In 1967, self-sabotage led to The Kinks’ worst gig, but one year later Ray Davies transformed the night into one of their best songs

Ray Davies turned a disastrous 1967 Kinks performance into ‘All of My Friends Were There’, a song on the following year’s The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. It matters because he used a humiliating personal experience to explore regret, fame and the discomfort of being judged by people close to him.

The band had agreed to play the South East R&B Festival at Rectory Field in Blackheath, despite Davies being ill. He recalled drinking heavily before going on stage and finding friends in the front row as the curtains opened. The album, shaped partly by nostalgia and anxieties about modernisation, reached number 12 in the UK but did not chart in the US.