A complicated life
The rollercoaster life story of the man behind the Kinks’ revered catalogue
‘I feel I could have been a friend of John (Lennon) but we did not get on.
He said some cruel things to me’
The events of Sunday, July 15, 1973, are enshrined in the Ray Davies story. This was the day of destiny – the end of The Kinks, the end of his career, and possibly the end of his life. It was a day of cemetery weather, befitting Ray’s mood. The Great Western Express Festival at London’s White City offered an eclectic line-up, though The Kinks, national favourites just a few years before, were no longer hip enough to secure top billing. Ray’s immediate concern was that, less than three weeks before, his wife Rasa had left him, taking their two daughters.
‘The White City gig was terrible,’ recalls Ray’s guitarist brother, Dave. ‘I didn’t want to play anyway and Ray was acting really oddly. I didn’t know he’d been popping lots of pills all day long.’
Onstage, Davies looked drained and haggard. Four songs in, he was heard to swear into the microphone and announce, ‘I’m sick up to here with it.’ A few songs later, Ray gently kissed his brother Dave on the cheek and informed the crowd: ‘I just want to say goodbye and thank you for all you’ve done.’
‘Ray Quits Kinks’ were the words blazoned across newsstands the next day. But there was more than that. A few hours after the show, Ray’s American girlfriend noticed he was acting oddly. He then hesitantly produced an empty bottle of pills.
Road manager Ken Jones rushed Davies to London’s Whittington Hospital, where the singer declared: ‘I’m Ray Davies… and I’m dying.’ A nurse responded by asking for an autograph. After collapsing in the hospital hallway, he was rushed to a nearby room to have his stomach pumped.
Years later, he offered an endearingly absurd explanation. ‘The doctor gave me pills and said, “Take one of these when you feel a bit down.” I was doing what I thought was my last show and I felt down every ten seconds, so I just kept taking them.’
On another occasion, Davies admitted it had been a suicide attempt – the gesture of a brilliant but temperamental man who had struggled for a decade with success.
As it transpired, that gig wasn’t the end of The Kinks either. Rasa never returned to Ray, but he came back to the band. They would continue in various guises until 1996. Even today, the brothers don’t discount a reunion.
Davies has long been a grand elder statesman of popular music, an iconoclast at a time of immense social and cultural change, and famed for creating songs such as Waterloo Sunset, You Really Got Me, Sunny Afternoon and Days. But his has been a career fraught with drama, from his famously fiery relationship with his brother, to his three marriages, to his turbulent relationship in the early Eighties with Chrissie Hynde. A contradictory figure, Davies has, at times, perplexed and infuriated ex-band members, managers, business associates and family members.
Even as a group, The Kinks – neurotic, complicated Ray, wild guitarist Dave and the long-suffering rhythm section of Pete Quaife and Mick Avory – were perhaps the most dysfunc-
tional band to emerge from the Sixties. ‘Ray and Dave were very volatile,’ Quaife, who died in 2010, once said. ‘They could start a fight over absolutely nothing.’
Dave says: ‘I was quite a happy kid and Ray was a real miserable one. He was probably happy for three years until I was born and realised there was another boy in the family. “What’s that little b****** doing here?’’’
Ray, Dave and their six elder sisters were raised in a chaotic, overcrowded threebedroom terrace, where their father Fred’s Saturday nights in the pub would be followed by raucous sing-alongs around the family piano. Ray was delighted by these family extravaganzas, but as he grew older he became a gloomy, introverted child. And as early as 1957, family tragedy threatened to unravel his already fragile psyche.
On June 20, the day before Ray’s 13th birthday, the boy was thrilled to receive the perfect present from his 30-year-old sister Rene – a Spanish guitar.
Rene had a serious heart condition, but nothing could quell her love of dance halls, and the prospect of an evening at the Lyceum Ballroom off the Strand proved irresistible. That evening, Ray watched her from the window as she sashayed down the road. ‘We’d played a few songs together. Then she got a bus down to the West End.’ He would never see her again. At the Lyceum, Rene suffered heart failure. She was rushed to Charing Cross Hospital but nothing could be done to save her. ‘She died in the arms of a stranger on the dance floor,’ Ray remembered.
Rene’s death shocked Ray into silence. He returned to school, seemingly broken by the tragedy. ‘Clearly, I couldn’t cope,’ he acknowledges. How long the great silence lasted is a matter of conjecture. Ray has variously described it as months, an entire year, or even longer.
Gradually, Ray emerged from his shell. As the Sixties dawned, a mutual interest in music unexpectedly brought the two Davies boys together, first as a duo and then in a band, the Ray Davies Quartet, whose singer was briefly Rod Stewart, a schoolmate. Reportedly, Rod played only once with the Quartet, though Ray has no recollection. ‘I don’t think those two liked each other, or maybe that was just Ray,’ Quaife recalled. ‘He was very competitive, even then. I could see Ray thinking, “This guy’s gonna take over if he stays” and I don’t think he liked that at all.’
From their early days in London’s blues and R&B scene, The Kinks, as the Davies brothers’ band gradually became, were misfits. ‘I don’t think we were taken very seriously from the start,’ says Ray, whose first hit for the band was their powerful and original third single, You Really Got Me. ‘I remember Mick Jagger’s jaw dropping the first time he saw us. He couldn’t believe that four such uncool people could have a bigger hit than he did.’
While the momentum was building, The Kinks opened for The Beatles in Bournemouth, where a sarcastic John Lennon suggested The Kinks were little more than copycats. ‘Can I borrow your song list, lads?’ he quipped. ‘We’ve lost ours.’
As Ray recalls: ‘I feel I could have been a friend of John, but we were destined not to talk. We did not get on. He was very cynical. John made a few cruel remarks to me.’
While Ray responded to fame by marrying young and settled down with his pregnant 18year-old wife in a rented attic flat in Muswell Hill, his 17-year-old brother lost himself in a social whirl of clubbing, bleary-eyed revelries and one-night stands.
At Ray and Rasa’s 1964 wedding, Dave disgraced himself, announcing that he was ‘too p****d’ to make his best man’s speech, then being discovered in an upstairs bedroom by his sister Peggy having sex with the leading bridesmaid.
Initially, the aggressive interaction between the two brothers gave The Kinks part of their drive. The two subsidiary Kinks valiantly attempted to avoid the psychological conflict between the brothers and kept their own counsel.
But the good-natured Avory in particular was frequently pushed to the precipice of fury by the heartless baiting of the brothers. One night in Taunton, on their first tour as headliners in May 1965, a drunken Dave threw a suitcase at Avory, who finally snapped, pounding his large fists into Dave’s head and body. Dave came off worst, with two black eyes.
The following night, in Cardiff, the brothers and the rhythm section arrived in separate cars and made their entrances independently from different sides of the theatre. One song in, Dave, wearing sunglasses to disguise his black eyes, wandered over to Avory and demolished the drum kit with a kick. Avory lashed out in retaliation.
‘Mick picked up his hi-hat cymbal, came over and, whack!’ says road manager Sam Curtis. ‘Fortunately, Dave stepped out of the way slightly, because if he had not moved that thing would have gone through his head down to his neck. Those cymbals are sharp.’
The instrument grazed his head, knocking him to the floor. As the drummer ran off stage, Ray was heard to shriek: ‘My brother! My brother! He’s killed my little brother!’ The band scattered, the younger Davies declined to press charges, and manager Larry Page tricked them all back into one room for a meeting in London a few days later.
‘As you can imagine, when they all sat down, it was dynamite,’ says Page. ‘I didn’t mess around. I just said, “OK, there’s an American tour starting soon” and I didn’t give them time to ask anything. At the end of it, I just said, “Any questions?” And Mick Avory said he needed new cymbals.’
Back in London after the American tour, Davies may not have made many friends among his fellow Sixties pop stars, but, increasingly, he had their respect. Indianinfluenced 1965 single See My Friends was only a fleeting Top 20 success, but Pete Townshend testified to its influence on The Who, while Dave Davies recalls a similar
‘We had a punch-up over my flares. His girlfriend beat me up with her handbag, so I threw the mout and wrote Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’
accolade from Mick Jagger. Ray seldom listened to his bandmates’ musical suggestions, yet he trusted his young wife’s commercial instincts.
Driven and neurotic, Ray has conceded that he married too young and wasn’t cut out for marriage, but in the studio Rasa exerted a welcome influence. She regularly attended sessions to add beautiful high harmonies to some of their most enduring songs.
While writing on the piano at home, it was always a good sign when he could hear her humming one of his new tunes. On Sunny
Afternoon, Rasa sang the high harmony, and provided the threeword ‘in the summertime’ refrain that closed the song. ‘ That was the only one where I wrote some words,’ Rasa admits. ‘To this day, my gripe is that he didn’t ever give me a credit.’
Even Ray’s comic songs could easily have troubled beginnings. Dedicated Follower
Of Fashion, a satirical thrust at Carnaby Street couture, was born of a violent incident during a party at Ray’s house, after a fashion designer made the mistake of suggesting that Davies was wearing flared trousers. ‘I had a slight flare, not amazingly so,’ Ray protests.
Somehow, this innocuous exchange ended in bloodshed. ‘We had a punch-up and his girlfriend beat me up as well with her handbag – or was it his handbag? Anyway, I threw them out of my semi. And I got angry and started writing this song.’
Dedicated Follower Of Fashion became an instant national anthem in 1966, although its author was disconcerted when passers-by walked up to him in the street and shouted the line, ‘Oh yes he is!’ In fact, while The Kinks were close to the peak of their fame and popularity, problems at work and at home were reaching a crisis point.
‘He was being very difficult,’ says Rasa. ‘I think he was ill. He was quite threatening and I said to him that I was going to call the police or I was going to leave him.’
Ray was not physically abusive towards Rasa, but in March 1966, stricken by flu and nervous and physical exhaustion, and haunted by creative, recording, personal and business pressures, he snapped. ‘I said something like: “You need to see a psychiatrist, you’ll have to go somewhere and get sorted. I’ve had enough, I can’t stand it,”’ says Rasa. ‘And then: Boom! We had a big black phone. He picked it up and hit me in the face, so I had a black eye.’
Ray’s breakdown wasn’t over yet. His family staged an inter- vention, after which he took to his bed. Then, on St Patrick’s Day, he unexpectedly rose from his bed in a state of agitation. From his home, he ran six miles to Tin Pan Alley in central London, where he confronted and attempted to punch his publicist Brian Sommerville. His next encounter was with his music publisher, in whose office he caused further chaos.
‘I don’t know what happened to me,’ says Ray. ‘I’d run into the West End with my money stuffed in my socks; I’d tried to punch my press agent; I was chased down Denmark Street by the police, hustled into a taxi by a psychiatrist and driven off somewhere.’
Davies’ physician prescribed plenty of rest, supplemented by a salad diet. A musical diet of Frank Sinatra, Bach, Bob Dylan and classical guitar also helped restore his momentum. ‘It sort of cleaned my mind out and started fresh ideas.’
Ironically, it led into possibly his greatest songwriting period.
Waterloo Sunset climbed to number two in the charts in summer 1967. But in America, it did not even reach the Billboard Hot 100.
After the near-collapse of the band in 1973, The Kinks marched on, before finding US success in the Eighties as a hard rock act and splitting 19 years ago.
Davies married twice more after Rasa. His 1974 marriage to Yvonne Gunner, a 22-year-old domestic science teacher, lasted until he began an affair in 1981 with The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, who gave him a third daughter.
A third marriage, to Irish ballerina Patricia Crosbie produced yet another daughter, and ended in around 2000.
Davies remains active as a solo artist and continues to tease journalists about the likelihood of a Kinks reunion. Their reputation was cemented by their influence on Britpop in the Nineties, and Ray has emerged as a rock icon whose life is overshadowed by the impact of his greatest songs. ‘My work is better than I am,’ he admits. ‘I just don’t live up to it. I’d love to be as good as Waterloo Sunset.’ Ray Davies: A Complicated Life is published by Bodley Head on March 5 at £25.