CREATIVE FRICTION
‘We don’t really like each other,’ but the Kinks might reunite anyway
Dave Davies admits he was astonished to see his brother Ray announcing the reunion of the Kinks on a TV news show in June. “I thought, ‘ What is Ray bulls---ing about now?’” he says.
That doesn’t mean it’s not true. “We’ve been talking about maybe trying to work on new Kinks material,” admits Dave. “I said, ‘We shouldn’t go public yet because we’ve got to iron out a few things.’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ Of course, he left and the next thing he’s on TV saying we’re doing it. Typical Ray.”
Dave’s lingering reservations are artistic rather than commercial. “It might work if we can do something that reflects the times and culture we are in. I would hate to finish off our career as a collection of pathetic old men trying to (expletive) resurrect the past.”
Ray cited the recent Rolling Stones tour as inspiration. Dave doesn’t seem quite so convinced. “The Stones are always going to be teenagers, aren’t they? The Kinks were singing about other things, to do with the human soul, real life and real people,” says Dave. “There are darker sides to life, and there was a darker side to the Kinks, for sure.”
They were a famously embattled band and at their core was a fearsome sibling rivalry between Ray (now 74) and younger brother Dave (now 71). They grew up in a large working-class family, two boys with eight sisters in a small house in Fortis Green, in the north London suburb of Muswell Hill.
“All our family were mad about music and dancing. We were brought up listening to everything from Al Jolson to Ella Fitzgerald to Fats Domino to Tammy Wynette.”
They formed the Ray Davies Quartet in school, becoming the Kinks in 1964. “You could never really put a label on the Kinks,” Dave notes of their output, which spanned heavy rock to satirical cabaret. “Our consciousness was jam-packed full of all this musical information that would surface in strange and sometimes enchanting ways. To me, the Kinks is just like that scruffy little house in Fortis Green, people fighting over food and sofas, trying to survive under very difficult circumstances. Which I think we did pretty well.”
With Dave on lead guitar, and Ray on rhythm guitar and vocals, the Kinks had a phenomenal streak of hits in the 1960s, including You Really Got Me, Sunny Afternoon, Dead End Street, Waterloo Sunset, Autumn Almanac and Well Respected Man. Ray was principal songwriter (with Dave occasionally contributing), and his work stands with the greatest of all time.
“Ray’s a clever guy, an observer, very good at expressing himself in music, very articulate about other people’s feelings,” says Dave, generously. But there is an inevitable caveat. “He wasn’t particularly good at expressing his own feelings, or telling you how much he cares about you.”
Though the band’s streak of hits lessened in the decades that followed, the likes Victoria, Lola, A Rock ’N’ Roll Fantasy, Come Dancing, Don’t Forget to Dance and Do It Again still kept the Kinks alive in the charts.
The last time we spoke, Dave mocked the idea of a reunion. “About an hour with Ray ’s my limit,” he said in 2011. But something has evidently changed. “We don’t really like each other, but we’re enjoying each other’s company, funnily enough. As the years have chewed and beaten us up, it changes you. There is such a rich vein of art and sweat and emotion and love and pain in Kinks music. As you get older, you think maybe things happened for a reason. Maybe we need to embrace the not-so-pleasant aspects of relationships.”
The brothers look and sound similar, but their characters are strikingly different. Ray is selfabsorbed, with a private artistic focus that can come across as a bit irritable. Dave is expansive and emotional, his world-view shaped by spiritual beliefs: “I looked up to Ray. I thought we were collaborators. But he treated me like a rival.”
Yet he admits to missing the near “telepathic” communication he felt making music with his brother. “It’s like we click into each other’s minds or emotions. We just get it. So the work becomes more powerful but also easier to produce.”
Dave is promoting a new U.K. compilation album, Sunshine Sixties. It features Sunny Afternoon, which Dave has warm memories of. “It was recorded in 1966. That was a fabulous year for the Kinks. We were having hit after hit and it was the summer England won the World Cup, so that couldn’t be better,” Dave says.
“The day of the (soccer) final, we were supposed to do a show in Exeter, Devon. We were sitting around the TV at home, riveted by the game, and it went to extra time, and then we won, and how could you miss the presentation? By the time we got down to Exeter, the show was over. The promoter was so p---ed off he actually kicked Ray up the a--.”
The story seems a perfect vignette of the Kinks, plucking disaster from triumph. Original bassist Pete Quaife quit in 1969 because he was “sick of constant conflict” (Quaife died in 2010). Drummer Mick Avory quit in 1984, at least in part due to animosity with Dave, but is involved in the putative reunion.
“I never had a problem with Mick as a musician,” reports Dave. “A lot of the conflict came about because if Ray and I had a bust-up, Mick always took Ray ’s side. He never had the gumption to stand up to Ray’s ego. And Ray’s got a huge ego.”
The Davies brothers finally parted ways in 1996, after 36 years. “When the ego takes over, art dies. That’s my spiritual belief,” Dave notes.
Yet if many of Dave’s remarks indicate tensions still fester, he insists time has lent a different perspective. “Heated emotions don’t always have to be destructive. Friction can be creative.”
Outside the Kinks, Dave has been quite prolific, his output divided between song-based albums and prog rock with a mystical bent. In 2004, he had a stroke but has fully recovered. He claims it enhanced his playing “because I’m more mindful now,” adding: “The stroke was a great learning experience for me. I could have died and gone into the choir invisible. No matter how cool you think you are, we’re all going to go there eventually.”
In October, Dave will release Decade, an album of rediscovered tracks he recorded at the Kinks studio, Konk, throughout the 1970s. “Songs would nag away at my brain, so I was always putting bits and pieces down.” His son, Simon (one of seven children from two relationships), helped complete and polish the recordings.
“When I heard his mixes, I thought, oh s--t, I’ve got to go through all these emotions again,” Dave says. “Songs are like points in time. These experiences still resonate, even when the feelings are no longer so raw and tender. They make you who you are. You have to come to terms with these ghosts.”
The same might be said of the Davies brothers and the Kinks. In his television interview, Ray suggested that, being the Kinks, their reunion would probably take place in a local bar. “It would probably be the safest place,” agrees Dave. “Because there is always an escape exit.”