A Well Respected Man

Ray Davies distills an entire British social class into three minutes of exquisitely polite venom, built on an acoustic guitar figure so tidy and precise that it functions as a sonic portrait of its subject before a word is sung. The production is dry and close, almost documentary in its refusal of atmosphere, which is precisely right — this song is observation, not romance. The protagonist reads his Daily Express, minds his prejudices, keeps his lawn trimmed, and considers himself the backbone of civilization while his emotional life remains entirely unexplored. Davies sings without cruelty but without mercy either, delivering the inventory of small repressions and social conformities with the tone of a naturalist cataloguing a species. The cultural context is mid-sixties England before the counterculture had fully arrived — the moment when the squares could still be portrayed without the sympathy that nostalgia would later generate. It plays with particular sharpness during the daily commute, when its catalogue of small dignities and smaller dishonesties resonates against the faces in the carriage. The genius is that the subject would probably enjoy the song without recognizing himself in it.