Dave Davies and George Harrison: Parallel Lives Part I

I’ll confine the first part of this blog to the early- to- mid-60s to make it more manageable.

I’ve already written a little about Dave’s guitar in the Kinks and the vital presence he was live and now I’m going to focus on his vocals and his songwriting.

I’ve been wondering whether there are parallels in Dave’s contribution to the Kinks with George Harrison’s to the Beatles: both lead guitarists, both great guitarists, neither of them as prolific in output as the main songwriter/s in the band. I would argue that some of the songs they did write had more emotional intensity. It’s an interesting jumping-off point for a reconsideration of Dave’s role in the Kinks.

I read in a recent article that George only managed to get about one song on each Beatles album. Whether this was his choice, I don't know. With Dave, it seems to me that he was probably discouraged by the facility and ease with which Ray turned out songs and possibly by the sheer number he came up with. Plus what demotivated Dave would motivate Ray.

I was going to write that one difference was that George only ever sang his own compositions with the Beatles but fact-checking proved me wrong. He did sing lead on at least a couple of Lennon and McCartney tunes (I'm Happy Just to Dance with You, Do You Want to Know a Secret); Dave sang on more of Ray’s songs than this and both Dave and George sang lead vocals on a number of covers. It’s not exactly clear how the decision about who would sing what was made. A few times in X-Ray, Ray mentions that he thought Dave’s voice would suit a song better or that he wrote a song for Dave, for instance, he says:

‘We recorded Come On Now [I love the version on the Picture Book set that I was lucky enough to win at the first Satsang weekend, when Dave gets the words wrong and has to restart twice, with laughter and comments in between], which I had written for Dave to sing as the B-side of our next single, Tired of Waiting for You’. 
This is par for the course – the track Dave sang (or wrote) would be the B-side even when it was exceptional like I’m Not Like Everybody Else, also originally written for Dave. Later Ray might change his mind about who should sing as he did with the latter.

Anyway, I’ve started to digress onto Dave’s vocals so let’s go.

Dave was crucial, especially in the early days, with his signature guitar sound on songs like You Really Got Me (discussed in more detail elsewhere) and his powerful lead vocal on original songs and the aforementioned covers that were then a staple of Kinks sets. Ray realises that certain of these fit Dave’s ra(n)ge and the urgency of his delivery, for instance, the rock/blues numbers, Milk Cow Blues, I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain, Beautiful Delilah and the Ray songs of the same ilk, such as I Don’t Need You Any More, all of which he interprets with exuberance, with his own potent feral amalgam of anger and sexual energy. Of course Ray also sang covers but not to the same extent and not with the same gusto.

COVERS

The moods and lyrics of these songs gel perfectly with Dave’s raucously fervent vocals. He may sometimes get the words wrong (remembering words is not his forte) but you never doubt his intent and he brings a credibility to some of these blues/rock standards that I don't think Ray could.

Milk Cow Blues (Sleepy John Estes)

‘Well I've tried everything to get along with you/But I'm gonna tell ya what I'm gonna do/I'm sick of all your crying, gonna leave you alone/If you don't believe I'm going/You can count the days I'm gone/I'm gonna leave/Gonna leave your lovin' baby, oh some day/Well if you don't believe I'm going/Watch me leaving you this way’

Again, who sings which bit is not set in stone. In 1965, I said before that Ray has yet to find his roar while Dave manages to smile and sneer at the same time – he wants to express the frustration in the lyrics but can't hide his delight at getting to sing on TV, so his demeanour and his performance are part-menace, part-glee (with classic hair toss) and pure exultation. Ray comes in and Dave never resumes the lead vocal, a pity as there’s some shameless one-upmanship from him in the 1966 performance. Dave’s voice is hoarse, strained, intense, real, an animal unleashed. His guitar and Mick’s drumming driving the song at points (can hardly hear Pete’s bass, although this song usually depends on it so it’s possibly just this recording), with a final flourish at the end, not that the self-involved French crowd seems to appreciate or notice it. Why is it that the French TV crews always show the audience at the expense of the band? It’s true of tennis tournaments too – the French are so obsessed with themselves that they really think we would rather see a French child or woman in the crowd than the actual tennis players.

Beautiful Delilah (Chuck Berry) 1964

That high rasp in his voice and the way the band race through the song adds a rush of excitement.

Naggin' Woman (Jerry West, Jimmy Anderson) 1965

‘So stop your naggin' woman/Nagging me right off my face/Well baby if you weren't naggin'/Honey you'd be so sweet’

Leisurely blues that Dave delivers in a drawl. Great picking on the guitar.

I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain (credited to Shel Talmy) 1964

Lazy, laidback beat works with Dave’s trademark lackadaisical, slurred vocals.

I’m a Lover Not a Fighter (J. D. Miller) 1964

The beginning of the true rock vocal, that fine serrated edge. Dave the Rave lets loose.

Good Golly Miss Molly (John Marascalco/Robert ‘Bumps’ Blackwell, 1958)

Dave’s joy as he performs this blues classic in 1973 is almost palpable. It infects the rest of the band. And John Gosling rocks the honkytonk piano.

EARLY RAY SONGS

I Don’t Need You Any More 1964

Dave’s distinctively rougher-edged lead vocal – is that Ray’s as counterpoint? It doesn’t sound like Ray. Very Beatles-ish, especially the bridge. Dave seems to come in a couple of words into each line, as if for emphasis – he seems to really mean it. His vocals reinforce the bitter triumph in the lyrics.

‘Well I don't need you honey/'Cause things just ain't the same/Since you've been going out with other fellas/Things have really (have) changed/Well I needed you once/But now I'm standing alone/I don't need you any more.’

Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight 1965

Again, despite what looks like gloriously bad miming but might just be out-of-synch sound, Dave’s joie de vivre is contagious.

DAVE'S EARLY SONGWRITING

First a comparison of Dave’s One Fine Day 1964 with George Harrison’s Don’t Bother Me 1963

Both of these are completely charming and haven’t received much attention.

Dave’s early songs were perfect for the infant Kinks and for the time, great little pop songs with a Merseybeat feel, I Believed You (1963/4) and One Fine Day (a crime that this wasn’t recorded by the Kinks or Dave; Shel Naylor’s voice has a  similar jagged edge but I would still love to hear Dave sing it) – a song as energetic, fresh, irrepressible and irresistible as Dave himself. Simple but effective and similar in tone and story to George’s initial input with the Beatles, Don’t Bother Me, a song that George himself dismisses but which I think is on a par with or even superior to what Lennon and McCartney were writing at the time, just as One Fine Day compares favourably with Ray’s I Need You, admittedly only a B-side (ok I know many of you love it and Ray does too but I find it pedestrian). Lost girlfriends are the subject of the songs but the jaunty tunes suggest the boys are pretty philosophical about their losses.

Weirdly the vocal on I Believed You doesn’t sound like either Ray or Dave. It sounds more like George.

Got My Feet on the Ground 1965

A song credited to Dave and Ray that Dave races through with such a burst of breathless optimism that the first line at first listen sounds like ‘La la la la la’ when in fact he is singing words, just failing to enunciate them in his hurry. A breath of fresh air in comparison to some of the material the Kinks did release: Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy and Who’ll Be the Next in Line. Not that Ray wasn't writing truly beautiful songs at this time that never got further than demo stage: I’ve Got That Feeling, Tell Me Now So I’ll Know. Perhaps there were simply too many to go round..

Wait till the Summer Comes Along 1965

Country-style tune in which the guitar sounds like a banjo and in which Dave sounds upbeat despite the theme:

I know my summer'll never come/I know I'll cry until my dying day has come/Let the winter roll along/I've got nothing left but song.

I think it’s always difficult in a band when one person is a prolific composer as Ray was. Dave’s situation reminds me of Grant Hart’s in Husker Du, with Bob Mould churning out tunes constantly and therefore believing he had more of a claim to tracks on an album, while Grant wrote much more from emotion as Dave does.

In the beginning, Dave was obviously having way too much fun to knuckle down to songwriting. It wasn’t something he felt obliged to do, Ray being the one who reacted to the pressure from the record companies and the pressure he put on himself. Neither have Dave and responsibility ever been on great terms so it was natural for him to leave this up to Ray in the 60s when there were so many other distractions (sex, drugs and alcohol). Ray was asked to provide a song for each episode of a six-week series called Where Was Spring:

‘I had the brief for a song on a Thursday, wrote it on Friday and it went out on Saturday’.

It’s almost as if he welcomes the opportunity to work to this gruelling schedule. I can imagine what Dave would have said if asked to deliver songs like this, probably something ruder than this:

‘I don’t function that well being pushed. Being inspired, I can go on forever.’ (Dave in Uncut interview).

Ray seems to thrive on pressure, rises to the challenge, even seems to welcome the task of exercising his ingenuity within certain constraints. Dave is the total opposite. While Dave might rail against the confines and mores of the system, Ray works within it, slyly subverting and denigrating it. Dave has a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything restrictive and once things get difficult or too much like a chore, he bails. Telling Dave to do something (especially when he was young) would probably ensure that there was little chance that he would do it. He would see any limits (time, studio) as an attempt to circumscribe his imagination but also, he was far more conscious, still single and carefree, that he was missing out on other opportunities. He had other, more hedonist priorities: making the most of his new-found fame and promise of wealth. Obviously Ray was married with all the responsibilities that entailed while Dave had so far escaped that fate although I’m not sure it would have made much difference. So the idea that Dave should make a solo album to capitalise on his popularity and good looks was destined to fail.

Dave grumbles:

‘It stirred up all the emotions about Sue and I didn’t want to do the bleeding record. I felt I had to do it out of duty rather than out of joy, fun and excitement. They were very exuberant times and there I was, traipsing into the studio to force this stuff out.’

You can imagine that Dave regretted each minute spent cooped up in that small studio, trying to create to order, minutes and hours he could have spent on the town. He has no misgivings about not completing the record but his pent-up feelings for Sue and the situation resulted in some beautiful, heartfelt, soul-searching songs, full of anguish. Being a social animal, he misses the band. But perhaps it wasn’t a bad plan, to give Dave a platform for his creativity, which could be stifled under the barrage of Ray’s new songs. There seemed little space on Kinks releases for these impassioned gems, each wrested from Dave’s soul merely to languish on a B-side. Perhaps this relegation was a punishment for his refusal to complete the album.

George Harrison traversed a similar trajectory, his first Beatles A-side being Something in 1969, with the exquisite While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Here Comes the Sun unbelievably deemed not to be A-side material. I’ll compare these with Dave’s songs from the same era in Part II.

Inspiration

As Mick says in the Imaginary Man documentary, Ray could write a song about anything. For him, it was more of an intellectual process, springing from an idea, whereas for Dave it was primarily cathartic, a release. Dave needed to feel passionate before he was driven to express himself, hence all those rage-filled, melancholy digs at (the much-maligned in song) Sue: Susannah’s Still Alive, This Man He Weeps, Crying, Love Me till the Sun Shines, Funny Face.

It seems like I'm only beginning to scratch the surface so more on the above in Part II plus Eastern religions, mysticism, karma and the lighter side of the comparison.

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.

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.