60 years ago today: The Kinks released their self-titled debut album

Originally published in Hot Press in 1994:

From the beginning, when Ray Davies looked across at brother Dave in a recording studio and dared him to better the guitar licks in ‘You Really Got Me’ an element of tension has been central to the Kinks, and within Ray himself.

In songs like ‘Lola’ the split is between masculine and feminine sensibilities; in Muswell Hillbillies the divide is one of class and, in many other great songs written by Ray Davies, a clear dichotomy exists between a worldview that is both deeply romantic and, at the same time, highly cynical. Extending this tendency towards schisms in his autobiography, X-Ray Ray Davies tells the story of the Kinks through a dual narrator, a nineteen-year-old biographer and a rock star named R.D.

“Tension is important in terms of the need to make music. Like, I remember, as a child, when I saw my parents singing 'You Always Hurt the One You Love' to one another I realised there was tension in their relationship that I hadn’t noticed. Yet they allowed that to come out in a pop song which showed me that people do use music to communicate that way, to sing the words they can’t say.

"And, though I’m not putting down books where academics analyse music, I think the real reason groups like the Beatles and the Kinks had that massive appeal was because every Joe out there on the street could analyse the songs in their own way and they resonated in their lives. That analysis, to me, is as legitimate as the analysis of any academic. And whether those songs really reflect the true tensions of any given time is something we probably won’t know for another fifty years.”

That said, Ray agrees that the tensions between the brothers Davies did heavily influence the music of the Kinks.

“With Dave and I there is a tension there but the point about that story of us recording ‘You Really Got Me’ is that I did not knowingly wind him up to make sure the guitar part was better” he explains. “We did that naturally, then. We might do it deliberately now to wind each other up but in the studio back then there just was that wonderful moment when we did just stop and there was a pause and I was afraid if we did stop recording ‘You Really Got Me’ we might lose the drive, the energy.

"But we’d stopped because we both felt someone had made a mistake and we looked at one another and I was thinking ‘fucking well get on with it!’ And that’s how we got it!”

And thus was born the blues-rooted guitar part that later heavily influenced punk and heavy metal. Yet Ray Davies stresses that this was just “one of those lucky accidents of fate that can happen.”

Leaping into the part of his book that details that original session he also points out that the splitting of the narrator into two to tell the story was also a form of lucky accident, rather than a technique that is a cop-out that frees him from having to directly address the less savoury parts of his own character – which is what some critics have suggested.

“It’s not a device or conceit I’ve used for no good reason” he elaborates. “The boy in the book says more about me than R.D. There is more of me in the boy and a lot of the things people might think are fictionally created by the boy are totally true. So, in that sense I do address all aspects of my character, maybe more so than I might have done if it was written in a traditional format. There really is a lot more truth in the book than people might realise. It’s not a cop-out.”

But why split the self in two?

“Because I still see myself as that nineteen-year-old boy, in many ways” says Ray. “And part of the whole idea is to get back in touch with that more innocent part of one’s self. That’s why there is that point where R.D. stands up and says to his biographer, ‘I think I know you’.

"That moment could have been fifty pages long because it is so central to the book and it really happened to me. It was a street called Woodside Avenue, in north London and I confronted myself when I was just about to leave college. It was as though I saw myself in another person. It was a misty day and I was walking across a disused railway line and that moment has always stayed with me. I love this whole idea of present and past selves meeting and colliding. And I think that when the two people are really bonded at the end, and the kid wants to get on with R.D’s work that, to me, is quite moving.”

In the book the nineteen and forty-something-year-old narrators certainly do collide, in that R.D. at one point walks over and kisses his younger self on the lips.

Inevitably this will raise again the long-whispered speculation about the alleged gay aspect to some songs Ray Davies has written. Wayne Studer, in his book on gay pop music, Rock on the Wild Side, reappropriates songs such as ‘See My Friends’, ‘David Watts’, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, ‘Lola’ and, not surprisingly, ‘Out of the Wardrobe’. Focusing specifically on ‘See My Friends’, Studer quotes Ray Davies as having once said to ex-wife Rasa, “I’d be queer if it wasn’t for you.”

"When it comes to songs like ‘See My Friends’ or ‘David Watts’ I like to leave their meaning open," he says. "In the book, I wrote about how ‘David Watts’ is about a gay guy but part of the thing also is like having admiration for the head boy in school. I try not to come down on one side, or the other. That’s not to say I’m bisexual.

"I find the world is a dark and mysterious place and as I was trying to explain to Gay Byrne on TV – though it seemed to make his eyes fall out – we all have got darkness inside us that we really don’t know about. Even on your death bed you’re probably gong to think ‘God, I should have gone out with him, or her and now it’s too late’. But, again, the wonderful thing about music is that anyone can interpret the songs any way they choose. And nothing is clearly defined in my songs.”

So, in a semi-humorous song like ‘Apeman’, is Ray Davies declaring he wants to get back in touch with his bestial self, really run naked through the jungle?

“In a way, yeah” he says, laughing. “Oddly enough, I’d already made ‘Apeman’, as a follow-up to ‘Lola’ and it was just ready to come out when I met a fan in San Francisco who said ‘you’ve got to make a record after ‘Lola’ or they’ll all think you’re gay, or something. You gotta make a record like ‘Superman’ or ‘Gorilla Man’!’ And I said ‘that’s really strange! My new record is called ‘Apeman’!” But if I’d deliberately set out to do that I probably would have come off looking even more like a queen!”

That, I guess, inevitably leads us to the question which has intrigued rock historians for nearly a quarter of a century: who the fuck was Lola?

“Who the fuck was Lola?” laughs Ray. “Lola was an amalgam of lots of people. But, specifically, it was a person I was dancing with in a club, who turned out to be a man dressed as a really attractive woman. But it’s a love song about a love affair – not in the gay sense, or Oscar Wilde sense – that I couldn’t tell anybody about. It was an affair it was wrong to have and I took that person’s name and formed the vowels in Lola. It was the love that no one will ever know about because it was not meant to exist.”

But why was the love affair wrong?

“Because I felt it was wrong, as a result of that old Catholic guilt,” says Ray, self-consciously. “There is that duality and those are the two dynamics out of which I create a lot of the songs.”

At this stage of his life hasn’t Ray Davies resolved some of those tensions in his own psychology?

“Briefly, when I got sick while living here in Ireland just before I started this book,” he says. “For a time there I felt totally centred and that those opposing forces in me were relatively resolved. But then I discovered it’s just when you are feeling centred and in control a truck comes and knocks you flat! That’s what happened to me.”

In his book Davies describes one of the lowest points of his recent life, when, on the verge of a total breakdown, he rushed into a hospital and said to a nurse: “Hello, my name is Ray Davies. I am lead singer of the Kinks and I think I am dying.” What brought him to the point of sad despair?

“What happened was marrying very young, at 19 to someone who was 17 and believing it would last forever, because I was told it would, then finally having to give up on it, realising it had ended,” he says. “And I had finally given up the chase of wanting something else in life when that whole thing fell apart. I’d made the emotional commitment for us to stay together then she called an end to it, after it being about to end for eighteen months.

"So, it was my ego that was smashed too. And that, on top of thoughts about the kids, just came crashing down on me and brought me crashing down. Also, when you go to the divorce courts in England you find they love taking apart somebody like me, so that happened and I became an emotional wreck. And making things worse was the fact that the real world had to go on, in that I had to do concerts and make records. And, emotionally I just couldn’t meet all those demands so, finally, I fell apart.”

In X-Ray Ray Davies reveals himself to have been so paranoiac that when the Stones won the Best New Group award in the NME two years in succession he began to call the newspaper “the enemy”. Only now does he acknowledge that the real enemy for Ray Davies is the enemy within.

“That is a simple observation but it’s so true,” he says, reflectively. “The whole trick is not what the world does to you but how you perceive what the world does. The information goes into the eyes, into the head and then we either distort it or see it as true, at which point it seeps into the psyche and can develop into paranoia, schizophrenia. But the worst madness is where we delude ourselves into believing that we actually understand the world.”

And yet, no doubt there are a million songwriters who would happily court the kind of psychological “paranoia” that has bedevilled Ray Davies throughout his life if it would lead to crystallised slices of social realism such as ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Dead End Street’ and albums like Muswell Hillbillies.

“Maybe, but the point is that a song like ‘Waterloo Sunset’ shows me that my subconscious is probably more alert, and intelligent than my conscious mind” counters Ray. “And this stream-of-consciousness style of writing I have does actually tell me things that I either can’t confront, or refuse to confront, directly.

"For example ‘Waterloo Sunset’ came about simply as a result of the fact that I’d had a great night’s sleep for the first time in a long time. And that was so wonderful, to someone like myself, who does generally have insomnia. I woke up and had the song in my head and then went down and looked at Waterloo Bridge, because I’ve always loved it, since I was a child. But then I do love bridges, including that one [gestures out the window of the suitably named Wellington Hotel at the Halfpenny Bridge]. I tried to write a song about that bridge the last time I was in Dublin. But ‘Waterloo Sunset’ came out almost as it is.”

When discussing the genesis of such songs as ‘Waterloo Sunset’ in his biography Ray Davies concedes that such creations are culturally determined, in the broadest sense. He obviously has no time for the kind of reductive analysis which suggests that songwriters are simply influenced by other songwriters. His influences came as much, if not more, from attending art college and studying the visual language used by the likes of Cézanne and, later, similar directors such as Truffaut, Kurosawa as well as the “kitchen sink” British drama of the ’60s.

“Those are the influences, as are the facts that I came from a working class background and was raised in Britain in the 1950s, with all the social resonances that involves” says Davies. “Likewise, in terms of living at the centre of the ‘swinging London’ thing during the 1960s, which I tended to view in a slightly left-of-field way because of my background.

"But apart from those directors who influenced the cinematic dimension to my songs there also were early childhood influences such as Hollywood movies like The Crimson Pirate and the great musicals like Singing In the Rain, which had that wonderful element of escapism. And, on a more mystical level, because I grew up in the area where William Blake lived, I like to think his spirit is still out there floating about and would be some kind of an influence on me. All this is just as important as the music we heard as kids, which was mainstream pop, particularly British popular music that grew out of that music hall tradition.”

From left to right: Dave, sister Gwen, Ray and niece Jackie. Credit: haringey.gov.uk

It is the latter which marks the lives of Ray Davies and Paul McCartney as probably more true to their own cultural base than all those British and Irish songwriters who merely tap into adopted Anglo-American musical models, such as blues or rock ’n’ roll .

“I call that vaudevillian aspect of the Kinks music the ‘contact’, as in our remaining true to the communal nature of music, like on the new ‘live’ album where we get everyone singing along on things like ‘Sunny Afternoon’,” Ray explains. “I remember being on a BBC 2 talk show to discuss a programme on rock ’n’ roll in which there was clip of Bill Haley where all the fans get up on the stage and started playing the instruments. And I said ‘that’s the change.’

"And that is what changed music, when people in the audience first realised they could participate in the creation of the music. Even better was the fact that, at least in the beginning, rockers like Bill Haley were not pretty-boy icons, so ordinary Joes from the audience could just get up there and sing. That’s what was really great about rock ’n’ roll. That was the real cultural breakthrough that led to people like myself being able to get up there and do what we do.”

The same could be said of skiffle music in Britain in the mid 1950s. And isn’t this the core connective between white British working class kids like Lonnie Donegan and John Lennon originally singing skiffle, and sharecroppers’ sons like Buddy Guy singing the blues near the Mississippi?

“That is where culture changed this century because the people got hold of the tools of production,” Davies agrees.”And I’m glad you mentioned Buddy Guy because I think he is one of the most under-rated guitar players there is. Without him there wouldn’t be no Eric Clapton. Eric got so many of his licks from Buddy. But, for me, that moment of recognition came when I saw the Beatles singing ‘She Loves You’ on television and thought ‘Hey, I could do that’ which is the same thing. Before that I was like a thousand other British working class kids who wanted to be a blues musician like Howlin' Wolf. Yet then I realised that I didn’t grow up in Memphis, I grew up in London.

“And that’s what I’ve tried to stay true to, like he stayed true to his Delta base. Sure, I knew I could imitate the sound of his chords, with the rough guitar and things, but my experiences were different and that’s why I wrote all those songs after ‘You Really Got Me’ gave us the breakthrough – which was probably the nearest the Kinks got to having an R ‘n’ B hit. I knew we could get the rough sound right, but the first thing I realised was that the lyrical aspect of the song had to come from my own experience, hence songs about my gardener, ‘Autumn Almanac’ – which was a top 5 hit about gardening!”

Which of the Kinks albums, such as Arthur, The Village Green Preservation Society and Muswell Hillbillies does Ray Davies regard as hitting the target as perfectly as singles like ‘Autumn Almanac’ or ‘A Well Respected Man’?

“Certainly not Arthur which I wish we could have abandoned and started again” says Ray. “But in an odd way The Village Green Preservation Society is perfect – but only because it’s not finished! It’s a sketch, like those old music books you pick up in antique shops where the advice above the music is ‘to be played intimately, among friends’! That’s what Village Green is! It’s not perfectly recorded but when people comment on my editorial capabilities as a songwriter I think of that album and realise that I got it right, editorially, with that set of songs. I even aspire to my Howlin' Wolf roots, with ‘The Last of the Steam Power Trains’, on that album, which openly uses the riff from ‘Smokestack Lightning’.”

And what about now, in 1994? Does it in any way frustrate Ray Davies that he still has to sing mostly 30-year-old songs on the new live album? Does he ever feel he is simply replicating his past, rather than continuing to grow as a songwriter?

“No,” he says firmly. “And I don’t see this new record as a replication because most of the songs are sung in a more acoustic setting, with friends, in our own studio – apart from things like the electric versions of ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ that opens the set, and ‘You Really Got Me’ that closes it. And even musically it feels so right.

"I hated Phobia, the album we did for Sony, because now I see the tempo of all the songs was wrong. Whereas here, we know these songs so well that we just fell into them in a sense that really was like coming home. Some, like ‘Apeman’, we hadn’t even planned to sing. And the real point about those songs is that, emotionally, so many of them still are true. I am still so tired of waiting and I am still looking for those friends across the rivers. I am, I is, I exist. And as for the future what I’m really looking forward to is doing a solo record, which I’ve never done.”

Listen to Kinks (1964) below: