Dead End Street

I've always loved this song, and it seems to tread a fine line between the tongue-in-cheek Noel Coward-esque satire which Ray Davies' work frequently adopted and an overt political statement of the sort which was relatively rare for him. This strange promo film seems to come from the same place - amid the cross-dressing and predictably wacky "British Invasion"-era antics, there is some menacing, almost demented, behavior from the band (I love the door being slammed in our face by Pete Quaife) and grim still photos of people on the wrong end of the social ladder in what must have been an unrelentingly drab and bleak post-war Britain. I don't know how widely seen this film might have been at the time, but it must have been a fairly unsettling contrast to the prevalent images of "Swinging London."