‘Nobody liked Ray Davies’: How the Kinks curmudgeon made English rock great, without making friends
For Ray Davies, lead singer of The Kinks, the British Invasion was not all it was cracked up to be. Less than a year after The Beatles opened the floodgates with their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, The Kinks’ inaugural tour of the United States, in the summer of 1965, saw them incur the indignity of playing to small crowds in large halls on a gruelling trek across the American Midwest.
As the tour wended its way towards California, the group learned that their promoter couldn’t afford to pay the amount agreed on contracts signed in London. By way of protest, a listless audience at the Sacramento Memorial Coliseum was subjected to a gruelling rendition of You Really Got Me that lasted for more than 20-minutes.
Matters came to a head in Los Angeles. Waiting backstage before an appearance on the network TV show Where The Action Is, Ray Davies became the focus of a tirade from a member of the production crew about how “every mop-topped, spotty-faced Limey juvenile thinks he can come over here and make a career for himself – [but] you’re just a bunch of commie wimps”. Seeing as he was neither of these things, the young Englishman responded in anger.
An emphatic punch to the head of his detractor saw him and his group barred from the United States for four years. The sanction was supported by The American Federation of Musicians, an organisation not wholly thrilled by the wave of British musicians landing on their country’s shores.
Raymond Douglas Davies was just 20-years old when he threw his ruinously expensive swinger. Today this most exquisite purveyor of songs both quiet and loud, poignant and pulverising, celebrates his 80th birthday. Oh, and one other thing too. Since being knighted in 2017 for services to music, that’s Sir Ray Davies to me and you.
Following his act of spontaneous violence in Southern California, The Kinks found that American musical fashion had marched on without them. “That ridiculous ban took away the best years of [our] career, when the original band was performing at its peak,” Ray Davies told the writer Tom Dunne in 2014. “The Woodstock generation had arrived and [we] were almost forgotten… [we lost out on] a big pot of honey [and] the opportunity to take our careers further.” The reason the group “had that denied to us” was the result, he felt, of “bad management, bad luck [and] bad behaviour”.
Ah yes, that great rock and roll triumvirate. In the Sixties, particularly, bad management was as common as the sloppy smiles on the faces of young British music makers granted instant access to a dizzying world of fame and acclaim. Matters of luck, on the other hand, were the doings of The Kinks themselves. With chaos at their fingertips, their often appalling behaviour saw them harvesting what they’d sowed.
Even in a time when domestic superstars such as The Who and Led Zeppelin posed a clear and present danger to hotel rooms the world over, the carrying-on of The Kinks was notable for its relentless unpleasantness. If there weren’t any strangers around with whom to have a scrap, the band would turn on each other. On subsequent visits to the US, warring factions were dispatched to separate ends of the tour bus while managers formed a border in the middle of the vehicle. They weren’t above brawling in the vicinity of their paying public, either. In the wings of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, in 1977, Ray Davies delivered a perfect knockout to the jaw of John “The Baptist” Gosling after the keyboardist had demurred at the prospect of an encore.
“Ray said, ‘Either you go back out there or I’ll knock you out,’” bassist Andy Pyle recalled in the book Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan. “And then, ‘Bop!’ – he was out. Ray ran on, all smiles, and played the keyboards. But Ray’s clever because after a while, for some reason, you think, ‘Ah, it’s not so bad after all. But it is.” As Rogan himself would ask, “If knockout blows were being delivered during the first leg of their tour, what awaited them on the next three?”
Born on the summer solstice of 1944, in Fortis Green in North London, Ray Davies became the beneficiary of a British class system that had temporarily lost its bearings. As clanging guitars and addictive choruses splintered the glass ceiling separating hoi polloi from the higher orders, the sensitive and curious boy with the gap-toothed grin found himself in the thick of a social revolution that seemed to have sprung up overnight.
In hitching their wagon to upper class managers Grenville Collins and Robert Wace, The Kinks, especially, were granted access to a world that would otherwise remain out of reach. At once, workaday bookings at air-force bases were replaced by appearances at the kind of debutante balls at which the drinks and the accents came in cut glass.
“Playing those posh society dos came with its own fascination and rewards,” noted younger brother Dave Davies, the group’s guitarist, in his book Living On A Thin Line. “Champagne was on tap and the debutantes were sexy and liked nothing better than talking to exotic pop musicians. One of [Wace’s] friends even told me that he could hook me up on a date with Princess Margaret for a small consideration.” (This “consideration”, by the way, was five hundred quid – at the time, not that small at all.)
For the majority of baby-boomer Brits, The Kinks, of course, weren’t “exotic” in any meaningful way. Rather, it was the music that set them apart. Without exception, the early-day hits were as sublime as they were all-encompassing. In the space of just two years, starting when Ray Davies was still a teenager, the group troubled the higher reaches of the British charts with the prototype metal of You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, the Britpop-influencing social commentary of Dedicated Follower Of Fashion, and the piercingly poignant Waterloo Sunset.
Davies was able, even, to turn his group’s banishment from the United States to creative advantage on wonderfully windswept albums such as The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, from 1968, and the following year’s Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire). As he would later explain, exile “made me root myself more in… the folk tradition of Britain”. The well didn’t really run dry, either. Of his many great songs, my own personal favourite is the hit Come Dancing, from 1982. A deeply poignant vignette in which the passage of time gets the better of youthful pursuits such as rock and roll, the song describes a fate that Ray Davies has managed to avoid.
Still, the litany of experiences afforded by his talents must have been disorienting. On a formative tour of France, for example, Davies recalled being in a Parisian nightclub in which “Robert Wace was dancing with this beautiful black woman who was wearing a tight dress. And I stole her. It was back to my [hotel] and there was the stubble. I’m not mad about the stubble. It makes your face very red.”
It’s worth noting, I think, that in other versions of the story it was Wace who spent the night with the cross-dresser (who was sometimes described as a blonde who looked like Marilyn Monroe). Here, as ever, it’s best to trust the art rather than the artist.
This memorable evening, of course, became the foundation for The Kinks’ 1970 hit Lola. An affectionate take on a na?ve young man’s unexpected dalliance with a transgender woman with a “dark-brown voice”, the instant classic caused a commotion at the BBC in ways that were anything but predictable. While the nation’s broadcaster had no problem at all with the subject matter, Ray Davies was required to fly from Canada to London in order to replace the words “Coca Cola” with “cherry Cola”. Evidently, in those days, product placement was more of a no-no than a colourful account of the goings-on in the fleshpots of Soho.
But for all his ease as songwriter, Davies himself never seemed entirely at home with the trappings of success. A famously frugal man, even when flush with cash, he forbade his first wife, Rasa, from buying a new coat in the thick of winter. When on the road on early-day tours of England, he’d ask hard-up support bands to pay for his food after “forgetting” to bring his wallet into service station cafes. Elsewhere, his behaviour could be boorishly ungracious, and often cruel. On a visit to a nightclub in Chicago, he responded to a standing ovation from patrons wishing him a happy birthday by throwing pocket change around the room while shouting, “Is this what you want? Is it my money you’re after?”
“It took Ray five years to come to terms with success,” Robert Wace once noted. “By then, he had made a great deal of money as a songwriter. [I] know artists that aren’t able to handle wealth and he’s not one of them. But he didn’t have a very sophisticated attitude towards money. He’s always been paranoid about it. He has this vision of himself as a tramp. He… [was] the tightest guy with money I’d ever met.”
Sam Curtis, The Kinks’ one-time tour manager, adds darker colours to the canvas. “No matter what you did, [Ray] would make sure there were problems,” he said. “He wanted to be contrary. And the reason he was contrary was because he knew that anybody who spoke to him was only speaking to him for one reason – to make money. Nobody ever spoke to Ray Davies because they liked him… In that position, why shouldn’t he say, ‘You want money? Work for it. I’ll be as awkward as I can.’”
Notwithstanding the wonderful songs, I’m left to wonder if any aspect of the rock and roll game made him happy at all. Certainly, life in The Kinks seemed to be one self-imposed ordeal after another. When not spitting at each other onstage, or kicking over drum-kits mid-set, without a trace of humour the group’s members would greet each other with the words “morning, c–t”. Throughout, the fraternal tensions were never less than exhausting. When it came to falling out with each other, the Davies siblings ranked somewhere between Don and Phil Everly and Cain and Abel.
In Living On A Thin Line, Dave Davies portrays his relationship with his brother as an ocean of unknowable currents. Ray’s decision to move to New York, in 1976, is met with a shrug and the words, “putting space – the entire Atlantic Ocean – between us was not the worst thing that could happen”. Thirty-eight years later, Dave’s curious decision to recuperate at his sibling’s North London home following a transient ischemic attack provided a new seam of complaint. “I sometimes feel he’s like a vampire the way he draws so much energy from people,” was the verdict after a fortnight’s board and lodgings.
Certainly, the elder sibling seemed determined to grouch his way toward premature old age. In response to a punk explosion that might well have spelled extinction for The Kinks, Davies remarked that “if Sid Vicious ever came up to me, I would’ve killed him”. Johnny Rotten, meanwhile, was “a c–t”. Seven years later, he sounded sourer still. “We [Britain] can’t go on pretending we’re a world power,” he declared. “We’re a joke. The only thing we lead the world in is pop music.”
Perhaps. But when it comes to exercising the soft power of rock and roll, Ray Davies can at least rest content with his status as a five-star general. Never mind that The Kinks’ last hit album in the UK was released in 1968, in the United States, the group’s peculiar blend of English whimsy and rock muscle continued to sell well into the 1980s. Van Halen’s explosive rendition of You Really Got Me, Kirsty McCall’s deft cover of Days and Green Day’s tasteful version of Tired Of Waiting For You are but three examples of the quartet’s evident influence on a wide array of styles.
In other words, on the occasion of a landmark birthday, today Ray Davies is old in a way his music will never be. One suspects he likes it that way. As he once said, “My song writing has been an ally through my life – because I ain’t got much else”.
