RAY DAVIES

The Kinks’ troubled star, master songwriter, and spinner of fables. He’s spent lockdown augmenting one of his best. “I had a blast of creative energy,” reveals Ray Davies.

The Kinks’ tormented mainman on Lola, lockdown, love and lyrics. “It’s a way of withdrawing from the world, being a songwriter,” he says.

DRESSED IN LUDICROUSLY GARISH GARB – neon bright silks over plus fours and shoes with spats – comedian Max Miller leant across the footlights, addressed a woman convulsed with mirth and delivered his catchphrase: “There’ll never be another, lady!” Seated in the audience at the Finsbury Park Astoria at one of Miller’s final London shows, Ray Davies, an introverted boy who barely spoke for several years, seemed a very unlikely candidate to prove Miller wrong. But mere months after the comic’s death in 1963, Davies, aged 18, would be on a stage in a green John Stephens suit, frilly shirt and leather cap, effectively repackaging Miller’s mock-cocky bravura for a new generation.

Some of Davies’s compositions, such as She’s Bought A Hat Like Princess Marina, would be direct descendants of Miller’s song style. During the ’60s, Davies would freak out the freaks who’d gather at his place to smoke dope, by playing a Miller album rather than the psychedelic soundtrack they were expecting. In the ’70s, at the height of glam rock – which he’d help kick-start with The Kinks’ shimmying 1970 single, Lola – as he resolutely swam against a tide of commercial indifference, Davies donned the full Miller regalia as Flash, the star of another of his themed, theatrical outings about oppressive leadership.

Miller cast himself as the cheeky transgressive eyeing his book of ‘blue’ material, liable to go a bit farther than anyone else, creating a delicious, electric tension for his audience. With Davies, the tension came from watching someone wrestling with his chosen trade as if he hadn’t chosen it. Fresh out of art school, the gap-toothed teen – one of eight siblings, raised in a three-bedroom semi – had struggled with physical pain and sudden bereavement, been sent to a special school, learned to box and purposefully flunked his 11-plus so he didn’t have to attend the grammar school and pretend to be someone he wasn’t. He brought that electricity to the stage. That and his crazed, guitar-wielding little brother Dave. Davies apparently didn’t care if you got the joke, the plot, whatever he was driving at – he’d do it anyway, trying a wide array of personas to see if one fitted him. And he wasn’t, one suspected, doing it for laughs.

Now much slower and quieter, as befits a man of his advanced years, Ray Davies, 76, is keeping as cool as possible on the hottest August day in recent memory. He’s sat in a shaded spot in his Highgate home. “It doesn’t feel very homely right now, ’cos I’ve got these builders in.” His attic study is full of recording equipment and too hot to occupy, but he has spent most of lockdown there preparing the 50th anniversary reissue of his album Lola Versus The Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One. An experience he has found peculiarly enlightening…

Hot enough for you, Ray?

I might get my camel out and ride across Hampstead Heath.

You’ve spent the majority of your life in north London. What’s its enduring appeal?

Actually, I’ve been on the road all my life. But I always gravitate back to north London. It’s something about the light. But it has changed. I drove past Highbury the other day. It’s not the same now that Arsenal have moved. There was something special about the smell of Highbury, the smell of toilets and tea.

Number 6 Denmark Terrace, where you were brought up, is now next to a joiner’s and an Indian restaurant. What did that used to be?

That used to be a baker’s. I took Lucinda Williams to that restaurant. I first met her at SXSW in Austin. She came over and said, “Hiya handsome, do you want to sing a duet with me?” I thought of all a relationship’s problems and pitfalls and said, “No, it’s OK, some other time.” When I did my collaborations album [See My Friends] several years ago, I remembered that and got her over. After we sang our duet I took her to that Indian restaurant. Great place.

What about the joiner’s?

The knocking shop? That’s what my dad called it. Because they were always knocking bits of wood together.

I’ve read stories about your dad coming back to the house from the pub on a Friday night, with a large group of mates, and instigating a sing-song, which you’d stay up to witness.

Yeah, dad had a great dancing style, like a Watusi tribesman. He’d do music hall songs and [Cab Calloway’s] Minnie The Moocher. He loved rock’n’roll too. He liked the backbeat. Most adults were square, they’d hear something in 4/4 time they’d hit the downbeat. Dad hit the backbeat.

What did you take later from those times?

Camaraderie. Getting people to sing. When I do concerts a lot of it is community singing. I guess it also taught me to hone in on a catchy chorus.

You had quite a reserved childhood…

You mean I was mentally unstable? Yeah.

Were you diagnosed with any condition at the time?

It was the early days of the NHS. They didn’t do that then. Now they’ve got a diagnosis for everything. They just said I was a quiet boy and my parents should watch me. I had mild depression and for two years I found it hard to talk. Then my sister, Rene, who was very close to me, died on my 13th birthday. She’d bought me [my first] guitar as a present and she died later that night.

Did that event make you withdraw further into yourself or bring you out?

I haven’t really thought about it, but now you ask the question… she gave me something that would propel me as a human being, but had an element of shame to it, because I always associated the guitar with the day she died. So, a troubling time. I found it hard, because I was a creative person in an athlete’s body. My dad couldn’t understand why I painted and liked art.

You became very competitive at sport after Rene died, is that right?

Yeah, as if I had to prove something. A great thing with my dad – on the night when You Really Got Me got to Number 1 – he hugged me and said, “You did it!”, as if I’d proved to him that I was a man.

You’ve said in the past that you were born when that song went to Number 1. Is that really how it felt?

Yeah. I had an identity for the first time.

Your career seems to have involved a lot of adopting identities, a sense of searching for something…

Trying out lots of characters and roles to see which one works?

Yes. Have you ever found one?

The only role I can really live is me and I’m still trying to find me. That’s why I’m fascinated with people. During the last three months I’ve been writing character studies of people in isolation. Now millions of people are finding out about themselves.

How have you found lockdown?

I’ve been working all the time, I’ve been mixing this new Lola compilation at home. But I had a blast of creative energy. I started writing things down on little bits of paper and I put it all into one track. It’s called The Follower.

I heard it, it’s good. Who takes the role of the female narrator?

The cleaning lady. (Long pause) I can’t tell you.

OK. So you added this to a track recorded during the Lola sessions?

It was a song called Any Time. I was playing through the tape with my engineer and wondering why we hadn’t used it, because it’s well recorded and very well played, and then I realised the song wasn’t finished. One night, at the height of lockdown, I had this feeling of people being alone and music being timeless and giving people strength and

I start walking around making notes… but fuck knows what I am doing.

You still feel like that, after all this time?

I know I’ve done something good when I can’t remember I’ve done it. It’s an existential thing that comes over you.

There are some nice mini documentaries on this record with you and Dave discussing songs and their demos.

Dave and I find it really hard to be together. I don’t know why. Bear in mind I was the first boy in the family after six girls and then this little mite came along three years after I was born and stole the limelight. He’s still trying to

do it. He came round to listen to these mixes that I’ve done, which is a big event in our house, so I had a tape recorder running, did a crafty interview with him, sitting in my kitchen, while I was making a pot of tea. That’s why they’re called Ray’s Kitchen Sink. People think Dave’s a rebel rouser and all that, but he has very good insight. Not like me; when I get off on a creative curve I can find it difficult to communicate with people, but Dave is very precise in what he wants. He screws up his life and he does it in style!

A lot of musicians have a sense they missed a memo somewhere. That others know how life should be lived and they don’t. Can you relate to that?

(Pause) I was with my grandkids the other day, they’re twins, aged 13, and they’re telling me all about their mental health issues. Kids now are free to talk about it. My generation, it was always taboo, mental health.

What do you wish you’d known?

Why we had to look left, right, then look left again. (Pause) And sex education, always taboo. That’s why boys got together to join bands. To see girls take their underwear off. Or even just to see the underwear.

People who started bands as early on as you did… what did you think it would lead to? What were your expectations, forming a group at that point in the music industry?

That’s a really big question. (Pause) I’m trying to think of something smart and witty. (Long pause) I made an album called Americana, there’s a track on there called The Mystery Room. There’s that door you only open when you’re young, it opens for you when you become a teenager. There’s a big light shining through it, and you’re walking into it, oblivious. It’s the unknown. We were in control of our music to a degree, but if the sense of the unknown could be conquered… we had music as the language to communicate with the world.

Bear in mind that the post-war generation… (Suddenly remembering something) I was on Zoom the other day with my family, a couple of my daughters and their kids. My sister Gwen was on it too. And she told this story. When I was two days old – she would have been about five or six – she suddenly decided to pick me up and take me out of the kitchen where my cot was. And she heard a V2 bomb come over. The V2 landed just up the road from Fortis Green and all the glass in the kitchen, where I’d been lying, was shattered, all over the room, and I would have been killed. Talk about being intuitive…

Had you not heard that story before?

No. It must have been one of the last V2s, because I was born in 1944. Hitler’s last attempt to destroy London. We used to play on the bomb site, though. He unwittingly gave us kids somewhere to play.

What was the first piece of music you heard that made you want to do it yourself?

Something on the vibes, when I was 13. I don’t know where it was. Maybe at Highgate Jazz Club. I don’t know who it was, it was like a Modern Jazz Quartet kind of band.

What was it about that sound?

The overtones. On the vibes you have the note that you hit and then it rings on, and that’s the sound that interested me. I discovered ambience, I suppose.

Did that make you want to explore the guitar?

Yeah. They sent me to a school where disturbed kids learn to communicate – it was in somewhere like Paddington – and I took my guitar with me. This woman said, “Is that a musical instrument?” I said, “No, it’s an orchestra, because it has overtones.” On You Really Got Me, I had Dave on guitar and Arthur Greenslade on piano playing the same notes and all you could hear was the overtones.

It seems to me you feel things in a different way to a lot of songwriters, you react to sensory stimuli in a different way. Is that true?

Without letting you put words in my mouth, I can relate to that. I started writing songs when I was about 12 when I went to that school. It was therapeutic then. When we put out our first single, Long Tall Sally, some people liked the B-side I wrote, I Took My Baby Home, better. I wasn’t thinking of myself as being a serious songwriter. I still don’t.

When I left art school all I wanted to do was make enough money so I could go to Spain and study with Segovia. Once we made You Really Got Me we were on the treadmill.

Those early years sound exhausting. You had a breakdown around 1966.

Yes. But there was an element of fun to it, fun to play gigs and have people like our music. I remember writing All Day And All Of The Night in a day. I became good at putting things on hold. I’m always writing things, always thinking about melodies. Then I’ll forget about it

“I know I’ve done something good when I can’t remember I’ve done it. It’s an existential thing.”

“I know a lot about romance and I’m just learning about love. I think I’ll be learning until I drop.”

until something strikes me one day and I’ll think, That’s that song. Maybe I’d had it in my mind for a while, but I was sat in Eddie Kassner’s office one time – he was our publisher – when he said, “We need another hit,” and I just sat down at the piano and wrote it.

Tired Of Waiting For You came in increments. After I’d been in hospital as a kid [for a broken jaw], they put a gold brace on my teeth so I couldn’t speak. And I made up this song on my guitar about working in the field all day like a slave – very current. Then, years later, we needed something on a session, Shel Talmy wanted to make another single, and I remembered that song and we just changed the tempo, changed the backbeat and put the track down. I told the boys I had a sore throat and couldn’t sing the lead because I didn’t have the words then. I went in on the tube the next morning and put the vocal on.

Did the Britishness emerge in your writing because America had just snubbed The Kinks, and you were snubbing it back?

It comes back to that indefinable overtone that comes from the vibes being hit. It wasn’t about the songs so much, it was the effect they had. Some songs – Cole Porter could do it – tell a story, but are touching on something more important, emotions that come from the subtext rather than the song itself.

And a great example of that is Waterloo Sunset. Did you know immediately you’d written something that, like an iceberg, had another 7/8ths beneath the surface?

I got my family together – my sister was over from Australia and there was Jackie my niece and a couple of my nephews – and I played them the acetate of it about 20 times. I said, “That’s for us, and I don’t want it to come out.” It was so important to me I didn’t want it to come out. Shows I’m not a very good businessman. I wanted it just to be ours.

You must be pleased that everybody now feels the same way about it as you did?

I’m pleased that people connected to it in the right way. And regardless of the nationality thing, it’s two young lovers looking at the sunset seeing their future.

That sense of possibility is hugely emotional. Do you miss that engine of looking ahead in your writing, now you’re older?

What can a 70-plus man know about romance? That sort of feeling? I know a lot about romance and I’m just learning about love. I think I’ll be learning until I drop. Love is very important to me, emotion and sensuality. Doing this revival of Lola I’m learning how much I was and wasn’t in love, with my career, and emotionally. And it’s been an amazing experience. This situation [the pandemic] has been awful, seeing people dying, but it’s time for people to re-gear, life must go on in some form. I think it teaches us all to learn how to love again. Sounds like a really twee statement, but I think that’s why I wrote The Follower. You don’t realise until you’re in adversity how much you care about people.

When I was lying on a stretcher in New Orleans after being shot [during a street robbery in 2004], I could sense people’s emotions better, because every problem I had in my life seemed so minuscule after being shot. Every emotion comes out.

Has songwriting been a source of comfort to you, or a source of stress?

It’s a way of withdrawing from the world, being a songwriter. It’s psychological freedom.

You said once that songwriting is a stream of consciousness and you drowned in it!

That’s right. I’m glad you picked up on that.

By the time you made the Lola… album in 1970 you’d been having hit singles for six years. Do you think you were seen as an important band, in the top rank of British stars at that time?

(Emphatically) No, of course not. The only people who thought we were important were our fans. We didn’t mix in the elite circles. I was walking my baby in a pram on Muswell Hill.

That album takes a hefty swipe at the music business. It could be regarded as rather disillusioned and bitter.

I hope there’s bitterness in it. I wrote a scenario for it, a one-man play, and the character [finds] the only way to defeat Powerman is to become evil, in order to become that vengeful he has to become bitter. It’s like a morality tale.

You had a famously bloated management set-up. Was this album about trying to extract yourself from that?

The song Got To Be Free sums that up. I felt like

I was in prison. But it was self-imposed. I wanted to take my vengeance out, make a statement. If this was the last record I’d ever make I wanted to make sure my voice was heard. But it’s a fun album too. Moneygoround is a fun song and Denmark Street. We wanted to be an albums band and Pye wanted us to be a singles band, because that’s how they broke us.

The album was labelled Part One. Was there a Part Two already sketched out?

Yeah, it was The Defeat Of Powerman, but we abandoned that when we went to RCA. I was writing a lot of what became Preservation down the line.

The evil Mr Black character in Preservation is another Powerman…

Dominic Cummings, you mean…

Do you know more about what you want, and what you’re doing, than you did 20, 30, 50 years ago?

I do after making this Lola… compilation. Mixing the tracks, I can sense what mood I was in. What amazes me is the lack of humour between us when we’re playing, particularly from [Kinks drummer] Mick Avory. When we made Muswell Hillbillies everyone was really happy. I think they sensed how important Lola… was to me.

Lola the single was a massive worldwide hit. Did that feel vindicating?

No, I just did my job. (Pause) And I wanted something my one-year-old daughter could sing… ”Lo, lo, lo, lo, Lola”. It’s not exactly You’ll Never Walk Alone. It’s shorter.

How did you feel after Lola when people stopped buying the singles?

I’d just made a good album, Muswell Hillbillies, I didn’t mind. But one of my friends from art college said I’d just become an existentialist. One of the things that I learned about writing was ‘Feel free to fail’. It’s the only way you’ll ever learn and get new ideas out.

It must be gratifying to know you’ve written songs that so many have connected with over the years. Surely that’s all a songwriter can hope for?

It’s incredible when somebody says, “Did you write that, mister? I’d love to have written that.” The reward for writing is not how much money it makes, the sales, it’s recognition from other people, that it resonates. But it’s part of me. (Pause) Just imagine if I hadn’t written Waterloo Sunset, what an empty place my life would be… (Long pause) When I lived in New Orleans I lived in Tremé. My next-door neighbour was a guy called June. He said, “Hey Ray, you the guy that wrote Waterloo Sunset?” I said, “Yeah, how’d you know that?” He said, “I know these things.” He said he had a gig at the Funky Butt. “I need 20 bucks to get my horn there. Can you lend me 20 bucks?” I gave him 20 bucks. “Thanks man, I’ll put your name on the door.” I get to the Funky Butt, and there’s no June, no gig. But he knew Waterloo Sunset. (Laughs)

Do you still find meeting people difficult?

Immensely, yeah.

Do you ever wonder why you put yourself through being an entertainer?

It’s only a play. I’m a bit part in the world play. But you can’t cut my part out of it, I’m a vital bit of subtext.

An overtone.

That sums up my career, really.

Lola Versus The Powerman And The Moneygoround Part One [50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition] is released in November.