The New Cue #343 December 11: Dave Davies of The Kinks
The New Cue Ted Kessler
"Ray and I are meeting up this week to work on some songs..."
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Good morning,

We hope you had a good weekend. We’ve got a treat for you today, a chat with a bona fide musical legend in the shape of The Kinks’ guitarist Dave Davies. Dave spoke to us about the new Kinks compilation, The Journey Pt.2, and also revealed some very exciting news about a potential new Kinks record on the horizon. Wowza! It’s a free edition, so please share among your friends and loved ones. Hey, why not make their Christmas and gift them a subscription to the world’s greatest music newsletter this year? Christmas shopping dilemmas solved!

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We’ll see all paying subscribers on Friday for more musical treats and festive fun. Until then, enjoy the edition,

Ted, Niall and Chris

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Start The Week With… The Kinks’ Dave Davies

Last month, The Kinks released the second instalment of their career spanning retrospective, The Journey. Rather than pile up their hits in chronological order, Ray Davies, Dave Davies and drummer Mick Avory went through the band’s back catalogue and grouped together songs based around the themes and ideas they explored. It’s an ingenious approach and means that you get tracks like 1974’s Preservation, which wasn’t even released as a single in the UK, rubbing up next to familiar classics such as Till The End Of Day and Dedicated Follower Of Fashion.

As well as uncovering a wealth of great tunes even people who consider themselves Kinks fans might not have heard, it really underscores what a fantastically creative and unique band The Kinks were, chancing ideas like 1974’s conceptual album-cum-stage play Soap Opera (represented with a live performance taped at London’s New Victoria Theatre) when many of their ‘60s contemporaries had slipped into stadium rocking complacency.

Chris had the pleasure of speaking to guitarist Dave Davies over the phone a few weeks ago about the compilation. Dave discussed the band’s approach to the songs, The Kinks’ past and legacy, his relationship with brother Ray and also revealed that there might be some brand new Kinks music on its way soon…

Hello Dave, how are you?

I’m OK thanks. It’s sunny but cold. It’s nice.

Thanks for talking to us to today about the new instalment of The Journey. It’s a great way to approach your back catalogue. Whose idea was it?

Ray thought it would be a good idea to look at it like that and to just show us in this different light. It gives us a more personal way of going through and looking at the music after all this time. And doing it properly as well.

It throws up familiar songs like Sunny Afternoon or See My Friends next to things a lot of people might not have heard that were B-sides or albums tracks.

Yeah, and they’ve been remixed to give them a new flavour. Some of them were always my favourite songs to play with Ray and we haven’t done them for years. Things like [Soap Opera’s opening track] Everybody’s A Star (Starmaker), you’d never normally find next to Sunny Afternoon. It gives it a different perspective.

Revisiting songs like Creeping Jean which you wrote in 1968, does that take you back to that time more so than hearing something like Lola again does?

Yeah, it does take you back. Music takes you back and evokes memories, some perhaps not as nice as the tracks themselves! But it does transport you back to a moment in time. One of my favourite lesser-known Kinks songs has always been This Time Tomorrow, it was fun to hear that again.

You’ve got songs like Preservation on there, which even people who consider themselves fans might not be familiar with.

I think we were a bit ahead of the game on stuff like that.

There’s a live performance of Soap Opera which didn’t do very well at the time commercially. Did that make more sense when you performed it live?

Oh yeah. It became more relevant doing it like a stage play. It changed the vibe of the piece playing it live.

Did you and Ray act out the characters on stage?

Oh yeah! We’d wear suits and wigs, we had a lot of fun with it when we were doing it live. It brought it much more to life. Often when you do something like that with music in the live arena, it really changes the character of it. It takes on a different persona and it makes the song feel a lot clearer.

Do you think The Kinks were ahead of their time doing stuff like that?

I think it was ahead of its time, very much so. Sometimes when we’d do a single like Sunny Afternoon there’d be these characters in there, we could do a show based on each song and the smaller themes within the songs. It was a lot of fun to realise.

Were The Kinks always willing to take chances in that regard?

You’ve got to take a chance. [Breakthrough 1964 hit] You Really Got Me could have quite easily never have come out. It was only through mine and Ray’s persistence that the bloody thing even got made.

When The Kinks were banned from the US [following complaints about the band during their 1965 US tour, the US musicians’ union withheld their work permits, effectively preventing them from performing in America for the rest of the 60s], it must have seemed like the end of your career at the time. In retrospect, was it the making of you artistically? Did it make you look closer to home and create something like [1968 LP] The Village Green Preservation Society?

Absolutely. We came back from the States off that fucked up tour. I was quite glad to get home. We felt that we could be making The Kinks’ last album, so we put a lot of work into it, it gave us a liberated feeling to think, ‘Fuck it, if it doesn’t do well than at least we’ve done it’. It was liberating.

What’s your take on why you were banned?

I think it was a lot of different things. I think our management fucked up the tour, there were lots of incidents with promoters not coming through for us. It was a combination of a lot of different fuck ups. Like you said though, it was kind of freeing.

One of the first songs Ray wrote on the way home from that tour was See My Friends, that one song pointed to a whole new direction that The Beatles, the Stones and The Who all followed you on.

See My Friends is a very special song. It touches on feelings about my sister and her leaving for Australia, in those days that was unheard of. That was a really emotional song for our whole family. It had a big effect on a lot of people. That Indian thing in the music with raga and the timing. We’d stopped in Delhi, I think, when Ray wrote that. Often in The Kinks we’d go into different time zones and eras, being in The Kinks was often akin to time travelling. We’ve been very lucky with people we met and places we went to.

Were there instances where you heard Ray’s songs and thought, ‘He’s writing about me, here…’

Oh of course! Many, many times he did write about me. Or he’d write [1966’s anti-journalist rant] Mr. Reporter about you! When you’ve got a highly creative person like Ray, creativity is happening all of the time. You wake up in the morning and everything you look at sparks creativity.

Two Sisters is on this compilation. You and Ray had older sisters, but is that really about the two of you and your relationship?

Yeah, sometimes you hit on a theme or an idea and realise, ‘Oh actually it’s really about me, or us…’. You change it around into something different. Two Sisters is a perfect example of that. It was about me and Ray - we knew that of course - but when you change the characters around and put them in a wig, it turns into two different people. We spent a lot of our career investigating different characters, but a lot of time characters like Lola were people that we’d met and we knew.

Is there some of your own experiences in Lola?

Of course. If you read my book [Living On A Thin Line], there’s references to so much of my life in Ray’s songs.

There’s a number of your songs on the record, things like Susannah’s Still Alive and Lincoln City from 1968. Did you feel frustrated that you couldn’t get more of your own material onto Kinks albums? It must have been quite hard to muscle in when Ray was on that kind of streak.

I think so, but it’s a good frustration to have. I was speaking to [guitarist] Tony Hicks from The Hollies and he was saying what he loved about The Kinks was that we created all of our own music, whereas they had to rely on songwriters presenting them with material. Me and Ray had a lot of disagreements, but the music we loved - everything from Django Reinhardt to Eddie Cochran - inspired us so much.

Did going back over these songs with Ray make you want to make music together again?

We spoke about it only last week. We’re going to meet up again this week and see where the journey might take us. We’ve had loads of stuff in the can for ages so who knows. Stuff we’ve had in demo form or things we didn’t use. There’s quite a few songs we’ve either revamped or done slightly differently so we’ll see.

So, there might be new Kinks songs on their way?

Let’s hope so, eh!

CC