It's no secret that Ray Davies has, in comparison with his early work, dished out an awful lot of substandard dross of late. In this he is like most of the rest of the great songwriters of the Sixties rock explosion….

The question of why Ray Davies' work has declined is a mite puzzling, however. Granted, he has tried of late to adapt his usual themes—the lives of little people, English traditions and their decline—to larger canvases than he's accustomed to. Even though his first attempt, the concept album "Arthur," was a rousing success, I still maintain that he is primarily a short-story writer, if you will, rather than a novelist: into such songs as Do You Remember Walter, Deadend Street, and Autumn Almanac, for example, he was able to compress more detail, more nuance, than any other writer in the history of pop music. That's...