Kinked Again. Revisiting the Phenomenon of the Kinks

And so, just like that, I’m back in 2011, the year I finally discovered the Kinks, the flame rekindled, courtesy of a BBC strand on the band. What does it this time is a documentary called I’m Not Like Everybody Else, which has interviews with both Ray and Dave Davies, and Mick Avory and Pete Quaife and music clips. End up singing Shangri-La for days. Oh, that particular gift that Ray has with major and minor, minutiae and melancholy, every tiny triumph pricked by irony, a herald to defeat, every loss resigned to, ‘every everything’ as my friend the late and great Grant Hart might say. It’s all there in the writing and the delivery. And that intelligence, that he plays down a lot. Of course, you’re a poet, Ray, but so much more than that.

And Dave. And Dave. What can I say? The cheekiness of the ten-year-old has never left him. Disarmingly honest, I fall victim to his charisma once more. His artless manner allows him to call his brother a ‘manipulative arsehole’ and get away with it.

So, the first Kinks song I remember hearing, and loving, was Celluloid Heroes (released in 1979) (probably the first time I'd heard the word 'celluloid'), because it was played a lot on Radio Caroline. It is such a tour de force and a typical Kinks song, in that it was atypical and unlike the rest of the music of the time. Full of melodrama and bathos, it told a story, it had a message – the power and the transience of fame ('Success walks hand in hand with failure along Hollywood Boulevard') and the price you might pay for it, how the glamour is merely an illusion. I presume I did hear the 60s and early 70s tracks on the Golden Oldies shows at the time but I never really connected any of them with the band who made Celluloid Heroes.

I feel as if Ray Davies is an old soul. That, even as a young man, he could understand and imagine what it might be like to be a middle-aged man, or an old man. And then capture it in a character in a song, who, even if slightly ridiculed, is ridiculed with affection and compassion (Mr Pleasant, A Well-Respected Man). He moves on, innovates, changes tack but he will still be looking at the scene in the rearview mirror, then encapsulating it in song – such as Come Dancing, Working Man’s Café (Ray solo). I’m like Ray. I was nostalgic by the age of 11. Dave says ‘If something good happens, Ray will construct a situation to make it go wrong.’ The thing is Dave just accepts something good has happened – its face value – but Ray is already looking the gift horse in the mouth or maybe even remembering the Trojan horse.

And Dave Davies is a new soul. He seems to regenerate, be able to leave and leave behind without rancour or regret. And maybe he doesn't even register the fact that he has left anything behind. He's moved on. His moment is everything. It’s as if he lived the life a CBT counsellor advised me to, carpe diem, without ever pausing to consider the past or the future but ready to connect right here, right now. It would probably be uncool of me to quote a John Denver song at this point but, if you have ever read any of my blogs, you’ll know that being thought uncool does not give me sleepless nights: ‘I can’t be contented with yesterday’s story/I can’t live on promises, winter to spring/Today is my moment, and now is my story/Who cares what tomorrow will bring?’ (Today – John Denver) 

I think I used the phrase ‘emotional intelligence’ to convey Dave’s writing and performing, perhaps in my blog comparing Dave’s role in the Kinks to George Harrison’s in the Beatles, and Dave’s solo career to George Harrison’s. Dave's music is transparent, immediate, accessible and stirring but, if you started to analyse the lyrics, you would find they don’t make total sense – it’s more a tide of feeling that carries you along (Strangers). Sometimes it’s like magic (Flowers in the Rain – Dave solo). Don’t get me wrong (to gratuitously quote Different Drum – Stone Poneys, written by Mike Nesmith), Ray has that emotional intelligence too and can create a song that’s sublime, subtle, simple, beautiful, of its time and of all time (to paraphrase the late, beloved Glenn Frey, speaking of the Eagles), like the incomparable Waterloo Sunset, but he’s also a consummate craftsman. When he paints a portrait or a landscape, any detail can be extracted and enlarged, and reveal more about the scene. Or say, if it were a character in a movie, there would be a backstory complete enough to satisfy Dustin Hoffman. The tune will be as contagious as Covid. Dave is more of an Impressionist. He paints in broad brush strokes.

It's not that Ray isn't optimistic. He's a realist. Listen to Real World. How else to explain it? Ray sees the wood and the trees within them. Dave sees the trees. And guess, what, I'm back to Different Drum.

Dedicated to John Gosling, 1948 - 2023. Rest in Peace.

 

Birth of an Obsession – The Kinks

Amazing how your life can change almost overnight. Before and after the Kinks. Of course, for Ray Davies, there’s probably a B.D. (Before Dave) and an A.D (After Dave). And it all hangs on my marking the Kinks programmes on BBC4 in the TV guide (Kinkdom Kome and Imaginary Man), thinking they might be interesting, wanting really a chance to hear ‘Celluloid Heroes’ again, a song that moved me long ago. Must have listened to it on a little transistor. Perhaps because of the poor reception, I always thought the line about Marilyn was ‘Should have been made of vinyl steel [rather than ‘iron or steel’] but she was only made of flesh and blood’. Can anyone tell me why these verses are not in later live versions of the song? But it was really only chance that I watched any of this retrospective. So completely random and now I’m so glad that I did. It seems that I was just waiting around for something to obsess about.

I don't know if it’s good or bad the way I am. At any point I can develop an obsessive interest in something. Obviously I liked them in the past. But only a little. Particular songs I remember hearing on oldies stations are ‘Celluloid Heroes’, ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Lola’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’. Certain songs are very familiar to me when I hear them again – ‘Dead-End Street’, ‘Autumn Almanac’, ‘Set Me Free’, which I don’t think I realised was the Kinks but probably thought was the Beatles, and ‘Come Dancing’ but I never truly appreciated their genius till now. Plus in the old days, it wasn’t only the fact that I didn’t have the means to indulge an interest in something and I didn’t – I had no power at all, let alone purchasing power. In those days, I was acted upon and not acting because of the way I’d been brought up or maybe simply because I was a child. But the means itself didn’t even exist.

Now of course there’s youtube, which has enabled me to rediscover the Kinks, gradually, live and on record, at different stages in their career. I always thought of them as whimsical and witty, not quite serious but they’re so much more than this. Ray Davies, observing and commenting on the world around him, with accuracy, wry humour, irony and affection, long before Damon and Jarvis. Now I can't believe how much time I’ve spent in the last week just watching or listening to the Kinks, wondering about them, well, the brothers mainly and their fascinating relationship. It’s total immersion. And I wonder: is it only me that gets like this? Or do the Kinks do this to everyone who takes the time to really listen? I actually feel lucky to care so much about something, and that there is something special enough to involve me so completely. The music is paramount but let’s face it, the Davies brothers are intriguing and charismatic, in performance captivating, which doesn’t hurt. Now, when I’m working (so fortunate to work from home), I have to have a ‘Kinks break’ every half hour or so. After more than an hour, I start Jonesing for a song. The songs are something else.

So begins the voyage of discovery, a magical mystery tour entirely dependent on the efforts other music fans have made to download tracks (famous, rare, from obscure foreign TV shows, live, studio, audio only) and interviews onto the net. Thank you to everyone. Now the songs that we listen to most are not the ones we knew although all those songs are glorious but earlier or later ones, like ‘Tell Me Now So I’ll Know’, a perfect jewel of a 60s pop ballad, the angst-ridden ‘This Man He Weeps Tonight’, the Dylanesque ‘God’s Children’, the later, rocked-up version of ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’, with either brother singing lead or the melancholic anthem, 'Rock 'N' Roll Fantasy'. Not to mention the solo material – ‘Imaginary Man’, 'Flowers in the Rain'; I could go on but this is only meant to be an introduction.

And so it begins. From a stray spark on BBC4, a fire has been lit. (Sorry – I seem to have gone all Lord of the Rings). The fuel is inexhaustible with more interviews and songs coming online every day. At the moment, it feels like an eternal flame but I am anxious that, several ebay and Amazon purchases down the line, it will sputter and go out. Is it merely an infatuation or the real thing? Oh, who cares? At least I feel enthusiastic about something. As those other warring brothers might put it: ‘You gotta roll with it.’

More later.