999,823: The Kinks — Skin & Bone

Ray Davies has complicated feelings as regards large women. On one "Sunny Afternoon", he called for help when a "big fat mama" was trying to "break" him. Ok, granted, no one wants to suffer the vague but dreadful fate of breakage, especially when a big fat mama would be the agent of said injury. Granted.

Keeping that earlier episode in mind as you start listening to "Skin & Bone", hearing Ray sing about "fat flabby Annie" and her 16 stone heft (that's 224 pounds for the millions billion of you who don't keep up with the latest trends in English imperial weight), you might think that Ray's fat-phobia is surfacing again. But then a "thick dietitian" puts Annie on what sounds a lot like the Atkins diet before Atkins had a chance to put his name on it. She cuts out alcohol, pizza, pies, potatoes, scones ("stay away from carbohydrates") and now she "looks like she's ready to die", tut-tuts Ray. "You can't see her walk by."

From one perspective, this is an ad for the low carb lifestyle. Sure, it's a crash diet, but it worked, right? Annie cut out the carbs, and in a couple of days she acquired a tiny headache and just enough nausea that eating turned into a mechanical chore that she avoided if she could. It was weird the way she kept waking up to urinate every night at 5 am with her heart pounding like crazy and her head feeling explosive, but that's how she knew it was doing something, and look at the pounds melt away! That's what "living at the edge of starvation" is all about. Ray doesn't say, but Annie probably goes a little crazy after a few months of this and starts thinking it's ok to eat raw spaghetti out of the box because the carbs don't count if it's not cooked, but this is supposition.

On the other hand, poor Annie loses all her friends because she's not "cuddly" anymore, although here I think Ray uses "friends" to mean someone who was a lot more friendly with Annie than the word implies. Like someone who was really friending it to her good, from like seven different directions, wink wink. I guess you could debate the merits of being the town pump up on Muswell Hill, and you might even conclude that having fewer friends is a good thing, when you put it that way. But when even the girl's parents shake their heads...well, no one stays on Atkins forever.