Excellent. I haven't read another rock book like this. There is a loose biographical structure, but The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-detached eschews the standard Monday-Tuesday minutiae of the Kinks' early recording and performing career and instead focuses on a historical/sociological account of the suburban, London milieu from which they arose. Doyle is a history professor at Middle Tennessee State University and, while this very readable title is written for a popular audience, it hews to the trust-inducing conventions of academic discourse, with end notes and an extensive bibliography.
I didn't really listen to the Kinks until I was an adult. "Lola" was a fixture on classic rock radio when I was growing up, and I knew they had created the monster "You Really Got Me" riff that I loved from the first Van Halen record, but, unlike British invasion contemporaries such as the Beatles and the Stones and the Who (heck, even the Yardbirds after a fashion), they were not part of the 70s Southern California rock and roll firmament. The Kinks were a band I read about before I heard them, and, as they are generally revered by a certain type of scary, self-satisfied, intellectual hipster, I found their sorta quirky music a bit intimidating for a long time.
I've been doing a lot of catch-up listening and reading in conjunction with Andrew Hickey's superb podcast, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. If I understood him correctly, Bill McKibben claimed in a recent New Yorker article about the podcast that, if completed, it will be the longest single-author written work in human history (!!!). It is exhaustive, and the two Kinks episodes so far have been superb. I was fascinated a few years ago by writer/artistic director/producer Polly Platt, who some think was the real genius behind Peter Bogdanovich's oeuvre. I don't know enough to have an informed opinion on that controversy, but, as a fan, I can say that the movies he made when he was married to her are head and shoulders above the rest of his work. Similarly, Hickey thinks Ray Davies is the primary author of his songbook, but that the songwriting "fell off a cliff" after Davies divorced from Rasa, his wife during the creative golden age that is examined in this book. Rasa is barely mentioned in this book that is very much about the idea of "home" in Ray Davies' songwriting; her children with Ray aren't even named.
The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-detached is structured roughly chronologically, album by album, but the real focus is neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house, hence the splendid pun in the title. One of the cliches of discourse about the Kinks is their essential "Englishness." Doyle is very interested in the way that Davies drew artistic inspiration from the community in which he was raised. The 'village' of the The Village Green Preservation Society is the London suburb of Fortis Green, where the Davies brothers and their bandmates grew up. As the band became successful, Davies purchased a series of increasingly better houses, first a larger house in a better suburb and then a manor in the country. Neither suited him. He was bored and cut off from the places and people that had inspired his best work, so he moved back to the city to make Arthur and Lola, which, in Doyle's opinion, are the last of the truly great records. He lives there still and, according to a Guardian story from the teens, remains friends with people from his childhood.