20th Century Man: Ray Davies Turns 80

You know the old adage about never meeting your heroes…

I know there’s some truth to it. For instance, considering Ray Davies – who turns 80 on June 21st – I talked to Tom Robinson in July 1979. Robinson led the band that bore his name and he was writer of “2-4-6-8 Motorway,” “Glad to Be Gay” and “Up Against the Wall.” His music was very Kinks-ian. Davies liked what he’d heard, the two met and Davies and Robinson struck some sort of deal for Ray to produce his music. I forget how it fell through – probably money or points – but I recall talking to Tom and he was extremely bitter and disappointed in, yes, somebody he’d considered a hero.

My Ray Davies stories are not that, practically the opposite, in fact. I’d first qualify it by saying Davies was not exactly a hero – neither was Pete Townshend or John Lennon. They are people whose music moved me, informed and infused my life, songwriters who I had great respect for, but I don’t have rock ‘n’ roll heroes. Heroes are the firefighters that rescue kids and animals from burning buildings.

Davies and I have had many chinwags over the years. some formal interviews (the first in 1981, a chunk of that comes later), some pre-show or post-show chats, a few limo rides together en route to arena gigs, dinner. 

Here’s something from 2006: During the course of an hour-long phone interview, Davies variously referred to what happened Jan. 5, 2004, as “the incident,” “the accident,” or when he “got injured.” He does not recall it as the time when he was shot in the leg pursuing the man who stole his then-girlfriend’s purse while they walked along a New Orleans street, where he then lived. Maybe it was just semantics, but maybe not.

For any other artist, such an episode might be a pivotal point for lyric writing. But for Davies it was neither the focus for the songs of his first “official” solo album, Other People’s Lives. (He’d released Return to Waterloo in 1985, the soundtrack to a film of the same name he wrote and directed.). Most of which Other People’s Lives, he said, was written prior to the mugging.

Like much of Davies’s four decades worth of material, many of the tunes on the album “were inspired by characters who live probably 100 yards from me,” says the resident of North London.

“It’s so very localized,” said Davies. “But it also picks up on the ironic facets of English culture. English people are a bit wistful and mundane, and I like people that have little quirks in their lives and [who are] lower-achieving people. I think they’re worth writing about.”

Nonetheless, it was fitting that some of the themes of the record deal with the idea of rising above adversity.

AUDIO: The Kinks “You Really Got Me”

The Kinks began with a loud bang in 1964, exploding with the ecstatic, if tortured, vocal and distorted two-chord guitar riff of “You Really Got Me.” In short order, The Kinks developed into one of Britain’s top bands, albeit an under-appreciated one when matched against the Beatles, The Who, or The Rolling Stones. Davies was one of rock’s sharpest writers, a man who could be sentimental, self-deprecating, and sarcastic – a lyricist both humanistic and humorous. He could write about something as simple as not being able to afford gasoline (“A Gallon of Gas”) or the lies of politicians and the faults with both capitalism and socialism (the “Preservation” rock opera).

A primary theme on Other People’s Lives’ concerned characters struggling with ennui and inertia.

“There are a lot of issues on this record,” said Davies. “It’s a lot to do with identity – finding a new identity, as in the person who gets that ‘lonesome train’ at the end of the song ‘The Getaway (Lonesome Train).’ It’s a key track for me because it’s got this fade-out and there’s a deep voice saying, ‘Get out, make a move, get on with your life, that lonesome train’s coming, and if you don’t get off it, you stay on it by yourself forever.’ There’s that haunting feeling to it. Every age has its own crisis points. There are a lot of crisis points on this record.”

Davies’s identity quest intensified during the mid to late 1990s. He says he began to figure out more who he was and how the songwriter related to the performer, when he conceived and performed a touring show in 1995 called The Storyteller. It was a mix of Kinks music and informative chat, accompanied by guitarist Pete Mathison.

With Davies moving forward in his post-Kinks career, what has he learned and what has changed?

“When I was with The Kinks it was easier, in a sense. There was a template then. Even though the albums are all different and the music was quite diverse, I knew what I was writing,” he says. “With this record, I had to dig deep and find out who I was as a singer, and who to cast the songs for before I could start thinking about whether they worked or not.”

During the interview, Davies expressed pride in The Kinks’ work, ambivalence (as always) toward his younger brother, guitarist Dave, and a certain satisfaction in having influenced generations of rock bands. Those include punk bands from the mid-’70s, Blur and Oasis in the mid-’90s, and current groups such as Franz Ferdinand, the Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys.

Davies was currently in the midst of a 15-date North American tour with a backing trio. During the two-and-a-half-hour shows, he was playing more than half the new album with the rest consisting of reimagined Kinks songs. Davies’s selling points for the concerts? They’re for “anyone who likes singer-songwriters and likes a bit of a kick in the drums, a bit of punch, and likes a half-decent rock show and some interesting lyrics and subtext.”

In 2011, we talked on the phone ahead of a gig at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston in November. Then 67, Davies was not quite as limber as he was in his youth, when he did jump jacks onstage during Kinks concerts. There was the “incident” in 2004, course. In 2010, doctors found blood clots in his lungs and Davies had to scrap a U.S. tour.

But he still had that ambitious drive. In June, he had curated a huge, multiband London festival called Meltdown. He wrote a school musical, Child’s Play, that was staged in September. He had been working on a Kinks biopic with director Julien Temple (never made) and a Kinks musical (Sunny Afternoon, came to fruition in London in 2014). He had nearly completed a memoir, which would become Americana: The Kinks, The Road and the Perfect Riff, which was published in 2013.

Davies also had been penning new tunes, which he called “the simplest songs I’ve ever written — not Neanderthal, but simple emotions that are very strong.” He hoped to record an album at the end of the year. That would take some time and it finally come out in 2017, also called Americana.

But at this point he was back on the road, playing a sold-out show in a mid-size theater. The Kinks were history – still may be, you never know for sure. But at the time he was not just with the four-piece English rock band he’d been traveling with, the Other People, but also New York’s 48-member Dessoff Chamber Choir. It was near the end of a 21-gig tour, one of eight with the choir.

Why was Davies so ambitious now?

“You get the sense that you don’t have too much time to do all the things you want to do,” said Davies on the telephone from his North London. “There’s definitely a feeling of ‘How many more times do I have to do this?’ and ‘Do I want to be there?’ But that is the nature of what I do. I’m a bit of a high achiever, and I try things that are a little bit outrageous sometimes. I think it’s the fulfillment of a lot of ideas I have and ambitions I have for my music. I’ve been told I’ve got to cut back, but I’ve never been one to play it safe.”

In 2009, Davies released an album called The Kinks Choral Collection, a disc in which classic Kinks songs were rearranged with London’s Crouch End Festival Chorus. On the tour, the Dessoff Chamber Choir replaced Crouch End, singing “Days,” “See My Friends,” “Waterloo Sunset,” “You Really Got Me” and “Celluloid Heroes,” among others. They’d also tackle a suite of songs from the 1968 masterpiece, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.

“I took a lot of care doing the arrangements, and that’s the key thing to get right,” he said.

Davies and his band, which did include former Kinks keyboardist Ian Gibbons (who died two years later), would be rocking out, too. But of the songs done with the chorus, Davies said, “I think they’re de-Kinkifed, if that’s a word. ‘See My Friends’ is quite magical, an a cappella version, and it feels really nice to sing it. Totally different from the Kinks recording.”

He added, “It’s about using the breadth of the songwriting, using the tunes to breathe rather than put in the raunchy guitar solo or whatever.”

Davies was not optimistic about the state of new pop music.

“Before, bands would say something in their music,” he said. “Now, the music is all about the glorification of angst. I can’t explain it any other way. And the standard of songwriting has really suffered because — what’s that Simon Cowell show called, The X Factor? — people write to that formula. Quirky people don’t get a foot in.”

During any 21st century talk with Davies, the question of a Kinks reunion comes up. The Kinks broke up in 1996. Might the band reunite?

“Not a chance,” Davies said then. “Dave’s very productive, but I don’t know if he’s on the same planet the rest of us are on. I think his planet is going through a weird phase in the universe. If it comes back into focus, I’ll spot him in the galaxy.”

After the Wilbur show was over,  I was a bit stunned when I went backstage. Ray had set aside passes for my wife and myself to say hi, but when we got to the door the large guard said, nope, no way. There were no backstage passes at all, period. I persuaded him to check with the man inside the dressing room. He did and Ray came out and sheepishly apologized that there’d been a mistake, and, yes, we had passes. We were the only ones who did. We talked, just the three of us, for about 15 minutes, not just about him. He was genuinely concerned about how my life and career were going and same with my wife, who he’d met the previous year after a gig at Berklee Performance Center. He remembered she’d been writing plays and asked if she was still at it. A bit, she said, but she’d shifted more toward photography.

AUDIO: The Kinks “Give the People What They Want”

Now, let me take you back to our first hookup. Davies and I met for the first time in 1981 in a Minneapolis hotel room. The Kinks were, well, kinda hot again, playing the arenas they’d once avoided (both by choice, too impersonal) and reality (they probably couldn’t fill them.)

“I’m a very nervous person, very quiet,” Davies said. “I think it makes people even more nervous. I wish I could make people feel more comfortable with me. There’s an element of weakness and an element of violence within me.

“Insecure? Yeah, totally. There’s one person in the world who’s more insecure than I am and his name is Pete Townshend.”

 In the mid ’70s, Davies saw rock ‘n’ roll become more and more of a high-stakes business. “I wanted to leave the continent,” he said. “I didn’t fit in with anything. That’s why I wrote ‘Misfits’ (a bittersweet celebration of life outside the mainstream. I hated my contemporaries – I hated the lifestyle of Paul McCartney; I didn’t want to be like Elton John or Rod Stewart – most of all Rod Stewart who I grew up with.”

 As a teenager Davies lived with his older sister Rose and her husband Arthur in the middle class Muswell Hill area of London. Davies says he “felt like nothing,” part of the post-war baby boom’s disillusioned first wave. “There’s a big unemployment problem in England now, and it started when I left school. I used to walk around so angry, angry about what was happening. And it was going to get worse.

“It’s not all bitterness. This sounds like I’m a really bitter person and I’m not. It just gives you strength. Maybe that’s the answer to ‘Why have you kept going so long, Ray?’ “

Davies attended Hornsey Art College, developed into “a very good art student,” and got his release by playing soccer and music. Davies played guitar until the early hours of the morning with a mainstream jazz/blues/ reggae group in seedy Soho clubs for the money it cost to travel to and from the gigs. He was a big fan of Black American blues singer-guitarist Big Bill Broonzy.

“It was the best time of my life,” Davies said, drifting back. “It exposed me to a world I’d been sheltered from – I was a suburban kid. Prostitutes used to come in and put their feet up. There was this old prossy who used to hold me and dance with me. Then she used to go back out onto Wardour street and do her job. I’ll always remember her. I wish I could find her now.”

Davies saw the Rolling Stones in 1964 and was convinced by rock ‘n’ roll. He found that his “punk” brother Dave was at his parents’ home playing guitar, and the two linked up with friends Mick Avory on drums and Pete Quaife on bass to form the Kinks. Later that year, when the Kinks hit with “You Really Got Me,” Dave Davies emerged as rock ‘n’ roll’s rawest guitarist. A few years later, Ray Davies emerged as one of rock’s most perceptive lyricists.

 “I read a book by Noel Coward called Future Indefinite’,” Davies said, “and I think he said, the greatest power I have is in my writing and I can say the most devastating things in a joke.’ I think he learnt that from Shakespeare.”

Hence was born “A Well Respected Man,” the first of Davies’ hard hitting social satires. Two songs later came “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,” which poked fun at those who followed fads and trends.

Davies says it was drawn from real anger. “I had a punch-out with a trendy ’60s fashion designer who came to a party at my house,” Davies said. Affecting a snooty upper class accent he coos, “Ooh, you live in a semi (a two-family house that shares a common wall, do you? In Muswell Hill? Mick Jagger’s got a mansion in Buckingham Palace.’” Davies told the designer what he thought about way Mick Jagger treated women which was not much – Davies said Jagger stuck Mars bars up his girlfriend’s arse. Then, he hit him.

At his best, Davies artistically teeters on fine lines, between violence and gentility and, particularly, between revering the conventions and mores of the past and sending them up. “God save little shops, China cups and virginity,” he sang plaintively in “The Village Green Preservation Society,” the title song from a 1969 album Davies considered one of the Kinks’ best.

“There’s a duality in what I do,” Davies said. That duality is manifested within songs as well as stretched over his dozens of albums. Though most of his songs are drawn from personal reflection, in the early ’70s Davies theatrically tackled the communism/ capitalism conflict in Preservation Act II. Neither one came out looking too rosy.

“This is my street and I’m never gonna leave it,” Davies sang at one point during our interview. It’s a line from “Autumn Almanac,” a song sung from the point of view of a provincial gardener in the north of England. “A lot of northern people didn’t like me for that,” he recalls. “They thought I was sending them up; actually, I was celebrating that lifestyle.”

Did it ever exist?

It existed for me,” he said. Davies sang songs about letting the world pass by (“Sunny Afternoon”) or running from it (“Apeman”). “I was going into my own form of escapism.”

Because of a dispute with the Musician’s Union and the band’s management, the Kinks were banned from playing the US from 1965 to 1969. “The crucial period – the war and the flag,” Davies said, launching into a vocal impression of guitarist Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner.” “The greatest and the silliest,” he added.

It became, in many ways, the Kinks’ artistic heyday – perhaps because they weren’t on the road continually, a situation that can be the death of creativity. Davies took refuge in a private world, singing melodic, decidedly English songs of complex simplicity – and biting wit.

The songs were, as Davies said, “out of step with rock ‘n’ roll.” Amidst psychedelia, progressive rock, long guitar solos, overt social protest and anti-war demonstrations, the Kinks sang clever pop songs about simpler times. Their drug of choice was alcohol, not acid. (Drinking later inspired “Alcohol” – which has the best line about boozing ever: “Sad memories I can’t recall.”) They wished for nothing more than to return to an England long past and in doing so became an anachronism to most rock fans.

 Still, the songs were among his best and Arthur – or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire – a concept album based upon the World War II experiences and disillusionment felt by his uncle – remains one of rock’s best anti-war statements.

But mostly the Kinks sought escape. Davies frequently returned to that period in conversation. One of those songs, “Waterloo Sunset,” was termed by Village Voice critic Robert Chistgau “the most beautiful song in the English language.” No argument from me. It’s a touching, gentle, gripping rock ballad in which two lovers gain temporary solace amidst a resplendent sunset and the squalor of a subway station.

 The story was originally thought of as Liverpool Sunset,” said Davies, “because there was the Mersey Beat scene that soon faded away . . . but I thought why bother when I’m from London and here’s this beautiful river. I think it’s one of the most enjoyable songs I’ve ever written in my life. The night we finished making the record I got [my wife] Rasa to drive me down – she went through hell with me, she never got any credit – to drive me down to Waterloo Bridge and I stood on the bridge and I said, ‘Yes, it’s all there.’ I got back in the car and said ‘You can take me home now.'”

Also from that period came “Days” – perhaps the second most beautiful song in the English language – which is about a lover Davies once had, briefly. She was, he said, “a strong, guiding light type of woman.” When she phoned him and told him their relationship was was over, Davies says he thanked her for what she had given him. In the song: “And though you’re gone, I won’t forget a single day believe me. Days, I’ll remember all my life… those sacred days you gave me.”

The words took him by surprise earlier in ‘81 – at a funeral for a friend. In January, Davies began to co-write a musical, Chorus Girls, with Barry Keefe. The play – panned by the theater establishment but sold out for its five-week run – was a satire about feminists kidnaping Prince Charles, who was was visiting the theater. The theater was going to be destroyed in order to create Europe’s largest job center.

“This was supposed to be a comedy,” Davies said, “and every day Barry would come in crying, tears streaming down his face.” His 40-year-old wife Verity was dying of cancer.

“I would get on the tube every morning on the central line and go into Stratford in East London. I’d turn up and wait for him four or five hours and all I’d get was a note saying, Sorry, Verity’s bad today, can’t work.'”

AUDIO: The Kinks “Days”

She died shortly after the play opened in April. At the funeral, actress Charlotte Cornwall read “Days.” “That was,” he said, pausing, still moved, “a chilling moment. Yet, when I heard it recited it made me realize how proud I was of the song.”

“I’ll never be able to make records like that again,” Davies said.

Why not?

“A lot of it has to do with the times, where you live. I lived in a little semi. That house was magical.”

“I have this theory,” Davies said later about the present. “Commerce dictates art.”

 Is that meant in a cynical sense?

 “Yeah, in a cynical sense – and an almost truthful belief. But my art is greater that the commerce that dictates it.”

 In January 1979 the Kinks were at a low ebb. Their English record company refused them money for tour support because the Kinks had no “product” to promote. “So,” said Davies, “I wrote ‘Low Budget,’ which is about [having no money].” It took him a day and it became successful – the Kinks first gold disc with Arista. “The joke was on them in a sense.”

 Despite the Kinks’ success, 1981 hadn’t been an easy year. Though Davies was seeing Chrissie Hynde – somewhat secretively at the time – he was recently divorced for the second time. He hadn’t been able to spend much time with his two daughters, then ages 10 and 13. He’d been living out of suitcases and couldn’t devote all the time he wanted to the Kinks’ new album Give the People What They Want.

Davies did, of course, watch the royal wedding earlier in ‘81. “As fraught as my life has been with divorce and all that,” he says sincerely. “I was so proud of our royal family. The queen is really wonderful.”

Still, he didn’t approach the day with utmost reverence. He watched with Graham Chapman, a friend from Monty Python, who had “conned” a local council into having a festival. Davies went, got drunk, and “tried to play slide guitar with a beer bottle. Everybody was laughing at me and at the end they carried me off. One of the best days of the year.”

And in 2017, Ray Davies became Sir Ray Davies, knighted by Prince Charles.

VIDEO: Ray Davies gets knighted by Prince Charles 

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Jim Sullivan

Jim Sullivan is the author of Backstage & Beyond: 45 Years of Classic Rock Chats and Rants, which came out in July, and the upcoming Backstage & Beyond: 45 Years of Modern Rock Chats and Rants, which will be published October 19 by Trouser Press Books. Based in Boston, he's written for the Boston Globe, Herald and Phoenix, and currently for WBUR's arts site, the ARTery. Past magazine credits include The Record, Trouser Press, Creem, Music-Sound Output. He's at jimullivanink on Facebook and the rarely used @jimsullivanink on X.

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