hoodie and jeans. I need a haircut and he’s just had one. We’re muttering things in short bursts, at frequencies only audible, only ever really audible, to each other. We’re thinking about where we’ll get lunch. We’re avoiding the important stuff.
[0:16 the vocals come in, a verse about a river and a crowd]
The Kinks were a brothers’ band. Ray Davies wrote and sang most of the songs, and his younger brother Dave played lead guitar, the louder and fuzzier the better. The job of the other Kinks, who over the decades became a revolving cast of bassists and drummers and keyboardists, was to pave the road under Ray’s words and Dave’s electricity. They didn’t have much in common, Ray and Dave, apart from being in the same band and growing up in the same family. Ray was detached and cerebral, an observer and a craftsman. Dave was young and flamboyant, still a teenager when the Kinks hit the big time, with a teenager’s lusts and angsts and rages. While Ray stayed home writing songs and raising a family, Dave tore around the world doing drugs and causing trouble, and you could hear these dissimilarities in their music. The band’s singles and albums were like a sonic graph of the slackening and tightening of the brothers’ bond, a longitudinal study of two consciousnesses bound together by nothing but genes and history, sometimes clashing, sometimes diverging, sometimes merging. Out of that churn came some of English music’s greatest songs.
Joey and I weren’t quite like that. There wasn’t a quiet one and a wild one: we were both the quiet ones, both Rays, with occasional streaks of Davelike excess. This sometimes made it difficult for us to talk but never difficult to understand one another. Like Ray and Dave – like all siblings, I suppose – we expressed our love through quarreling, sometimes quite violently (I once threw him through a window), but this ended when he grew bigger than me and I suddenly learned the art of placation. We also did the sibling thing of inventing our own secret worlds. If the Davies had their music, then the Doyles, at a much younger age, had their Pound Puppies, plush dolls who all had distinct biographies and habits of speech and lived in a world that looked like our bedrooms but was actually a kind of dog-centric amusement park. The closest we ever came to making music together was when we pretended these Pound Puppies were in a band: we’d turn on some music and move the Puppies around to make it look like they were singing and playing instruments. We even had an imaginary radio show, Pound Puppy Radio, that we recorded onto cassette tapes. The DJs were Pound Puppies, voiced by Joey and me, who improvised commentary and commercials between songs that we found on the radio or played on an adjacent tape deck. I listened to one of these tapes recently, one we made in 1987, when I was ten and he was six. It is not great entertainment – there’s a reason they don’t put puppet shows on the radio – but, for me, it’s a very recognizable portrait of how we interacted at that age. It’s mostly me talking and Joey laughing, the self-serious older brother providing the words and ideas while the younger one, divested of responsibility, made himself heard in whatever way he could. In this way, maybe we were a little like the Davies brothers.
I have a big pile of these tapes in a paper bag near my desk. If we had gone on to form a famous band, these tapes would doubtless have featured in the first ten minutes of the Netflix documentary about our career. As it is, they’ve moldered away in basements and attics for three decades, and so far I’ve only found the courage to listen to the one.
[0:35 the singer confesses he doesn’t need friends – he’s happy just watching the sunset]
When Ray Davies wrote “Waterloo Sunset” in 1967, he was afraid to show it to the rest of the band because it was too personal, because he thought it revealed too much of himself. Normally Ray wrote songs like a novelist writes dialogue, like a ventriloquist writes jokes. They weren’t confessions, more like situations, observations about the world and its people that were sometimes written in the first person but rarely written as memoirs. Even when they were exploding with lust or rage, the songs were rarely transcriptions of Ray’s own emotions. They were expressions of how an imagined narrator felt about things, or of how a different Ray, a Ray who wasn’t the one singing the song, had once felt about things. On stage he never played himself. He played characters. He did funny voices and accents. He played the fool, the drunk, the spiv, the mod.
During the first period of their fame, in 1964 and 1965, the band acquired a rowdy, unwashed reputation, thanks largely to Dave’s sound and fury. But by 1967, the time of “Waterloo Sunset,” Ray was writing gentle story songs, social commentary songs, songs sung by characters who definitely weren’t Ray. Any self-expression was indirect, incidental, tucked into corners.
“Waterloo Sunset” is one of those gentle story songs, but it doesn’t have much of a narrative, and it doesn’t have sharply drawn characters. There is only the haziest storyline: A distant observer watches millions of people swarming around Waterloo Station, on the south bank of the Thames. He’s dazzled by the lights and dizzy with the crowds, but he feels no need to join them. He is happy in his cage, too lazy to go outside, a housebound Jimmy Stewart touched but untroubled by what he sees from his rear window. Amidst the swirl of the station, a boy named Terry meets a girl named Julie, just like every Friday night. They cross Waterloo Bridge wrapped up in each other, safe in their own little world, a distant mirror of the narrator’s own contented solitude. And that’s about it, a moment of grace amidst the city’s bustle and swirl – until the very end, when the chord changes, the music swells, and you can almost hear the sun blazing out in a million colors before it drops behind the curve of the earth.
“Waterloo Sunset” has a swoony, dreamy quality that is unusual in a Kinks song. “It is effortless, making its small slam without a qualm.” So wrote the architecture critic Ian Nairn in his London guidebook of 1966. He was speaking not about the song, which hadn’t yet been written, but about Waterloo Bridge itself, and I think there is a sense in which the song sounds like the bridge. The opening bassline drops us into the scene from on high, giving way to Dave’s delicate guitar licks that span the song like the arches of a bridge (Nairn again: “Five tense, shallow arches leap the Thames, drawing extra spring from hunched abutments …”). Meanwhile, soft Beach Boys harmonies swell and fade like the tides of the Thames, lifting us above the madding crowd and into the misty heights from which the narrator watches the scene. Ray once said that he wanted the vocals to sound like a leaf falling through the air, and it has that quality, too. His frail voice could be blown away by the slightest musical breeze. “The song is about how innocence will prevail over adversity,” he told the Guardian in 2016. “It starts out delicate, but by the end has become awesome in its power. Those triumphant chords come in – and the angels tell you everything is going to be OK.” (Nairn: “The rhythm is syncopated further, because the arches don’t run the full width of the bridge: there is a deep channel between them, which gives a breathtaking view from directly underneath, on the Embankment, looking down what seems to be a majestic colonnade.”) But that moment of majesty is brief: the chords and the angels arrive only in the last few seconds, before a quick fade hurries you along your way. The moment may be tranquil, the underlying structure majestic, but it is also fleeting, like life.
So what, exactly, was Ray confessing here? Why was he embarrassed to show it to the others? You won’t get a straight answer from Ray on this subject: over the years, he has said all sorts of things about “Waterloo Sunset,” but not why it embarrassed him. He has said that it came to him in a dream and that he wrote it while hungover. He has said that it was originally called “Liverpool Sunset” and was about the “death of Merseybeat and all that,” and that he had initially wanted to name the lovers Bernard and Dorothy. The names he settled on, Terry and Julie, could either refer (as he has sometimes said) to two of the most famous scenesters of Swinging London, Terrence Stamp and Julie Christie, who were filming Far from the Madding Crowd in Dorset at the time, or (as he has also said) they could be a nod to Ray’s nephew and his girlfriend. He has said that he wrote the song for the generation who came of age before and during the Second World War, the generation of his six older sisters, working-class Londoners who were supposed to accept their lots in life and work in factories and things. In this way of listening to the song, crossing the bridge represents an escape from a life of drudgery into a more hopeful future, but it is someone else’s future, not the singer’s, that we’re led to contemplate.
The reason the song has proved so durable, of course, is that it lends itself to all of these interpretations, or none. “It doesn’t mean anything,” Ray once admitted, “But when you hear the record, it means a lot.” Sometimes a sunset just makes you want to sing, and you don’t need a reason for it. Maybe that’s what embarrassed him: he has allowed us to see him in an unguarded moment, he has allowed us to hear him singing in the shower, and he’s worried about what we might think.
But once he shared the song with the band, “Waterloo Sunset” ceased to be a private moment and became the sound of a group. When we listen to the original recording, we’re hearing not just Ray but the other Kinks, as well – Dave’s guitar, Mick Avory’s drums, Pete Quaife’s bass – plus Ray’s wife Rasa on backing vocals with Dave and Pete. When I listen to it, it’s hard not to feel a little nostalgia on these strangers’ behalf. They all sound so happy and harmonious. It’s the backing vocals that do it. I don’t know exactly how they recorded it, but I like to imagine Dave, Pete, and Rasa all gathered around a single microphone, shoulders touching, friends for now but not forever, wrapped in a moment that is simultaneously fleeting and eternal. The nostalgia comes because I know what they don’t: that in two years Pete will leave the band, and that several years later Rasa will leave Ray, and that both endings will be awful. Even Mick will leave the Kinks before their run is through. Only the brothers will stick it out to the end.
[0:53 the sha la la chorus]
We were always going to be Kinks fans, Joey and I, although it took some time. I first found them through Van Halen’s cover of “You Really Got Me,” which got much more airplay on Oklahoma City radio during my childhood than the Kinks did. When I heard the originals, mostly early hits like “All Day and All of the Night” and “Tired of Waiting,” they didn’t grab me, probably because I wasn’t yet a horny teenager. It wasn’t until the mega-deluxe reissue of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society in 2004 that I realized there was more to the band than those early singles. At that time almost everything I knew about music came from the email newsletter of an uber-hip New York City record store, so when they praised the album as a great, little-heard masterpiece, I snatched it up. But even then I wasn’t quite sold. The opening track’s semi-sarcastic inventory of bygone Englishness tickled me right in my Anglophilia, but the rest of the album seemed uneven and difficult to unpack. So I shelved it and went back to my grad school rock: Arcade Fire, TV on the Radio, Sufjan Stevens, things like that.
I only really sat down and listened to the Kinks after Joey burned me a copy of a two-disc greatest hits collection. This was probably 2005 or 2006, when we were making CDs for each other to take on road trips between the east coast, where we lived, and Oklahoma, where our parents lived. I was fascinated by the way the band had evolved from those early, Van Haleny songs to the quirky story songs of the later Sixties. I usually stopped listening before the final overproduced singles of the Seventies and Eighties, but that was okay. I had what I needed, and I began to explore a little more.
Skip ahead to 2012, two years after Joey died, and I finally discovered the 1969 album Arthur: Or, the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. I found it thanks to a class I was teaching on twentieth-century Britain. Each class session was 85 minutes, which is a long time for anybody to listen to me talk, so I began inserting musical interludes about halfway through. Students who didn’t rush off to the restrooms or vending machines got a short DJ set of songs from or about the era we were studying: Iron Maiden’s “Passchendaele” or Motörhead’s “1916” for World War One, Vera Lynn for World War Two, sprinklings of Noël Coward, any of a dozen songs wishing for the death of Margaret Thatcher. It was while I was compiling these sets that I found Arthur. The album was a soundtrack to an abortive television drama that Ray had written. It’s about a depressed Englishman looking back on his life and contemplating his disappointing present, and it’s full of songs about British history from the Victorian era to the Sixties, enough songs to fill nearly all of my musical interludes until we got to the Seventies. Somehow, I had never heard this album, and I began to think someone should use it as the basis for a novel. The liner notes, written by Ray’s collaborator Julian Mitchell, gave a rough sketch of the narrative, and the songs conveyed the emotion – and really, what’s a novel but narrative plus emotion? Then I decided that the person who should write that novel was me. Then I wrote the novel.
This is not something you’re supposed to do when you’re a full-time history professor at a regional comprehensive university with a young family and very little spare time. But after Joey died I’d promised myself that I would really live, and that meant working like hell to become a real writer, not just a writer of academic articles and monographs. So I wrote this thing because he had died, and also because he had lived, and while he lived he had cultivated in me not just an appreciation of the Kinks but a conviction that things like the Kinks and Englishness and music really mattered and were worth thinking deeply about.
That novel has never seen the light of day, which is probably for the best. But I did send out inquiries, and one publisher got back to me with an offer to write a different kind of Kinks book, the socio-literary-artistic history of the band that I finally published in 2020. I listened to an awful lot of Kinks during the two years it took to write this book, and I thought an awful lot about Joey. It was good to have something to do with my hands, good to have an excuse to pat and knead my grief, but it caused a curious inversion. The original idea was to write the book as a way of really living, but it turned out that when I was writing it, I wasn’t living, but grieving. It was when I stopped writing for the day, when I put the computer and my grief to sleep, that I really did my living.
[1:15 second verse: Terry meets Julie on a Friday night]
“Waterloo Sunset” isn’t really a grief song unless you squint your ears. If anything, it’s a song that defies grief, the kind of song that catches a moment and saves it from the ashes. Ray once studied to be a painter, and he never quite lost the painter’s knack of capturing a scene in all its shapes and angles. Sometimes he speaks of the song this way: “All the colours are there. I had to go into the studio and produce that record because that made up for me not being a painter. When I did the mix, I came down to Waterloo Bridge, to see if it worked. It was my substitute for not being able to paint it.” Here, if we believe him, he was reversing the aspiration of those painters who have labored to make pictures that look like music – think of Whistler, think of Kandinsky – and mirroring Ornette Coleman’s desire to make jazz that sounded like a Pollock painting. All art is about refusing death, I suppose, but to make music that sounds like a painting is especially daring because it’s a refusal not just of death but of the temporality of music itself. Music, like life, has a beginning and end. A painting doesn’t have those things, or, if it does, we measure them differently. How do you make something as effervescent as a song resemble something as persistent as a painting? How do you freeze time with sound?
A perhaps more answerable question: If “Waterloo Sunset” is like a painting, what kind of a painting is it like? Someone who knows their Thames sunsets might first imagine a refulgent yellow sunset by J. M. W. Turner. It’s not a bad choice. Turner lived along the Thames all his life and painted it many times, sometimes at peace, and sometimes, as in his 1830s scenes of the burning of the Houses of Parliament, in majestic fury. He had a skiff that he’d take onto the river to capture it at different times of day, but he liked the hour before sunset best. His sunsets are often apocalyptic, dwarfing humans and their petty creations in a piercing, divine brilliance. They are also melancholic. One of his most famous paintings, The Fighting Temeraire, depicts a wooden warship being towed down the river by a tugboat. The old campaigner is about to be broken up for scraps, its glory days forgotten in a belch of coal smoke, side-lit by a drooping, cloud-hooded sun. It is an image of the industrial age clearing away an outdated but perhaps more wholesome way of living, a warning about the future and a lament for a fading past.
J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire (1838) source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain,
You can’t get much more Kinksian than that. This was exactly the sort of theme that was preoccupying Ray when he wrote “Waterloo Sunset,” and it’s all over Village Green and other albums from the period. Ray might have had The Fighting Temeraire in mind when he told an interviewer in 1994 that “Waterloo Sunset” was “about a world that was passing and we weren’t appreciating. The underlying mood is very sad. The world will never be the same again and I’m a little bit scared but I take consolation in seeing the sunset and knowing that there will be another sunset and there will be sunsets long after I’m dead.” He said something similar in his memoir, X-Ray, where he described standing on Waterloo Bridge as a teenager and watching the river flow “like blood flowing through a giant vein that led to the pumping heart of the Empire. I felt that there was a bigger tide coming that would completely flood the banks and submerge the Houses of Parliament. This was a tide of reality and change that was soon to turn England on its head.”
A fiery apocalypse, a great city flooded, the inexorable rush of change – that’s a lot of weight for a three-and-a-quarter-minute pop song to bear, and I’m not sure this one, tender and fragile as it is, is quite up it. So let’s try this instead. A corpulent Frenchman in late-middle age, his dark moustache fading southward into a long white beard, eyes pinked by soot, stares at the Thames from the balcony of his suite in the Savoy Hotel. It is the very end of the nineteenth century, and London is the capital of the world. The sharp smell of burning coal is everywhere, but the river smells much sweeter than it once did, back when it served as both the principal sewer and the principal source of drinking water for the world’s largest city. Now it is mainly the air that is slowly killing Londoners, a throat-clogging haze of carcinogens that is sometimes so thick that pedestrians crash into one another and church spires vanish into the heavens. “Fog everywhere,” Charles Dickens had written on the first page of Bleak House in 1852, “Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.” Decades later and the London fog has only gotten worse, but it is precisely this that has drawn the Frenchman here. He is fascinated by what the London fog does to the light above the Thames, and he has come to capture the river while it moves.
Claude Monet made roughly a hundred paintings of the Thames between 1899 at 1901, mostly from his balcony at the Savoy, at the northern end of Waterloo Bridge, although he also painted from St. Thomas’ Hospital, across the river from Westminster. He painted the river in pale blue shadows cast by the arches of a bridge, obscured it with white clouds turning pink in a low-hanging sun, smeared it in a grey-blue haze emanating from the smoking chimneys on the south bank. He liked to do Charing Cross and Waterloo Bridges in the morning (he captured several Waterloo sunrises, but no Waterloo sunsets) and the Houses of Parliament at sunset, when the day’s accumulation of smog made it look like a sea creature rising up through the mist. Monet once wrote that he loved London “only in winter with the fog, for without the fog London would not be a beautiful city.” His London is mostly sky reflected in water, imposed upon but not unsettled by blurs of buildings and bridges. The London crowds are often in there, too, daubs of cream and blue who walk or ride near the river in ghostly procession, but they hardly matter to the play of light and color that’s happening elsewhere. Monet’s goal in these paintings was to suck viewers into a passing moment and leave them gaping there. He was painting in pursuit of what he called the enveloppe, the instant – no longer than, say, a popular song – when the light made the river appear just so, just before it became a different river. Alone on his balcony, he was trying to package the ephemeral and make it eternal.
Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, effet de soleil (1903) Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Monet took a long time to finish these paintings. Like an obsessive musician doing take after take, he carried many of them back to his studio at Giverny and reworked them until they were just right. This fussing, I think, is how the paintings ended up with that chalky haze that makes them feel instantly nostalgic, like a faded photograph or a memory half- recalled. “Waterloo Sunset” has that quality, too, both because of the gauzy backing vocals and because the recording equipment they were using makes it sound so much of its time. It makes us think not so much about a scene present before us as of a scene as it once was, a river lit by memory. For that reason it sounds more like a Monet than a Turner to me, more like a delicate dance in the fog than a careening spectacle lit by fire.
[1:52 those sha la las again]
When he wrote “Waterloo Sunset,” Ray Davies had plenty of his own memories of the Thames to draw on. He remembered visiting the Festival of Britain on the south bank in the summer of 1951, with its huge, cigar-shaped Skylon Tower that looked, at the time, like the future. He remembered spending some nights at St. Thomas’ Hospital on the Thames at the age of thirteen, when a serious injury required him to get a tracheotomy. The procedure nearly killed him, and during his recovery the nurses wheeled him onto the balcony to look across the river toward Westminster – the same view Monet had – and out toward Waterloo on the right. He remembered changing trains at Waterloo Station on his way to art college a few years later, and, later still, he remembered courting Rasa along the Embankment and planning their future together. Waterloo Bridge, the station, the south bank, the Thames – that area, he once told Jon Savage, was his “center.”
For the previous generation, the generation of the Davies sisters, the area held its own romantic memories. This was partly thanks to a 1930 play by Robert Sherwood called Waterloo Bridge and three subsequent film adaptations, all of which were about love and separation on or near the river. In the play, a man and a woman meet on Waterloo Bridge during World War One. The woman is a prostitute, the man a soldier, and the drama revolves around their blossoming relationship and the woman’s efforts to keep her profession hidden from him. The most successful film adaptation was the 1940 version starring Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor. In this version, the man and the woman (now a ballerina) meet on the bridge and become lovers. The man is called up to the front and subsequently reported dead. The woman falls into despair and resorts to prostitution. When the man returns to London alive, the woman tries and fails to keep her recent past from him, ultimately committing suicide by throwing herself under a truck on Waterloo Bridge.
It’s a grimly appropriate ending. Today the guides on London sightseeing boats will tell you that Waterloo Bridge is known as the Ladies’ Bridge because of the women who helped construct the current bridge during World War Two. I’m not sure how many people other than tour guides ever call it that, but I do know that some Londoners knew the old bridge, the one built in 1817, as the Bridge of Sighs because of all of the suicides that happened there – and because it was the title of an 1844 poem by Thomas Hood about a seduced and abandoned woman who prefers death to dishonor and throws herself from the bridge, “Perishing gloomily / Spurr’d by contumely.” The poem became so popular that many of the paintings and illustrations you’ll find of the old bridge feature wretched women preparing to jump from it, or falling from it, or lying dead beneath its wide arches. “This is where it is,” a toll-keeper told Charles Dickens one night in 1853, “if people jump off straight forwards from the middle of the parapet of the bays of the bridge, they are seldom killed by drowning, but are smashed, poor things; that’s what they are; they dash themselves upon the buttress of the bridge.”
But this wasn’t just a Victorian thing. In 1910 the poet Douglas Goldring imagined the archetypal scene of a “pale girl” contemplating suicide just at sunset, “where the West is olive-pink / And rosy mists the river shade” above a Thames that is “sullen, purposeful and strange” running beneath a “patient bridge that will not change.” Here sunset represents not hope but hopelessness, a full stop after which “will come no night, no dream.” In 1923 Noël Coward opened his revue London Calling with a woman being notified of her husband’s suicide off Waterloo Bridge: “Yes, the one next to Charing Cross, —No, no, no, that’s Blackfriars. Don’t be so silly, Flossie, you know perfectly well Westminster comes first, then— the one with trains on it, then Waterloo.” In this tradition the Thames is not just a dirty old river but the River Styx, a passageway between life and the afterlife. Or maybe it’s the River Lethe, the river of forgetfulness from whose waters the dead drink to forget their past lives.
But the Thames isn’t a river of forgetfulness, not really. It’s a river of memories, more memories than you can count, even if you’re just counting up the times it’s appeared in the works of writers and painters and musicians, even if you’re just counting up the sunsets. Each time we encounter one of these little memories it shapes and reflects and absorbs our own. “Remembrance! as we glide along,” sang Wordsworth of a sunset on the river at Richmond in 1798:
Such views the youthful bard allure,
But, heedless of the following gloom,
He deems their colours shall endure ‘
Till peace go with him to the tomb.
—And let him nurse his fond deceit,
And what if he must die in sorrow!
Who would not cherish dreams so sweet,
Though grief and pain may come to-morrow?
The poet here is floating westward down the Thames, toward the sun, oblivious to the gloom that’s shadowing him from behind, and Wordsworth wants to keep it that way: let him have his momentary paradise, let him have his singing. In Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot sends her hero out rowing and singing upon the Thames in a similar sunset reverie. Daniel is adrift in his life, just back from a spell abroad and wondering whether to join battle with the world. In his solitude he absently sings some lines from Dante that are usually translated as, “There is no greater pain than to remember a happy time when one is in misery.” He sees a young woman: she is dipping her woolen cloak in the water to make a drowning shroud out of it. Daniel’s song has penetrated her, seeming to endorse what she’s about to do. But Daniel rushes over and rescues her, and a major plotline is set in motion.
Other writers have dwelt in the gloom. Conrad opened that most river-obsessed of stories, Heart of Darkness, the Thames at sunset, just as “the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.” Dickens opened Our Mutual Friend on an equally sinister note, with a man and his daughter searching the Thames for corpses as “a slant of light from the setting sun glanced into the bottom of the boat, and, touching a rotten stain there which bore some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form, coloured it as though with diluted blood.” Then there’s Dr. Seward in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, stepping away from his grim asylum to find cold comfort in a Thames sunset, “with its lurid lights and inky shadows and all the marvelous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul water.” There isn’t much consolation in these scenes, more like an undertow of dread, but, that, too, is a perfectly reasonable way to feel about a river.
[2:14 third verse: Terry and Julie cross the river, safe and sound]
Joey and I had no shared memories of London – when we went there, we went separately. But we did share stories. The last time he was there he spent most of his time with an Oklahoma friend who had somehow ended up addicted to heroin in a squat in Tower Hamlets. While the friend was out scoring, Joey wrote postcards and went bookshop-hopping. Then he wrote me a long email with travel tips. He told me about a chocolate shop in Spitalfields that was started by some disillusioned lawyers after they visited South America. He told me about the pub he was writing in, which had a large collection of country music and Faces LPs. He told me about a bookshop in Notting Hill where an old man in tweed was complaining loudly about how long novels are. Then he told me about the first time he was in Notting Hill. It was a high school trip some years earlier, and he had been delighted to see that the cinema in Notting Hill was playing the movie Notting Hill. He was tempted to go see it – he found Hugh Grant charming and coincidences comforting – but instead he and some friends got a bottle of vodka and drank it on the roof of their hotel.
He wrote me that email one January while I was in London working on a book about the British Empire. I was alone, and he was trying to make me feel less so. But I didn’t really mind the solitude. My chief memories of that time are of wandering alone through the city at every spare moment, particularly at night, and glorying in the solitude. After a day at the National Archives in Kew, I would pack up my notes and take the Tube to a station in central London. After grabbing something to eat, I would wander for hours practicing night photography with my new digital camera, often balancing the camera on bollards or rubbish bins to minimize vibrations. I snapped crowds hustling down Villiers Street, ice skaters at Somerset House, cheesemongers in Borough Market, the lights of Hammersmith Bridge. They were solitary, these night walks, but not lonely. I felt that lovely freedom you get in a foreign city where you run no risk of running into somebody you know. My attention was rapt, my senses primed, my path eccentric. I needed no friends: the city was mine.
I suspect this is how another American in London, James McNeill Whistler, felt when he painted his series of nocturnes along the Thames in the 1860s and 1870s. He nearly said as much in a lecture in 1885:
And when the evening mist clothes the riverside in poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us – then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone.
Whistler liked to observe the Thames at night – atop a bridge, aboard a rowboat, on a balcony at the Savoy (it was he who recommended the hotel to Monet) – and, after observing it, he would withdraw to paint it from sketches or memory. What he was after was a sound as much as a scene: he was one of those painters who approached his work like a musician, arranging tone and form to bring order out of chaos. The term he chose to describe these paintings, “nocturnes,” is a musical term, as were many of the titles he chose: Symphony in White, Harmony in Blue and Gold, Arrangement in Grey and Black. They aren’t pop songs, these nocturnes – they’re too cool and abstract for that – but they can give you the same feeling as a pop song.
James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (c.1872-1875). source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain,
Which brings me back to “Waterloo Sunset.” I said earlier that the song is like a Monet, but it is also like a Whistler – or maybe it’s better to say that Whistler’s nocturnes are like sleepy cover versions of the song. They have the same colors, the same tones: blues and violets, greys and flashing yellows, solitude, peace, a quiet awe. Often in Whistler’s paintings there is just one person visible – a solitary bargeman, a figure standing at the river’s edge – with maybe a few other people up on a bridge. All are painted with the same colors as the river or the sky or the land. The paintings depict solitude but not loneliness, because how can you be lonely when you’re made of the same stuff as the landscape? The painter is there too, of course, watching the figures from a bridge or a balcony or a boat, just like the narrator who watches Terry and Julie from his window. The figures we see may think they’re alone, but they’re not. There’s Whistler with his sketchbook, Ray with his piano, me with my camera, catching and holding them before they’re gone.
[2:50 the looping electric lick returns, one brother carrying the other over the river]
The last time I was in London was in the summer of 2018, eight years after Joey died, when I was working on my Kinks book. I stayed in Muswell Hill for a couple of nights, photographing the places where the Davies brothers had passed their youth and wondering how the place might have changed. Then I moved to a student room at the London School of Economics for a few nights while I scouted locations for a summer course I thought I’d teach. I took a Rock ‘n’ Roll Walking Tour around Soho, visited the house in Mayfair where G. F. Handel and Jimi Hendrix once lived (not together), photographed a Battersea housing estate, and, one afternoon, headed out to Twickenham to visit the Eel Pie Island Museum, which commemorates a bygone dance club in the middle of the Thames that once hosted acts like the Rolling Stones, the Small Faces, Bowie, and the Who (but not, as the chap at the museum told me, the Kinks). None of these places made me think of Joey, particularly, which was strange. I often feel closer to him when I’m travelling, especially when I’m travelling alone, but on this trip I was so preoccupied with other things that I didn’t give a thought to his rooftop vodka parties or his cranky old men in bookshops. I could have used this trip as an occasion to visit once more all the places he had told me about, to imagine him standing beside me as I sampled some lawyer chocolate or flipped through some LPs in a Tower Hamlets pub, but the thought didn’t even cross my mind.
Because it had been eight years, because the grief had been so fully absorbed into my bloodstream that it had altered my chemical composition. I didn’t feel like I needed to do anything with the grief, because it wasn’t outside of me: it wasn’t something I enacted, but something that I was. But then I had a thought. While I was walking along the Thames path in Twickenham, after Eel Pie Island, I decided to try catching the sunset on Waterloo Bridge. It was getting late, and it was a long way to central London, but I thought I could probably make it. It had been a metallic June day, blue and clear, so the sunset wouldn’t be much, neither a Turner nor a Monet (and I’d have to wait until full darkness for a Whistler), but the rest of my evenings were booked and this would be my only chance. I checked the sunset time on my phone, estimated my route and speed, and decided that if the District Line wasn’t too slow I could rendezvous with the sun before it vanished. I said earlier that Joey found coincidences comforting. He also liked to force coincidences, by, say, putting on the Eagles song where they mention Winslow, Arizona, at the very moment he’d be driving through through Winslow, Arizona. My idea was that I’d get to Waterloo Bridge just at sunset and play the song on my headphones while I watched the sun slip into the river. It was a corny kind of joke, but I thought he’d get it.
[2:58 the chord changes, and the angels come in]
The train took longer than I’d expected. As I rushed along the Embankment toward the bridge, past Cleopatra’s Needle, past the faux- Parisian posterior of the Savoy, I rehearsed the line from the Muppet Movie that I use as an aide de memoire for keeping track of sunsets. Fozzie and Kermit are on a cross-country trip and joyfully lost. They’re singing about their wrong-turnings and mishaps and at one point Fozzie says, “Hey, I’ve never seen the sun come up in the west!” This movie was a fixture of my and Joey’s childhood, and that line is how I learned – and how I still remember – that the sun sets in the west, but it doesn’t rise there. I was now heading northeast, so I knew that the sun would be behind me. I couldn’t see it from where I was on the Embankment, but perhaps once I was up on the bridge…
But no. The sky was still blue, scored by jet trails and marbled with dark and light clouds, and the sun was obviously still above the horizon, but I couldn’t see it for the trees and buildings. I put on my headphones anyway, put on “Waterloo Sunset,” and walked toward the south bank. The bridge was nearly empty, but even if it had been swarming with people I’d have felt alone. I know I’ve said that grief didn’t stalk me on this trip, but while I was racing there I think I had this idea that I’d meet Joey at the bridge, that I’d find some kind of sign or feeling, some thinness between his world and mine. I’m always feeling around for things like that, and sometimes I find them, even if I have to strain a bit. But this was just a bridge, a fairly unremarkable concrete bridge when you’re actually up on it, with white metal railings and bike lanes and bus lanes and grey, wet-looking smudges on the stone.
When the song finished I played it again: one brother up high with the top notes, the other brother down below, hard to hear, strumming the acoustic. A bridge and a river, two lovers, the world through a pane of glass. I looked to my left, to the east, where I knew that there would be no sun. But I was wrong, because suddenly there it was. A glass building near Saint Paul’s Cathedral, some anonymous office building that people of an artistic temperament probably hate, was glowing orange like it was on fire. It had caught the light of the sun from across the river and was reflecting it back at me: a sunset in the east instead of the west. It was a joke so good it brought tears to my eyes.
source: photo taken by author
MARK DOYLE is a professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University. He is the author or editor of four books on British and Irish history, most recently The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached (Reaktion 2020). He has been a finalist for short story prizes from Salamander and Pithead Chapel, and his stories have also appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal and elsewhere. He is currently finishing a book about John Cale’s album Paris 1919 for Bloomsbury’s music book series, 33 1/3.
