The songs will be remembered. I might just disappear
Kinks frontman Ray Davies has suffered his demons — but his timeless hits are the best part of him, he tells Richard Godwin
SHOULD you ever ge t the chance to sit on a London bench with Ray Davies I recommend you take it up. From his preferred perch in Highgate, the 70-year-old songwriter — currently the toast of the West End for his musical Sunny Afternoon — proves no less observant than he was when he wrote those deathless old Kinks tunes. Behind the windows of his Ray-Bans, he watches the world as it quietly passes by, ever al er t to details.
A Porsche roars, obnoxiously loud: “Is that legal?” he drawls. A businesswoman clatters by i mpor t a nt ly. “She’s wearing very strong perfume,” he sniffs the air. “Cartier.”
Conversation is peppered with details on the horrors of west London (“a wasteland”), the Seventies gentrification of Holloway and how New Orleans (where he lived until he was shot by a burglar in 2004) reminded him of East Finchley. The Mayor’s office should hire him out as a guide. “It’s important to keep archives together,” as he says.
As it is, Davies is to receive a rather more honourable honour at tonight’s London Music Awards, which have named him a London Legend. That status may be assured through songs such as Waterloo Sunset but the time he spends in songwriting workshops and in helping to give children from less advantaged backgrounds the chance to express themselves at his Konk studio now receives due recognition. “People need the right to have fantasies — the factual world is so cruel,” he says with that watchful intensity. “You need to let people escape for three minutes.”
It’s a personal mission for him, since his escape came not only in listening to the old R&B records that formed the blueprint of the Kinks sound but in the writing process itself, which helped him break free from his mode stup bringing in Muswell Hill, where he was the seventh of eight children.
In Sunny Afternoon — his autobiographic al jukebox musical, currently playing at the Harold Pinter Theatre — he suggests that it was the death of his beloved older sister Rene on his 13th birthday that set him on this path. She gave him his first guitar and he implies that the songs he wrote were an attempt to repay that debt.
“I was quite reclusive after my sister died,” he says. “I wasn’t depressed exactly but I went into withdrawal. Songwriting helped me get through that. Nowadays, there are so many challenges for young people. To enable them to break through that barrier of e moti o n to c o nve y their feelings through song would be a step to selfawareness. It’s not a cure but it’s an important step. The whole point of doing music is to discover yourself as
‘People need the right to have fantasies. You need to let people escape for three minutes’
well as write songs. I really want to find a way of carrying that on.”
He has set up The Kinks’s old studio in Hornsey as a little outpost that in some small way makes up for the loss of the art schools where Davies and many of his contemporaries first formed bands. “We’re encouraging young people to come and experience the studio. I’ve already got the motto, I’m looking for the Latin: ‘Feel free to fail’ — I think it’s a human right to be creative and to enable people to do that is so important.”
The London Legend award, established by the Mayor’s Music Fund, is part of a general upsurge in Davies-related activity. Next year sees the release a new album, Americana, based on his love affair with the blues, and he is rehearsing a new band for a series of summer shows. (A Kinks reunion is apparently not on the cards until his younger brother Dave can patch things up with drummer Mick Avory).
There’s a Kinks biopic due from veteran punk director Julien Temple, st arring folk singer Johnny Flynn, though Davies says he’s “detached” from the process. Meanwhile, there are rumours that Sunny Afternoon — which was 10 years in development before Edward Hall’s production premiered to five - st ar reviews at Hampstead Theatre last year — will tour the country and possibly beyond.
Davies is gratified by the success of Sunny Afternoon but not so surprised. The Kinks always had a strong musichall influence, more in tune with his parents’ generation than the visceral rebellions of the Sixties (he points out quite proudly that the Rolling Stones or The Who would never have had a top five single about gardening, as he did with Autumn Almanac in 1967).
“The songs lend themselves to the theatre,” he says. “They have a dark side th at makes them useful in storytelling. I call it the ‘third element’.” What’s that then? “The possibilities that are unsung and unexplained… sometimes it comes through in the performance. Sometimes it’s an underlying current, a place where the riff goes or the melody goes.”
It goes some way to explain the appeal of the songs, which always have that little backwards glance: the remorseless minor key that underpins the celebratory Til the End of the Day, the mordant knees-up in the chorus of the Dickensian Dead End Street.
Still, what’s intriguing about the musical is how raw the events depicted seem to be for him. This is less due to his rivalry with Dave and more to do with the “immense hurt” that Davies felt in the mid-Sixties, when the band had just returned from tour in penniless disgrace, having been banned from America and exploited by their paymasters. In the show, we see Ray confined to his bed unwilling to come out. “The man on the bed is quite significant to me,” he says. “When I put together the show I was detached from it, but it comes back to you. It would be nice to put that to rights.”
WHEN I ask him what he feels his greatest achievement is, it’s the “triumph against all odds” that allowed him to get up from that bed, write Sunny Afternoon in time for England’s World Cup triumph in 1966 and get the band back on track.
Still, you could cite any number of songs — which he too admits are “the best part” of himself. A huge recent biography by Johnny Rogan goes to some lengths to make the same point, with former friends and associates seemingly queuing up to relate how difficult Ray could be. “I think the songs will be remembered. I might j ust disappear,” he adds. And it’s this subject that brings him to life. He tells me how he got the session pianist for Sunny Afternoon to imitate his own “stodgy” style in order to get the right sound. You Really Got Me was inspired by a girl dancing at The Scene, a defunct club on Great Windmill Street.
Waterloo Sunset was his attempt at impressionistic songwriting but he didn’t record the vocals until the end of the session, as he was afraid the band would laugh at him.
I do get a hint of grump-a-dump Ray when I tell him that All Day and All of the Night is my favourite example of a band copying their first hit and getting away with it. “We didn’t copy it,” he says testily. “If you listen, there’s a clash in there with real finesse. The A major on the bridge.”
It’s striking how prescient The Kinks were about London, particularly the albums they recorded in the late-Sixties when their US ban confined them here while their peers were exploring wider frontiers. A lot of what Davies was writing about then — the rise of commercialism, the decline of working-class culture — is even more true now.
“London is built for the horse and cart,” he says. “Now it’s had to accommodate becoming the financial centre of the world, so you see these great monoliths as you come out of the Blackwall Tunnel, these cathedrals to consumerism. I don’t want to be political, but I do think communities are being squashed. The quirkiness is going out of London.”
There’s still enough to keep the muse alive. “After I was shot in New Orleans I cameback and walked around Finsbury Park until about two in the morning. I thought: ‘It feels so safe here’. I’ve been all over … maybe I keep coming back because I’m still looking for my home.”
Sunny Afternoon is booking at the Harold Pinter Theatre, SW1 (0844 871 7627, sunnyafternoonthemusical.com) until October 24. Ray Davies will be playing the at Old Royal Naval College, SE10 ( greenwichmusictime.co.uk) on July 24; mayorsmusicfund.org
‘The songs lend themselves to the theatre. They have a dark side that makes them useful in storytelling’