The Kinks

Davies brothers rock’n’roll; You Really Got Me is the riff prototype.

Formed 1963. Mid-1960s Pye singles (You Really Got Me, All Day and All of the Night) used sliced-speaker distortion and Ray Davies’s songwriting; later Village Green–era work turned toward English observational pop. You Really Got Me (1964) is the essential track here—two-chord riff, Dave Davies’s guitar grind. Cited by Van Halen and countless garage/hard-rock bands as a distortion template.