How the Kinks were reunited
Neil Mccormick tells the story behind the shock decision of Ray Davies to reform The Kinks
Most big band reunions are announced with a fanfare of coordinated publicity to stir excitement and ticket sales. But The Kinks were never like most bands. The unexpected return of one of the greatest groups in rock history leaked out when Sir Ray Davies took a call on his mobile from drummer Mick Avory during a filmed interview for Channel 4 News. “Mick, I’ll see you at the pub later,” muttered Davies.
The interview had been organised to promote Davies’s new solo album, Our Country – Americana Act II, released on Friday. It took C4 presenter Krishnan Guru-murthy a moment to grasp the implications of what he had just overheard. Davies was meeting former bandmates to discuss “making a new Kinks album”.
The last Kinks studio album was in 1993. Their last concert was in 1996. For more than 20 years, the surviving members have repeatedly and vociferously denied there were any plans to reunite, not least because they all seemed to hate one another. “You’re not pulling my leg?” asked Guru-murthy. “Are The Kinks getting back together?”
“Officially we are, yes,” twinkled the 74-year-old Davies. “In the pub later on.”
Claiming to have been inspired by the latest stadium tour of contemporaries The Rolling Stones, Davies suggested it was time for the famously embattled Kinks to bury the hatchet. “I’ve got all these songs I wrote for them,” Davies revealed. “I think it’s kind of an appropriate time to do it.” But Davies doubted they could pull it off with the same grandeur as the Stones. “Mick [Jagger]’s done an incredible PR job. It’s kind of inspiring to see them playing the big places. The Kinks will probably play in a local bar.”
There was something suitably shambolic about this haphazard announcement. The Kinks, after all, were simultaneously one of the most thrilling and dysfunctional bands of all time. Constantly teetering on the verge of breaking up even at the height of their career, The Kinks never quite achieved the global pre-eminence of The Beatles, the Stones and The Who. On record and on stage, they were often a bit of a mess. “It was always shambolic with The Kinks,” Davies admitted to me last year. “We were a dishevelled bunch.”
Over 36 years together, from 1964 to 1996, The Kinks rode a rollercoaster of creative and commercial ups and downs. “I try not to think about those days,” Dave Davies, lead guitarist and younger brother of Ray, once told me of his decades with The Kinks. “When I hear it on the radio, I get excited, until you think about the way things really were: the bad contracts, the arguments, beating people up, getting beaten up, all the s---.” Between 1965 and 1968, The Kinks were banned from touring in America following a fist fight at the recording of a US TV show. Ray suffered a nervous breakdown in 1966. Original bassist Pete Quaife quit the band in 1969 because he was “sick of the constant conflict”. Quaife died in 2010. Mick Avory quit in 1984. Although The Kinks had
Dave Davies once told me: ‘I love my brother, I just can’t stand to be in the same room with him’
sporadic hits, by the Nineties the world seemed to have lost interest. The Kinks’ final studio album, Phobia, spent a week in the US charts, reaching the dizzy heights of 166.
So why should we care about whether they manage to put their differences aside? Because, quite simply, they were the perfect conduit for one of the most visionary songwriters of all time. They often overreached, and made oddball albums that nobody loved. But when everything fell into place, The Kinks produced a whole slew of records that still seem the very pinnacle of pop as art.
Their first big hit, You Really Got Me in 1964, is acclaimed as the first heavy rock record, with one of the greatest power chord riffs ever heard. Waterloo Sunset (1967) is three minutes of pure magic.
The Kinks gave us such perfectly observed vignettes of English life as Sunny Afternoon, Days and Autumn Almanac, and such pithily satirical narratives as Dedicated Follower of Fashion, Dead End Kids and Plastic Man. Their gloriously romantic transsexual singalong Lola (1970) might just be the most outrageous and subversive pop hit ever. Paul Mccartney has admitted The Beatles felt a keen rivalry with Davies’s songwriting skills. The Kinks are an acknowledged influence on Bowie, Weller, Noel Gallagher, Madness, Blur and The Libertines. Their influence was stamped all over punk and Britpop. At the core of The Kinks’ peculiar dynamic lay the embattled relationship between singer, songwriter Ray Davies with brother Dave (now 71). Their mutual dependency and vicious sibling rivalry could have been the prototype for the Oasis brothers.
“I love my brother,” Dave Davies told me in 2011. “I just can’t stand to be in the same room with him.” The Davies brothers weren’t the only Kinks who seemed to actively dislike one another, as Ray acknowledged to Channel 4. “The trouble is the two remaining members, my brother and Mick, never got along very well. But I made that work in the studio. It fired me up to make them play harder.” You could argue that it was this very disunity that lent The Kinks their ragged glory. According to Ray, The Kinks’ messiness was an art in itself. “If you really listen, there was a lot going on. It was organised chaos.” Their peculiar genius was not always appreciated at the time. The Village Green Preservation Society may now be revered, but when it came out in 1968, it was a flop. Their career would regularly descend into the doldrums, only to be revived by an offbeat hit such as Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy in 1978 or Come Dancing in 1983. They enjoyed a second wave of success in America in the Eighties, making up for their inability to tour there in the Sixties. But The Kinks never reached the stadium level. The truth is their career ended with a whimper, not a bang. They never even officially broke up. Ray has released six solo albums, and been involved in various theatrical projects, including the musical Sunny Afternoon, a dramatisation of the Davies brothers’ volatile relationship. He was knighted last year.
Dave suffered a stroke in 2004 but recovered to resume playing and recording by 2007. “It’s made me more mindful of what I’m doing, and appreciative of the chance to do it”, he told The Telegraph. In December 2015, Ray joined Dave for an encore at Islington Assembly Hall, performing You Really Got Me, the first time the brothers had shared a stage in 20 years. It led to rumours of a Glastonbury spot for a reunion in 2017, but Ray was dismissive. “They wave chequebooks at you but the reality is, you’ve got to be comfortable with people when you go onstage,” he told me.
Something has evidently changed. Whatever has triggered a desire for reconciliation, fans can only hope that pub meeting went well. The last time I spoke to Dave about a Kinks reunion he did not seem optimistic. “About an hour with Ray’s my limit,” he said. “So it would be a very short reunion.”