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’)

X-Raying 'X-Ray' by Ray Davies: Part One

Had to divide this up as it became longer, evolving from an essay into a dissertation. Please excuse the length.

Ray Davies’s decision to write an autobiography seems a peculiar one when it is almost immediately apparent that he just wants to confuse the issue. Which issue? Every issue. The title itself is an enigma.




It’s typical of his sense of humour that he’s called this an ‘Unauthorized Autobiography’, suggesting the following:

1. An acknowledgement that there can be no completely accurate version of events, as everything is subjective; if even his version is not authorized or authoritative, what hope is there for anyone else’s attempt?
2. That the book has not been authorized by the powers that be (the people in grey), the mysterious ‘them’, referred to so often in the text and is therefore more likely to be true.
3. That he is poking fun at the biography industry itself and perhaps other unauthorized biographies of the Kinks.
4. That he recognizes that he isn’t always entirely honest. Or, at least, that there might be some truth in the book but probably not the whole truth. It’s certainly not a straightforward read but we would expect nothing less or more of Ray. Or
5. He’s simply playing with the words because he can.

The main title, 'X-Ray', is also open to interpretation:

1. It implies something that he mentions more than once in the book – that he is no longer the Ray from these stories, that that is an ex-Ray, inevitably changed and alien to the Ray now speaking. After all, ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’.
2. It gives the impression that he is going beneath the surface of the story, under the skin, like an X-ray, to reveal what is usually hidden. He brings this to the fore again in the final few pages when he has an X-ray of his back fall out of a folder. The problem with this approach is that it sometimes wilfully ignores what is on the surface. I don't think this is a deliberate obfuscation. I think it’s how Ray’s mind works.

Identity crisis or 'Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues'
In his songs, Ray Davies often adopts a persona to present a situation from a particular character’s perspective or writes about a specific character he’s created from his (Ray’s) own perspective and in this book he attempts something similar except that this time he takes on two aspects of his own personality or himself at different stages in life, at least that is what is implied in the Foreword, also called an Introduction. So, he’s the unnamed reporter interviewing the elderly RD as well as RD himself. (For the purpose of this review and to avoid confusion, when I talk about Ray Davies, the author of the book and the frontman of the Kinks, I’ll call him Ray, to distinguish him from the ‘characters’ in the book.) Of course, he’s hiding behind these creations – we can't trust them as each has their own agenda (although naturally we mustn’t forget that, in fact, they’re all Ray’s, that he has a conflicting set of agendas) and admits that what he says/remembers may or may not be true. It’s not so much that the line between fact and fiction is blurred, it’s more that the distinction doesn’t exist. Just as Ray’s songs take up residence in our heads, when the young man listens to his music, this allows RD to enter his subconscious via his dreams and even, in their first meeting, to possess him, as if the only way he can convey to the writer the visceral nature of his experience is to have him go through it (like the fellatio from the groupie or a particularly vicious physical fight with Dave).

And so he’s a detached presence, an observer (as he is in his songs) even in his own life, as if just being himself, telling us about himself, would not be enough. Perhaps this signifies a germ of insecurity. You get the idea that everything he says is considered and his reactions measured.

This use of characters invests the text with a degree of mystery and uncertainty. The reader has to weave a way through the dream sequences and fantasy sections in a quest for the truth of what really happened.

It also allows the reporter to comment on RD’s character (an obsession with breasts, for instance), his opinions wavering between admiring (‘he was still a handsome old boy’) and damning (‘degenerate, sexist weirdo’). We must remember that this is actually Ray passing judgement on himself, which he also does a few pages later, when he declares ‘even as a child, I was a dirty old man’, demonstrating a degree of self-awareness; Ray realises that people might well disapprove of these traits but he doesn’t try to hide or excuse them. Other comments include the way that RD switches accents, one minute ‘pantomime Cockney’, the next well-spoken, Ray perhaps acknowledging that he was the original Mockney. This is particularly apparent in performances from around the punk explosion of 1977, when Ray says ‘I suppose’ after everything and his accent becomes more common, for instance, the way he introduces the next song after this version of ‘Get Back in the Line’ (rather endearing, sort of, I suppose). He has shown a fondness for Cockney rhyming slang in his lyrics – ‘chauffeur-driven jamjar’; ‘two-tone daisy roots’ (‘Sitting in My Hotel’); ‘soaking up that currant bun’ (‘Sitting in the Midday Sun’).

Because of all this, the book poses more questions than it answers. When the reporter ignores some issues and concentrates on others, you get frustrated before realising that these are the matters that Ray wants us to focus on. He’s the puppet master here. But do we really want to know about ‘the girl’ (and whether she is Julie Finkle, although he claims she’s an assimilation of many: ‘Truly, Julie, you're only a name/You could be a Molly or a Sarah-Jane/But if I should never see you again/I'll never forget you, truly’) or would we rather learn about his relationships with the rest of the band, his wife, his family or satisfy more prurient curiosity?

It’s like an Impressionist painting. You’re not given an exact representation of his life, which would probably be impossible but a general impression. That’s all Ray wants you to have. For instance, he leaves you with the idea that he was usually faithful to Rasa, resisting temptation until … he didn’t. But was this the only time? That’s the implication.

Importance of events
So it’s a complex, deliberate form of subterfuge, with the timeline all mixed up so events are hard to follow; more a series of stories related as they occur to him bearing little relation to the actual order in which they happened. I would like to think that the reason for this circumspection is the need for discretion; names might be changed to protect the innocent, as they say, or at least to ensure that the guilty are not easily identifiable.

Some aspects and incidents are covered exhaustively (meetings with lawyers, his confused mental state) or seem to be, like certain characters, representative of what we presume were many similar; others are merely glanced upon. I suppose we have to accept that these are what Ray considers to be the crucial factors in his life, character-building or psyche-forming (the accident that affects his sister Peg, the tragic tale of Rene). What’s worrying about this is where the book ends – 1973 – is this where the original Ray ends?

Dave
This arbitrariness is most apparent in regard to his brother, Dave. We learn a lot about Ray’s state of mind but not much about what Dave is up to, being left with the idea that what Dave did had little effect on Ray (apart from the initial insult of having been born of course) and that occasions when Dave was emotionally desperate did not impinge on Ray’s consciousness although Dave probably did not confide in Ray anyway. This tactic relegates him to a bit-part player in ‘The Ray Davies Show’, a walk-on role with a few lines of dialogue. He’s incredibly vague on Dave’s shenanigans (there is no speculation about why Dave is always in trouble, it just seems to ‘happen’, neither is there any sense that Ray feels at all responsible for his younger sibling bar the line at the beginning ‘I knew that I would always have to protect this interloper’ although I do get the idea that Dave was probably more experienced in the ways of the world than his brother and sexually precocious). Events that have affected and inspired Dave for years are glossed over, with a deal of possibly intentional inaccuracy. So, although Ray seems self-aware (as RD in retrospect), he shows little awareness of others and their problems. We hear more about how Pete Quaife holds a cigarette than we do about Dave’s lost love, Sue, who isn’t even named although RD does recall Nicola, sole arbiter of what was and wasn’t cool in the early days of the Kinks. But it might be that Ray feels he’s mythologised Dave (and their relationship) in song already so why repeat it here? He might expect us to listen to ‘Two Sisters’, ‘Dandy’, ‘Long Way from Home’, ‘All Night Stand’, etc. instead.

I wonder how deliberate this is though, this minimising of other people’s roles in the story. I’ve noticed it with other musicians with inflated egos, how they have a tendency to ignore the contribution of another band member, and once the band has broken up, pretend that they no longer have any interest in what their ex-band mates are doing (Bob Mould of Grant Hart). In refusing to discuss Dave in any concentrated way, Ray denies his importance and downplays his role to ‘other band member’, not acknowledging how integral and to forgive the pun, instrumental, Dave was to the sound of the Kinks. But then again, an autobiography is by its very nature an egocentric proposition so he can't be blamed for that. It’s about him, not Dave. Dave does evince compassion for Ray in 'Kink' though, when Rasa leaves Ray on his birthday, for instance, and when Ray attempts suicide although at other times, Ray can fall off the stage, knock himself out and everyone just laughs.

But perhaps I’m being too hard on Ray. It’s possible that he feels that he could not write about Dave without being overly critical, something that Dave has not been shy of in 'Kink', in which he is sometimes vituperative on the subject of his brother. Discretion might be the better part of valour.

Dave jokes that this book should have been called 'Y-Ray?' Meanwhile Ray claims not to have read 'Kink'. Hmm. He would have to be inhuman not to be curious although it might simply be self-preservation; he might read something that will lead to an even more irretrievable breakdown in their relationship.

Omissions
Perhaps Ray reveals more in the things he doesn’t say, or the incidents he describes at length while getting key details wrong. Is this because he doesn’t care enough about them to get them right? Or did he feel himself too far removed from them? Or does he just think that his rewritten version is better or more exciting and dramatic than the truth?

I get the idea that Ray wants us to believe that he was in control at all times (while Dave was frequently out of control) but this doesn’t sit well with some of the conclusions we may draw and that he seems to want us to draw – for instance, that he may have been deliberately trapped into marriage, the result of a conspiracy. We are given clues but still left with a mystery. I could choose to believe that everything that RD hints may have happened, actually did happen but still be unsure whether his wife was unfaithful, how she received a black eye, etc. (the fact: Rasa had a black eye; the clue: Ray admits he could be violent). Or in whom the possible interloper (the mysterious Barry Fantoni) in the marriage was actually interested: Ray or Rasa. Very intriguing. Like a song lyric or a poem, which we are left to interpret as we please. Much of what we learn has to be teased out of the subtext.

Part Two will follow shortly.

This is my street and I'm never gonna leave it

Took a couple of short tours round Ray and Dave’s old haunts this year, en route to other destinations (plays, gigs etc.); map here

1 September 2011
In town for a gig in the evening, decide to head in early to investigate Highgate, as a Davies-connected area and because we’ve never been there (at least not in daylight). Perhaps we’ll catch sight of Ray. Our preliminary research has been less than rigorous, mainly consisting of watching the ‘I Know Where Ray Davies Lives’ video on YouTube, which is great fun.

Owing to the opposite of forward planning (backward planning otherwise known as retrospect), we end up in Highgate just as Highgate Teas is closing. We’re the sort of people who come to a party and after a couple of hours, put the kettle on so we crave a cup but never mind. Ray has said ‘I always gravitate to where I grew up. I think it is because of the light. In Hampstead, Highgate and Muswell Hill the light is different because of the hills.’ Can't say I notice this today but there certainly are hills and it’s very green for a suburb.

And I miss you most of all
When I see Flowers in the Rain

The violets whisper from the shade
Which their own leaves have made:
Men scent our fragrance on the air,
Yet take no heed
Of humble lessons we would read.


Don’t let anyone tell you that Ray still lives in Muswell Hill. Highgate, though nearby, is a different story. Genteel, expensive, exclusive. A bit like Manhattan versus Brooklyn; more Downton than downtown. Even a tramp (apologies if he’s not) on a bench looks quite well-heeled. Residents have included the rich and famous (Jude Law, George Michael, Rod Stewart) so it’s not your average town. Buried at Highgate Cemetery are Karl Marx, Christina Rossetti (quoted above), Malcolm McLaren.

Decide to cross the road to Waterlow Park, supposedly where the promo for ‘Starstruck’ was filmed, in which the whole band look like they’re having a ball. If only they could have stayed that happy. It’s peaceful (I’ll resist the cliché of an oasis of calm, partly because the whole of Highgate seems to be pretty tranquil), except for a small group of teenagers gathered round a bench, smoking and hanging out, trying and failing to impress each other. It’s not your ordinary municipal park, with some disused and neglected tennis courts, some rough grass, a couple of paths and a playground. It has its own website, which tells us that it ‘“was bequeathed to the public by Sir Sidney Waterlow in 1889 as a ‘garden for the gardenless”’. It boasts events, a café, a historic house, exhibitions and ‘supports a number of important ecological habitats and a rich variety of wildlife’ (well I would put has plenty of ponds and plants but still). These are not simply delusions of grandeur. It’s actually grand.

Then we duck into the Duke’s Head and are greeted by the sort of looks the tourists attract when they go into a pub in An American Werewolf in London. Suspicion turns to disbelief when we ask if they do tea. Beat a hasty retreat. Imagine they’re saying in a generic country accent ‘ They bain’t be from roun’ these parts’. So that’s why they call it a village.

That’s all we had time for, before heading back to Camden Town via Archway tube. One day we’ll get to the Archway Tavern although apparently it’s changed a lot since they shot the 'Muswell Hillbillies' cover there.

Strangers on this road we are on
We are not two we are one.


19 December 2011
I’ve made a resolution to look on the bright side of life – nothing to do with Monty Python.

So, it’s December, it’s raining, it’s not exactly warm, it gets dark by three pm and we decide it’s a good day to do some of the Kinks London tour as we’re off to the theatre in the evening.

If you would like to look at some of the places on the tour, including many that we didn’t get to, there’s footage of them on this version of ‘Fortis Green’ by the Spivs, and it has Ray and Dave’s (and Pete's) old school, from which Dave was expelled, formerly the William Grimshaw School, now called Fortismere. Rather a romantic name.

I know that Ray doesn’t like coming South of the river and we Sarf Londoners don’t venture North without misgivings either. They’re different, North Londoners – we think of them as posh, pretentious, rich, trendy, etc. We're more to down to earth, like Mick Avory. I'm sure Mick Avory would agree. They probably think we’re all yobs. Went to a barbecue at a friend’s (North) and learnt that you couldn’t have a barbecue without haloumi. They actually refused to start the barbecue without it. Our friend (being from South London) hadn’t realised this. Someone was despatched to get some. Needless to say, it wasn’t that hard to find. I didn’t even know what haloumi was.

So it’s a train to London Bridge then the Northern Line to Turnpike Lane. Our luck starts here. Part of the ceiling has collapsed in the underground. The luck bit? We weren’t underneath it.

Then, on the train, a man offers me a seat – I must look pregnant or old, unsteady (but this is before the mulled wine) or plain bolshy. No, bright side, remember – he’s just a gentleman.

‘GILLESPIE ROAD’ was the orginal name of Arsenal station when it opened in 1906, later changed to Arsenal (Highbury Hill) before it was renamed after the football ground. 
So I saved all my money
And packed up my clothes,
And I said good-bye to my friends
And my folks back home


Well I know the tube’s expensive but it’s only seven stops or so – perhaps, Ray, the saving, packing and goodbyes were a little on the melodramatic side. Got to love Ray’s imagination. Also when you’re a child, these places do seem to be almost mythical or simply destinations on the Monopoly board, out of reach, no matter how close in reality.

There's gotta be a place for us to meet
I'll call you when I've found it

Then a bus to Tottenham Lane where we’re handily dropped off by the police station and the Lane Café, mooted to be the one on the cover of ‘Working Man’s Café’. This should be the end of the tour (going by the internet) but, like a lot of things in our lives, we decided to do it backwards. Why start at the beginning when you can start at the end? Plus we haven’t had lunch yet. Didn’t expect the place to be so small but anywhere with an all-day, all-in breakfast is fine by me.

I'm the kid with the greasy spoon
Firmly held in my hand

Or anywhere that does vegetable moussaka with chips It takes a while to arrive but we can

Have a cuppa tea

while we wait. Even this tiny caff has haloumi although I think because it’s a Greek place rather than any nod to pretentious North London taste.

Long ago there was a working man
Don't you know we were all working men
And we'd sit and pass the time of day
At the working man's café

There definitely are working men in the café, if they can be identified by donkey jackets and/or fluorescent waistcoats – but not very hard-working men as they’re there all the time we are and we wait a while for our food. They don’t so much pass the time of day as pass the whole day.

Next stop Konk:

And I've got imitation moonlight
Standing underneath the neon sign

which is a beautiful blue one. We wait outside while we try to bully one another into being brave enough to push the buzzer. Lyn gives first but they have ‘clients in’ (am I the only one who thinks this sounds dodgy?) so can't welcome the hoi polloi but the implication is that they might let us in when they don’t – hmm. Maybe worth a try on another day then?

Midhurst Avenue. We come across like we’re casing the area for a burglary later on as we go up one side of the street and then back down the other, apprising the valuables (stopping to look at someone’s ginormous telly – ours is half the size, old and analogue, a little prehistoric by these standards) and checking for alarm systems. So, Lyn goes, ‘Look, there’s a piano’. In character, I reply ‘It’ll be a bugger to shift, though’.

They'll move me up to Muswell Hill tomorrow

Discover that no one in Muswell Hill knows where anything else is in Muswell Hill. I ask two girls what road we’re on (later discover it’s Fortis Green Rd – in fact I’m at the junction where Dave says that Ray and Rasa once had a flat) and they think it might be Muswell Hill Rd but they’re not sure; a guy with a dog asserts that the other road is Muswell Hill High Street. It isn’t. It’s Muswell Hill Broadway. Altogether seems quite affluent – lots of shops, lots of people. Something about the buildings, perhaps the scale of them, bespeaks an old-world elegance, a little gone to seed.

Almost as many charity shops as Sidcup but with North London prices and more designer-type and specialised merchandise (I’m guessing as I wouldn’t know designer gear if it moved in with me) plus a huge range of little shops. Our High Street has little else but charity shops, nail bars and hairdressers for some reason, its demise signalled by the preponderance of huge supermarkets on the outskirts of town.

God save the little shops …

The Clissold Arms is more upmarket than I expected. Hard to imagine the staff tolerating much actual drunkenness these days.
Mum would shout and scream when Dad would come home drunk/When she asked him where he'd been, he'd say ‘Up the Clissold Arms’

It’s actually rather beautiful inside with Christmas lights arranged artistically and old church chairs in the restaurant – more restaurant than pub now (moving with the times), with a garden and a heated terrace. There are huge vases of extravagant flowers on the bar. As we come in, in our soggy Parkas, a Sloane-ish-looking couple, the only people in the Kinks room, talking very loudly, look askance at us. How do they know we’re from South London? Is it that obvious? Must be the Parkas. They make me feel embarrassed when I stop to look at old 45s on pillars, or flyers and articles inlaid in a tabletop.

Of course, it’s right opposite Denmark Terrace. The Davies family could probably have stayed at home and still heard the boys play. No. 6 is a cute little cottage, a much more modest affair than anything in Midhurst Avenue. Resist the temptation to peer into the famous Front Room.

I love the couch with a picture of the band on it. Pete, Dave and Mick are along the back and Ray is on the seat. It seems a little forward (not to mention rude) to sit on Ray’s face (before even being introduced) and churlish to sit with our backs to Dave. I dare Lyn to snog Dave ‘on the couch’ before we leave but two large glasses of mulled wine won't swing it though I am a little unsteady now.

Who thought I would fall, a slave to demon alcohol

On to:

Fortis Green, memories, of days when I was young

Too dark to see much now and very wet. Looks like another rung up the property ladder. Interesting to see how reluctant the boys were to leave their territory to begin with – all their first homes are pretty close to where they grew up. Family ties were strong.

This is my street and I'm never gonna leave it,
And I'm always gonna stay here

Running out of time now so head back

To those bright city lights

One of these days,
I wanna go home,
Visit my friends,
And see all the places that I used to know

It’s not that far, babe and at least you’re on the tube.

‘The King of Love has died’ … Jackie Leven, Rest in Peace

Quote in title taken (and slightly altered) from Jackie's song, 'Some Ancient Misty Morning')

The Mystery of Love Is Greater Than the Mystery of Death

Larger than life in every way, especially in terms of his immeasurable talent, and a complete one-off, it’s hard to believe that someone who seemed more alive than most of us, and to me indestructible, is dead, this brave, lovely, completely genuine and incredibly gifted man. I felt better about the world just knowing he was in it so this is hard.

Since I found out Jackie was seriously ill, I’ve been unable to listen to more than a line from ‘Universal Blue’ without bursting into tears. I have the live version on the Deep in the Heart of Nowhere CD (quite different from the more uptempo and strangely cheerful studio one, actually a live version has just been added to YouTube) and his voice, so plaintive, goes straight to my heart. Somehow especially poignant and heart-rending in contrast to the light-hearted story that precedes it. Exquisitely melancholic. Now it’s very hard for me to hear his voice, which always had the ability to move me anyway, without sobbing. And who else is going to title a song ‘Young Male Suicide Blessed by Invisible Woman’?

I was introduced to Jackie’s music by a university friend who had all the Doll by Doll albums. Soon, I had them too but the band had already broken up without any success – their idiosyncratic talent out of step with the times as ever, too musically and lyrically accomplished for punk or New Wave and too rough-looking (they looked like a bunch of bruisers spoiling for a fight – you certainly wouldn’t want to mess with them) for an era of pastel suits, frilly shirts and floppy hair, neither a feel-good band in the 80s mould nor a pointlessly rebellious ‘what have you got?’ punk outfit. Way too real for people who wanted to escape, they pondered deeper questions with wit, eloquence and intelligence. From the anthemic ‘Main Travelled Roads' to the wild and thrilling ‘Gypsy Blood’, Jackie had this unerring ability to discern beauty in desolation and desolation in beauty, not to mention the elegiac in the everyday and the mythic in the moment (‘Some Ancient Misty Morning’), and express this in song while remaining something of an incurable romantic – ‘I do believe that lovers on the harbour wall were meant to be’ (‘Cool Skies’), I always imagined to refer to graffitied names on the wall but maybe there were real lovers, and ‘While the neon universe was winking to an end, And taxi drivers yawned from Earl’s Court to the Strand’, told me of a London I had yet to visit. Doll by Doll sounded as dangerous as they looked: ‘The Human Face’ – ‘A watched clock never moves, they said, so he never watched the clock. The only time he saw the hands, they were rushing like a torrent round a rock’ describes the song’s own trajectory, one minute soft, slow, tender, the next out of control, gathering momentum, an essay in intensity. It fit with my college life, ‘Angst, angst and more angst’ as a friend put it at the time. We were all so post-Joy Division (in fact, let's face it, post-'Blue Monday') although yet to experience any actual pain or sorrow. At the time, I wrote a poem that included the line ‘I'm in love with Jackie Leven’s voice’. I still am.

Then, when I was working in London, just as Jackie resurfaced, I had the privilege of seeing the phenomenon that was Leven live (almost invariably in shorts, him not me), many times, dragging friends and colleagues with me, to the Borderline, to the 12 Bar. All were impressed. I didn’t know at the time that some of the songs that I requested from Doll by Doll days, were, since the mugging, out of his new vocal range, ‘Main Travelled Roads’, ‘The Fountain Is Red’, etc. The studio albums are amazing but I will always treasure my memories of the gigs, which are where Jackie really shone – his magnificent, awe-inspiring voice, every emotion amplified, invested with an unbelievable vehemence, his skill as a raconteur and those incredibly funny stories. Though solo, you always felt that there was more than one person on stage, given Jackie’s skill on the guitar, – why just use the strings when you have a whole guitar? He was invariably entertaining, enthralling, entrancing. In a way, he was suited to these venues, because a Jackie gig was always a special and an intimate experience, where he would converse and interact with the crowd.

I hate to talk of Jackie in the past tense. He meant a lot to me. I did a fair amount of evangelising on behalf of him and his music. Part of me did relish the fact that he was little known but a bigger part wanted to share him with everyone.

I had some contact with him, mainly by fax (I was at work and too in awe to ring him up), persuading him to let Grant Hart play the CORE benefit show, then persuading Grant Hart to play the benefit (he was on a budget and was only paid £25 for expenses, while remarking to me that in 1987 he was paid $25,000 for one show although it was to be divided with the other members of Husker Du). Also convinced Jackie to play a gig for Bromley Acoustic Music Club, of which I wasn’t even a member, but it meant I got to see another Jackie gig. And so, my brief but exciting career as a music promoter, ended. I had a real job but this was so much more fun. I still dabble occasionally although some might call it interfering.

Although it’s lovely to read so many glowing tributes in the papers, it’s a shame they never devoted this many column inches to him while he was hale and hearty and at the height of his powers.

So, we’ve got the music and we’ve got the memories. And both are glorious. At the moment, of course, the sadness is overwhelming. Much has been written about the fact that Jackie never received the acclaim he deserved. It seemed that he would ever be on the cusp of making it but be destined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, talked up one minute and forgotten the next but I think we should all concentrate on the dedication and loyalty of the fans that he has got, evident in the posts on Yahoo and Facebook. Maybe he was just too great to be appreciated by the hordes. There are a lot of undiscerning people out there. With Jackie, you either get it or you don’t and once you do, you’re hooked. He reels you in with those haunting melodies, the poetry of his lyrics and the breadth of their reach, his heart and soul, the power and the majesty of his voice and his extraordinary gift for telling stories, either spoken or sung. He was never less than captivating.

That voice – instantly recognisable, unique – I would know it anywhere. Unparalleled. Flawless. There are no words to describe it so I’ll give up right now. It will echo forever in our minds and hearts.

We did love you, Jackie and we always will. As Jackie says at the end of this live version of ‘Exit Wound’– God bless us all. We’ll see you somewhere else.

[I’m sure Jackie would have been amused by the obituary that eulogises Doll by Doll’s Gypsy Heart. Mmm. Like that famous Bruce Springsteen album, The Stream. How can you ever have listened to the track and not know it’s Gypsy Blood, especially as in inimitable Jackie fashion, the word ‘blood’ is extended to seventeen syllables in each chorus? As I wrote in my comment: 'Shades of Marge, the New York plugger, anyone?']

Here’s a review I wrote in 1994

Jackie Leven / The Borderline 29 July 1994
Jackie still has a voice that quietens crowds in seconds – massive, majestic, effortlessly soaring – he's a one-man choir, whether playing to a packed house at the Borderline where tonight we could sample his own whisky, Leven's Lament (bemused businessmen from the restaurant above are totally won over, by Jackie, not the whisky) or, barefoot and relaxed, to a few people sitting politely at tables in a church crypt in Clerkenwell where alcohol and cigarettes are prohibited.

The songs range from hard, rocky numbers like ‘Cabin Fever’* and a frenetic version of ‘Sacred Bond’ to the melancholy triumph of ‘Snow in Central Park’ and my particular favourite, ‘Call Mother’. "Call mother a lonely field." What does it mean? Somehow when he sings, it all makes sense. I hope you’re right, Jackie.**

Call it what you will - Celtic rock, folk, whatever, Jackie and the band give it their all. Tone, thanks for telling me about Doll by Doll all those years ago.

* Can't find this song anywhere. Have I got the title wrong?

** ‘Everybody gets the chance to fall in love again’ (‘Natural’)


Other Leven blogs can be found at The King of Love Has Died,  Exit Wound and I Never Saw the Movie and Jackie Leven and Adventures in Levenland.

I mention Jackie in my first blog about modern music. Also see bashful's blog.

Dave Davies Satsang Weekend Setlist September 2011

Ok, here’s the setlist from the Satsang Weekend, copied from the band’s one but might not be in order. It was all pretty amazing.

All Day and All of the Night
Where Have All the Good Times Gone
Set Me Free
Tired of Waiting for You
The Lie
See My Friends
Creeping Jean
Rock Siva
Death of a Clown
Too Much on My Mind
Are You Ready, Girl?
Fortis Green
Flowers in the Rain
Remember the Future
Strangers
Love Me Till the Sun Shines
Rock Me, Rock You
I’m Not Like Everybody Else
Living on a Thin Line
This Man He Weeps Tonight
You Really Got Me
Get Back in the Line

Next night
More or less the same but with
Hare Krishna
One Day at a Time
A snatch of Last of the Steam-Powered Trains
Party Line
Sea of Heartbreak

The band, apart from the drummer, Frank Rawle, who came from Barnstaple, had travelled from LA and were Jonathan Lea (rhythm guitar - he can also be seen in the version of The Lie from the World Trade Center, linked above, amusing to watch Dave try to control his lyric folder, luckily there was no breeze to contend with on the weekend), David Nolte (bass), Kristi Callan (backing vocals). They were a great support to Dave and all worked really well together.

Question: Why is the song called Rock Me, Rock You when Dave always sings ‘Rock You, Rock Me’? He introduces this 2003 live version as Rock You, Rock Me. Beautifully tender.

Corrections: Do let me know if you were there and remember the setlist differently.

My next blog will be about the great Jackie Leven. I can't believe he's gone.

Dave Davies Breaks My Heart (Again): Satsang 1

So we did it. Went on the Satsang Weekend. It took a huge leap of faith. Like the jump that Robert Redford and Paul Newman make in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Well maybe not as risky as that. It was billed as the opportunity of a lifetime but I’m the sort of person who, when opportunity knocks at the door, crouches down behind the sofa until it goes away again. At one point during the preliminaries, I thought I was joining the FBI or something; the payment method that my bank told me was unsafe and would cost me £30 (luckily the bank proposed an alternative that worked), the security, the ID laminates, the whole clandestine nature of the affair seemed so outlandish but in a way, this somehow only served to make the prospect more intriguing. It was all so Secret Squirrel. Although I did wonder what might be coming next: Fingerprints? Retinal scans? The absolute secrecy, need-to-knowness was possibly a little excessive considering that, if I’d told my friends that I was going to a satsang weekend at Dave Davies’s house, they wouldn’t have said, ‘Oh my God, you know where Dave Davies lives?’, they would have asked ‘Who’s Dave Davies?’ and possibly, ‘What’s satsang?’ I did wonder what sort of people had been invited to Dave and Kate’s before that they felt the need to make us sign a declaration that we would abide by a daunting list of ‘terms and conditions’ and just as it was nerve-wracking for us to put our trust in people we had never met, I kept thinking it can't be easy to invite all these strangers, possibly stalkers, to your house so it was probably even more nerve-wracking for them. Still, it was a little ironic given Dave’s rep as a rule-breaker. When I told my friends I didn’t know where I was going and wasn’t allowed to know, they were sure I would be inducted into a cult and they would have to break me out and then spend a long time deprogramming me. Still, I’d never been in a cult before so was willing to take my chances. After all, you only live once. My worry was that it all seemed like it might be a bit ‘Abandon cynicism, all ye who enter here’, which is a hard thing for me to do. With the added pressure of breathing and meditation, two things I don’t excel at.

So what was it like? Although it wasn’t exactly what we were promised or what we expected, because of Dave, who and how he is, it was so much more. He didn’t only open his house to us; he opened his heart and soul. He’s a sweetheart; totally unguarded, so open that he releases some conduit of emotion in me so that I spend much of the weekend in tears. This is partly because of bad news that I had before I went away but it’s something more. Dave really touches me and affects me somehow so that I feel what he’s feeling, so that each time he cries or his voice breaks, I’m already in tears but I can't know what he’s thinking about. It’s very strange. At one point he talks about being in love – I think he must imagine I’m in the middle of or at the end of a tragic love affair because I keep bursting into tears. I feel there’s some emotional connection, elemental and beyond words, and maybe only momentary. But Dave   probably has this effect on many people and has learnt to go with it.

I’ve never cried so much or been hugged so much in my whole life although my life has not been high on the hugs front anyway. It’s cathartic. The other members of the group are really supportive and kind and I hope that many of us will keep in touch. There is healing from the professionals Dave has enlisted but it’s therapeutic just to be in the group, to accept its and Dave’s kindness.

It’s interesting to hear some of Dave’s ideas, reassuringly eclectic, especially for someone like me, a Brideshead Revisited type of Catholic, more interested in the superstitious, personality-based side of religion, whose own brand of beliefs is a bit like a Woolworth’s pick and mix, with bits of everything all jumbled up, there’s nothing like variety, my ultimate faith lying in St Anthony, and Dave’s credo, which is based on love, should be our ideal although some things are a little harder to accept (like dolphins coming from another planet). Having recently had what faith I had shaken by an event that belies any concept of karma (and not for the first time), it was surprisingly moving to be with people who still believed in something, who could conceive that their positive energy could affect the universe, that we could pool our spiritual resources and make a difference. Dave is very anti intermediaries (priests and so on) but he can be my intermediary any day. Dave notwithstanding though, a couple of days after the weekend, I hedged my bets and bought medals of the saints from Buckfast Abbey and celebrated the Equinox at some stone rows on Dartmoor with a Druidess.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not quite ready to canonize Dave yet because I just read an interview with Ray where the interviewer was ‘kind’ enough to point out all the cruel things that Dave had recently said about him. Ray said that he wouldn’t read the article because it would only upset him. It reminds me of my sister and I. I once said that she has empathy for every living creature except me. I know circumspection’s not in your nature but have a heart, babe. He may be all those things but if you prick him, doth he not bleed?

And am I the only one who was a bit disappointed that the talking stick never said anything?

But, let’s be honest here. I didn’t even know what satsang was so I’m not really here for that even though it was intriguing and I found it really affected me. (Or was it just Dave?) Primarily, I’m here for the music.

The gigs in the evening are amazing and the band are great. More than intimate – we’re practically standing on top of them. Dave might forget the words or even the chords occasionally but the emotion and the passion and the humour shine through any minor restarts. He really gives of himself when he performs. He might have managed to get through ‘Flowers in the Rain’ the second night without crying but I didn’t and L* knew I wouldn’t. It gets me every time. I don't think about myself – it’s imagining what he’s feeling that upsets me so much. Empathy. Kurt Cobain was right about that. Still, Dave manages to slip easily between joking and intensity.

But we danced, we sang along, we had a blast. As a relatively new fan, it was the first time I had heard ‘Are You Ready, Girl?’, ‘Rock You , Rock Me’, ‘The Lie’ and ‘Get Back in the Line’. Wow. How lucky am I?

It was incredibly uplifting to hear Dave sing ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’, a pivotal track for me and a major factor in the reasons for me being here at all, and have everyone sing along. I could forget my disappointment in karma and experience unadulterated joy. And he danced with me! Well, sort of.

So many things that I wish I’d asked or said, like ‘Dave. Did you ever know all the words to ‘Village Green Preservation Society'?’

And maybe next time I’ll get up the courage to request some songs. I was dying to hear ‘Run’, ‘Mindless Child of Motherhood’, ‘Lost in Your Arms’, ‘Love Gets You’, but angsted too long over whether there was some particular reason he didn’t play them any more.

Despite everything, the expense and the extreme secrecy, I ask a friend if she’d do it again and she says ‘In a heartbeat’ and I would too. Of course it’s Dave that does it; he still has it, whatever it is. He really touches me. Ok, he looks older but he has that indefinable something; you can see and hear the sixteen-year-old he was in him still, that love of life. Great to see him so well recovered from his stroke. If he toured, wouldn’t we all go? Looking forward to hearing the new album.

Dave, Don’t Stop Breaking My Heart.