X-Raying ‘X-Ray’: Part 3: ‘Lost between tomorrow and yesterday/Between now and then’

I’ve written I don't know how many words and still barely scratched the surface, let alone exposed the exoskeleton of the story. But, if I go on much longer, my appraisal will be longer than the book itself so this is it.

I’ll summarise the points I’ve made already and add a few more that pique my interest.

First, the subterfuge
Ray toys with his readers. Crafty and a natural wordsmith – he is able to seem to be saying something and its complete opposite at the same time. In a sense, with the characters and personas he’s created, either in his songs, this book, on stage, he’s always hiding in plain sight. He’s a chameleon, changing with the times but sometimes deliberately against the spirit of the times so that, instead of blending into the background, he’s thrown into relief (for instance, with the Meisterwerk, ‘Village Green Preservation Society’). But, although not entirely candid, he does acknowledge his own errors or faults, is not uncritical of himself.

He loves to dramatise (or melodramatise, if I can invent such a word) hence all the devices – the possessions, the dreams, the fantasies, the dark clouds, the strange context he creates in which to set his tale, of the mysterious Corporation – which form a series of veils between the reader, the reality and himself, a smokescreen. It’s a little frustrating, like those TV docudramas that are neither one thing nor the other where dramatic licence is used to spice things up. But, although it might seem like an essay in distraction, we’re always being told something. On to …

‘The people in grey …’
The faceless Corporation a symbol of the establishment he fears and society’s power to eradicate individuality (the ubiquitous us and them), the theme of ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’ and ‘Here Come the People in Grey’. There’s the fear that Ray will be the butterfly broken upon the wheel, the beautiful, fragile wings of his idiosyncratic talent and his delicate mental state torn to shreds in the blind, relentless cogs of the machine.

Of course, even at the time that Ray wrote X-Ray (1995), the notion of ‘Big Brother’ retained all the negative connotations it had in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, of a society constrained and restricted by the attentions of a totalitarian state, a nightmare world where your every move was under surveillance. Since the advent of reality TV and Big Brother, in particular, in which members of the public gleefully and voluntarily subject their most private moments to the scrutiny of millions of viewers 24/7, it has become something that certain individuals actually aspire to as a quick route to fame, a privilege rather than an ordeal – hard to warrant I know. These days, celebrity is an end in itself, and it doesn’t seem to matter how you get there, for instance, by being clueless, shallow and loud (The Only Way Is Essex – apologies if I’m wrong about this because I’ve never watched the show). But, although RD’s paranoia about the tyrannical Corporation seems outdated now, the advent of the nanny state in the UK means that the notion of state-administered medication is actually quite plausible although any free medication’s ok by me.

Sex, love and so on
While Dave is happy to acknowledge a bisexual past (although often termed ‘bisexual’, this only means that he experimented with sex with men in the 60s not that he actually has any sexual contact with men now that he’s in his 60s), Ray is much more cagey and generally more of a private person so we have to make do with hints and suggestions. He might be leading us up the garden path but the flora and fauna we encounter en route are never less than fascinating, although they may very well be figments of his imagination. Was the mysterious man in Marianne Faithfull’s room really Ray? He’s a provocative little minx, forever leading us astray.


In the My Generation documentary, Ray admits that Kinks songs aren’t used to chat up girls because the ‘sexual overtones are not wholly masculine’. I’ll say. There aren’t many ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’-type exhortations in Ray’s lyrics.

An aside: Ever audacious, Ray is not afraid of tackling the taboo of paedophilia in the strangely touching ‘Art Lover’, with his usual humour and understanding, typically destabilising the preconceptions he set up with the title, the ‘Come to Daddy’ refrain and ‘Jogging in the park is my excuse/To look at all the little girls’ with ‘She's just a substitute/For what's been taken from me’, leading to YouTube comments that this is the point of view of a father who’s lost custody of his own little girl(s), etc. rather than a pervert in the park. So Ray takes us from perversion to subversion in two lines, which could also refer to his own loss of innocence. So clever. But what about the rather arch introduction and the shades and flat cap he dons to role-play the live version? Not to mention the saucy tongue action (2:28, after the shades line) that my sister pointed out to me – too lascivious for a father/daughter relationship. But his delivery is so tender. How does he make that 'creepy uncle'-look sexy?

Power and control
RD probably rails against the intrusion and the hegemony of the Corporation because he is something of a control freak himself. From early athletic meets to relationships (familial and otherwise) and band politics, he needs to prevail. This is evident in his reaction to school.

‘I was not particularly bright in the sense that I could only absorb information that interested me.’
Most of us are like this. Of course it’s easier to retain knowledge on a subject that appeals to you (for me at the moment that would be the Kinks). It doesn’t make Ray special, it makes him normal, the very thing he claims he is not. But we are all judged by the standards of the time. These don’t fit everyone as we all have different abilities and skills. He’s not the only child to have felt like a misfit. If children were allowed to do only the things that interested them, we’d have an education system where kids learn animation before they learn to read and write because kids like cartoons. Oh hang on, that's what we do have since the new powers that be have deemed that school must be enjoyable at all times. No one would study Shakespeare or Dickens because the language is too difficult or the texts too long. And they’d all end up with qualifications in nail technology or something equally fatuous.
He also makes a comment about his eccentric spelling (and later pronunciation – ‘Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues’, in which Ray sings ‘schizophrena’ each time). Hmm. I’m an editor by trade – there are two ways to spell words – the wrong way and the right way. There has to be consistency in education. ‘Schooldays’ is slightly more even-handed.

‘I could read, but I wasn’t allowed to read what I wanted.’
There’s always the library, honey. I read library books all the time as a child, some wildly inappropriate. I left primary school, having read most of Alexandre Dumas and the James Bond novels, pretty racy stuff for an eleven-year-old.
‘I had to decide whether to play the game their way, and succeed or fail according to their rules, or go my own way. I decided to settle my own fate.’
Ray opts not to participate in the Eleven Plus exam that could determine the course of his life. A bold move of rebellion or the avoidance of failure? It allows him the illusion of power at least.


Attention-seeking missile
‘This was my first victory over my newly arrived adversary sleeping in the cot by the kitchen table. All the pain I was suffering was inconsequential. I was once again the centre of attention.’
Three-year-old Ray throws himself out the door in order to wrest the family’s focus away from his baby brother.

‘I tried to toughen up my resistance to any further injuries by tapping away at my legs with a hammer. … it was … a horrible attempt to manipulate my parents’ emotions.’
Ray admits that this was really a cry for attention. We’re lucky that he found other, less painful ways to grab the limelight from the interloper as he’s evidently prepared to suffer to gain a little leverage. I don’t even want to think about the suicide attempts. Just grateful that Ray was as inept as the man he writes about in ‘Life Goes On’.

Fatalism
There’s a sense of fatalism in the book, with Ray sometimes wanting things to end before they begin so that all he experiences is the anticipation of possible bliss before it has a chance to turn into betrayal or despair. Of course this is written in retrospect – and we all see so much more clearly then. He reacts like this to certain defining moments or points of perfect happiness in his life, after which things usually alter for the worse. [I’m a great proponent of delayed gratification and I rather suspect that Ray is too. Dave would favour instant gratification. No surprise that this led to conflict between the two. I’m the sort of person who finishes their ice cream cone after everyone else or saves the thing they like best till last. But, of course, sometimes you can wait too long and lose your chance. Your ice cream has melted. Is the anticipation of desire better than the gratification of desire?]

‘I seemed to know everything I needed to know about her at that moment and actually considered walking away. It was almost as if this could have been the beginning and end right there, which would result in a perfect relationship full of thoughts of what might have been.’
Ray writes this of his first date with Rasa, when she has her back to him before they meet, the implication being that their union was less than the perfect one he envisaged.

‘Love like that is something beautiful but like cancer, it’s almost better to have it cut out before it can do any damage.’
Ray obviously does not agree with Tennyson that ‘Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all.’

‘England had won the World Cup and the Kinks were Number 1 in the charts [with ‘Sunny Afternoon’, this promo shot on anything but a sunny afternoon]. I wished that I had a machine-gun so that I could kill us all and everything would stop there.’
See what I mean about dramatic? We’ve all felt something like this though. I’m naturally nostalgic. I was filled with regret when I had to leave primary school. Nostalgia, a term coined for a type of homesickness, was originally considered an illness, and if the past really is a different country, it could still be accurate. Ray doesn’t let an appreciation of the past stop him from moving forward and urging others to do likewise.

‘Here's hoping all the days ahead/Won't be as bitter as the ones behind you/Be an optimist instead/And somehow happiness will find you/Forget what happened yesterday/I know that better things are on the way.’

Anyway I digress, what I mean to say is that I’m very glad that Ray didn’t have a machine-gun in 66.

‘Whatever else, that was the year RD’s life came to an end. He dreamed that he had been killed on that warm autumn afternoon as he cycled down the country lane. Perhaps he had actually died after the White City concert?’
‘He stood at the White City and swore that he was “F...... sick of the whole thing”... . He was “Sick up to here with it”.’
Management and financial wrangles and marital strife brought Ray to the brink in 73; he announced he was quitting, leading to …

‘Christmas day spent on the Circle line with a six-pack of Kronenbourg.’
Oh, Ray. The book imagines that the Kinks ended in 73 and although Dave might say ‘Imagination’s Real’, luckily for us, it wasn’t in this instance.

So what does Ray think about the rest of their career? Admittedly, there were highs and lows in the years that followed but the work speaks for itself (as Ray often says, his life is in the songs, subject of a future blog) and is testament to his genius and the hugely creative tension of the Kinks. As a recent convert (konvert?) to Kinkdom, each day I find a new favourite track (today it’s ‘Million Pound Semi-Detached’, a whole life in one song, as usual, with what should be hopeful horns sounding strangely mournful even as they valiantly try to counterpoint the poignant melody of Ray’s verse, but somehow end up generating additional pathos; the seemingly mundane subject matter at odds with the romanticism of the refrain but you know, not really as Ray’s always so blessedly profound) or see a long-lost promo (like the recently unearthed 'Sitting in the Midday Sun', God, they were beautiful boys! Or girls?) or watch a live performance on YouTube that I’ve never seen before.

I’ve read X-Ray twice now (once the lines and once between the lines as there’s often more subtext than text) and remain as enthralled as I was to start with, some of my questions unanswered but my senses sharpened and honed, my curiosity engaged and intact.

Inconclusion (as it’s inconclusive)
We’re left with a series of intriguing contradictions ….
Sometimes Ray claims he has no regrets, other times, he declares:
‘If I had my life to do over, I would change every single thing I have done.’

The book reflects its author, not just his image but the sinews beneath, what he’s made of (neuroses, psychoses, paranoia, narcissism but always talent and wit), what he’s made up ("I am the ‘Imaginary Man’"): simply fascinating and, like Gilbert Osmond in James's The Portrait of a Lady, ‘unfathomable’.

But, as for:
‘The past is gone; it's all been said.’
I hope Ray can bring himself to revisit the rest of his past soon and deliver the next instalment.

X-Raying ‘X-Ray’ by Ray Davies: Part Two: ‘Sex-Ray?’

Couldn’t resist the title – Sex-Ray sounds like a weapon in a porno version of ‘Star Trek’. Thought about ‘Sex, Ray?’ but this sounded like an invitation, which would be a bit impertinent although I can supply my own tape measure …

No wonder I’m having trouble coming to any conclusions. In ‘Fancy’, Ray sings,
‘No one can penetrate me. They only see what's in their own fancy, always.’
It’s probably true but I intend to have fun trying. Far be it from me to infer anything here about the choice of the word ‘penetrate’.

Sexuality, orientation and love
Ray is such an incredible tease. I mean, you can tell that from watching him perform, flirting with everyone in the audience, and sometimes Dave (see ‘Slum Kids’, about 3.48 minutes in, (dis)gracefully camping it up), leading us all on. There are tons of hints and suggestions about which team he might bat for but they are all as insubstantial as gossamer and likely to disintegrate when touched – there’s nothing tangible or concrete. I’ll investigate some quotes from the book to see if they shed any light on Ray’s predilections or merely cast more deceptive shadows.

‘Even as a child, I was a dirty old man.’
He goes on to confirm this with the following quote about his unsuspecting sisters:
‘Attractive girls who innocently played with me as I took every opportunity to look up their skirts’ (while still in his pram).
It’s hard to believe this although it’s one thing that he has in common with Dave; both of them were sexually aware of their sisters from a young age. There’s an element of the voyeur about Ray. Still, I can't be sure whether this is just a red herring to prove red-bloodedness, if you know what I mean.

‘The Queen’s Coronation was very erotic … I possibly had the first hard-on of my life on Coronation Day’ (aged 8).
There’s no doubt that somewhat unlikely events turn him on.

‘That was the first time I was even remotely ‘turned on’, and it was not by what I had seen but rather by what I felt due to a complete lack of inhibition on the woman’s part.’
The teenage Ray watches a neighbour sunbathe naked, titillated by the fact that she obviously doesn’t mind who watches her: observer rather than participant.

RD declares an early interest in women (or ceremonial occasions) – the Queen, Eydie Gorme, Jill Kennington, his sisters but comes to some peculiar conclusions, such as:
‘Subsequently, whenever I met a woman, I measured her sexuality by the distance between her chin and the tips of her nipples.’
It’s unclear here exactly what he means by ‘sexuality’: a woman’s sex appeal or her appetite for (or ability at) sex. It’s so strange that I don’t disbelieve it. I’m left wondering whether he assesses this by eye or carries a tape measure so that he can check before deciding whether a woman is worth pursuing. The reporter’s reaction is swift and scathing: ‘I thought he was a perverted, over-lustful, degenerate, sexist weirdo.’ But the Ray in X-Ray is never this quick to label and disapprove and in fact, rarely reacts negatively to any of his friends’ peccadilloes, tending to accept people as they are; his ‘young’ self plays devil’s advocate here.

‘The conquest is the most important element, not the execution because after the conquest you are in control. Then you can do anything you want with that object – because that’s what they are. … That’s when you begin to detest them.’
It’s evident that Ray needs to feel as if he’s in control and exercised this need over the Kinks career as well as over his love life. Perhaps once his band mates had capitulated, become subordinated to his will, he ceased to respect them or simply lost interest.

As an Aries, I sympathise. Arians tend to want what we can't have then unexpectedly get it, after which, we don’t want it any more. But it isn’t pure bloody-mindedness; it has more to do with insecurity, fear and low self-esteem.

‘I believe that it is impossible to have sex with anyone you love and respect.’
Oh, Ray. Perhaps said simply to provoke controversy, this could also mean that RD believes that once someone has deigned to have sex with him, he can no longer respect them, either because he doesn’t value himself highly enough to be worthy of their submission (therefore they are poor judges of character) or because they immediately lose their worth once they become attainable. Their value was dependent on their refusal to submit. The combination of these could possibly explain why Ray hasn’t had much success in long-term relationships. Not that I can talk.

Although there are countless descriptions of encounters with girls, of one kind or another, named and unnamed: Cindy, Roxie, Savannah, Anita, Miriam, etc., Ray lives by his creed, tending to idolise and idealise women then dismiss them once they surrender to his desires. He fights shy of any depiction of his marital relations but the overall sense is of desire thwarted and in such a way that he’s made to feel guilty for even having it.

‘Not a poofy type, are you?’
he challenges the researcher when they first meet although he declares he’s not prejudiced with a favourite saying:
‘One up the bum, no harm done as they say in versatile circles.’
The compulsion to mention this so early in the book is telling, implying that this is something he has given some consideration; he goes on to define queer as opposed to gay:
‘One does it because it’s his natural bent, as it were [queer]. … The other does it because it is fashionable [gay]’.
One minute, he seems almost reactionary and quite old-fashioned, the next, refreshingly non-judgemental. Note his playful use of ‘bent’.

‘When you are in despair, any arms are welcome. It doesn’t matter what sex they belong to. People place so much emphasis on gender. Love is love.’
These beliefs are similar to Dave’s. They’re more alike than they think.
I understand this too. Reciprocal affection, a tiny gesture, can be very powerful. Although I’ve had some extremely demonstrative boyfriends, the most romantic thing that ever happened to me was at a Matthew Sweet gig during the terribly moving, somewhat suicidal song ‘Someone to Pull the Trigger’ when a random guy next to me, a stranger, took my hand for the duration of the song. Affection and closeness can exist independent of sexual desire.

‘I thought about the newspaper stories of his sexual ambiguity. Maybe they were true after all. He had been born at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Although not gay in my opinion, he had lived through the era of the closet queens and his songs were some of the first to sing openly about those poor tortured souls.’
Confused, you will be. The fact that the reporter mentions ‘sexual ambiguity’, only to conclude that RD isn’t gay could be an attempt to put any rumours about this to rest but why bring it up only to discount it? Ray has to tantalise us with the possibility. Songs like ‘Lola’ and ‘On the Outside’ illustrate his affinity with sexual ‘misfits’: cross-dressers, transvestites, closet queens. In ‘Mirror of Love’, as Belle, he teases us with:
‘You're a mean and obscene lover/But you are my dream lover/'Cause even though you treat me bad/You were the best man I ever had’.
There’s a degree of compassion for and perhaps identification with ‘those poor tortured souls’. Of course at the same time, he’s obviously had relationships with women and fathered children. But, boy (or girl), does he look good in make-up! And neither he nor Dave were averse to dressing extravagantly on stage (to illustrate a character, such as Mr Flash or a video story, in drag for ‘Dead End Street’).

Terry
‘I gazed in wonder as his beautiful half-open mouth drew air in and out … I admired his perfect features, soft olive skin, silky chestnut eyebrows poised just beneath a proud, long forehead.’
The intimations begin with this description of his feelings for his nephew Terry (although they are a similar age), in the bed next to him whom he obviously has a crush on. The fact that he feels comfortable divulging these suggests that he’s not worried what people might think, that he’s either secure in his own masculinity, or happy to imply otherwise. Or it could be an unresolved conflict that he never fully confronts and doesn’t feel the need to. However, I’m not someone who believes that so-called straight men can't find other men attractive. My brother once told me that even he fancied Brad Pitt in Interview with a Vampire.

You can't help but feel there was at least some unrequited (or even requited but not acted upon) passion for Terry and that this was partly responsible for the depth of the despair he felt when Terry and his family decided to emigrate.

Of ‘Waterloo Sunset’, Ray has said,
‘It was a fantasy about my sister going off with her boyfriend to a new world.’
Perhaps I’m reaching but my theory is that Terry is, in fact, Terry and that Julie is Ray; in a fantasy world, he is Julie Finkle – the perfect audience he’s always been searching for. After all, he and Dave used to be girls (see this promo for ‘Sitting in the Midday Sun’).

‘Terry said that when he met me at the hotel in Adelaide, he didn’t know whether to shake hands with Dave and me or to hug us. I said that if he had kissed me I would have returned the compliment.’
The fact that their love has not been acted upon, that there has been no consummation and maybe it isn’t needed, has allowed Ray to continue to respect Terry and allowed this love to endure. It’s interesting that he doesn’t report Terry’s reaction to this, leaving us to wonder what it was.

RD seems to combine humour and offhandedness (the ‘one up the bum’ type of saying) as a defence mechanism, as a way of hedging his bets. He’s saying, he isn’t gay, but if he were, would it matter? He could feel his orientation is fluid, malleable and that it’s not really significant anyway. It’s hard to fathom his motives; I don’t believe that he’s afraid of what people think. This is evident when he confounds expectations in interviews and songs and in his affected, effete, somewhat camp, even effeminate, persona on stage. Like in this interview from a much later period:
'I also got the best blow job of my life in the toilet at that place - a wonderful guy'.

It’s as if he’s constantly daring us to speculate. So speculate I will as I’m being led round in ever-decreasing circles by the ringmaster.

‘The fat cowboy explained to RD that he was a closet queen who was after some rough homo action and considered RD too effeminate for this purpose’.
He would rather take the girl Ray is with outside and ‘suck her dick’; she’s more macho than Ray. Echoes of ‘Lola’ here (‘I'm not the world's most masculine man’). Ray seems merely amused by this; we don't know whether he would have gone with the cowboy if he had been chosen.

‘Suddenly he grabbed me and held me close to him, without seeming to know or care who or what I was.’
This illustrates his earlier assertion.
‘Will you hold me for a second? … I don’t want to be intimate or have sex with you, all I want you to do is show some affection … I am not a queer and I do not want your body.’
God, how sweet.

‘Then RD closed his eyes and kissed me gently on the lips.’
‘As a human being, I was a little sickened.’
As a human being myself, I don’t understand how anyone can reject or be nauseated by tenderness. Ray obviously believes this to be a possible reaction, one that he might have had himself in the same situation.

‘He was old, but not past it sexually.’
If he says so himself, which, of course, is exactly what he is doing. Bless.

‘If you’re not prepared to humiliate yourself in order to give somebody else a moment’s pleasure, I don’t believe that you’ve actually lived.’
Does he actually believe that to give himself to someone would necessitate a degree of humiliation? In the sexual act or in the act of relinquishing control or admitting subordination? Or do you simply have to be prepared to do it? Makes you wonder what he would consider to be humiliating but this is never expanded upon although the lyrics to ‘Headmaster’, for instance, convey more a sense of delicious anticipation for the coming punishment than any real fear: ‘Don't tell all my friends I bent over/ … Headmaster please spare me I beg you/Don't make me take my trousers down.’

‘Some men prefer the company of other men. It does not necessarily mean they are gay.’
This is his comment after trying to barter 'that little whore' Dave away to David Watts (as a joke, I’m sure). The latter evidently has more of an interest in Dave than just his company. And Ray knows it.

So, I’m no clearer. How about you? Ray is a man who has affection for other men, or at least responds to their affection for him, not necessarily with any physical demonstration but by rewarding them with his trust (for instance, Colin Wadie, a bachelor in the circle, who shows concern for him). Why should gender make any difference? I think Ray loves both men and women but he has sex with women and, in doing so, destroys his love for them. Or perhaps theirs for him, in the case of Rasa and Chrissie Hynde.


‘Why is true love so difficult to find?’ (‘One More Time’)