Ray Davies – A Well Respected Man

I’ve just been reading X-Ray, an amusing, semi-autobiographical work by former Kink (and darling of certain gushing members of the current British pop aristocracy) Ray Davies. The book follows an anonymous narrator who, captivated by our hero, sets out to penetrate the mind of the enigmatic Mr. Davies. By writing in the third person, Ray indulges himself in a few rather embarrassing literary flourishes, and he seems just a little too well pleased with his substantial back-catalogue. But while Ray’s observations of himself are often hilariously conceited and self-consciously overwritten, it is easy to forgive his obvious pride in an admittedly rather brilliant career.

The Kinks started their life like so many other British bands of the Sixties – playing raw, nihilistic R n’ B. Their seminal, proto-punk recordings are short, almost violently catchy variations on the “Louie Louie” theme which flirt with distorted guitar. While songs like “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night” managed to attract the praise and envy of arch Sixties icon Pete Townshend for their simplicity and power (“I was influenced more by the Kinks than any other group..”) and are still enjoying heavy rotation on most plodding golden hits radio stations in this universe, Raymond Douglas Davies’ did not capitulate to the status of urban poet until the last years of that decade, when everyone in the rock world, apart from the stubborn Mr. Davies, was ready to shed their kaftan and plunge into the era of the muddy festival.

At the end of the Sixties, when the music and style of the American hippie counterculture took hold and became entrenched in the popular imagination, the Kinks retreated into campy social critique and the symbols and myths of their own (quintessentially English) cultural heritage rather than mimicking the musical inflections of American performers, as so many British artists had done before them to remain commercially afloat. There are three albums by the Kinks which every self-respecting riff-stealer should own – Something Else By the Kinks, The Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur: Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. As well as containing timeless anthems like “Waterloo Sunset”, “David Watts” and “Shangri-La”, these albums were richly melodic, poignant and socially relevant – and commercially overlooked.

By the end of the decade Ray Davies’ songs were taking as their subjects not bombastic political tirades, nor love and peace; but such small-time concerns as the progress of technology, and the little familiarities (and mundanities) of English life – semi-detached suburbia, holidays in Blackpool, village greens, steam locomotives. His songs were positively bristling with references to a bygone era. The concerns of Davies’ lyrics were founded in the peculiarities of British history and the class system, and in many instances he assumed the role of social critic. “Sunny Afternoon” and “End of the Season” both featured the endearing yet chiding caricature of an idle upper-class dilettante. This city gent appeared again in “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”, in which Davies poked fun at the frenzy of consumerism which had been occasioned by the transitory fashions of subcultures and countercultures of Swinging London, (of which he was, by this time, firmly a part), and on “She’s Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina”, he gently mocked the English obsession with keeping up appearances in the face of adversity.

While the records of the time were increasingly “prog”; multi-layered, inaccessible and (often self-indulgently) lengthy, the Kinks retained the format of the three minute pop song, maintaining efficient, and for the most part ebullient melodies which drew satirically upon the pre-rock culture of their parents. Each song had one prevailing lyrical theme which would be echoed by its instrumentation. “Tin Soldier Man” is set to a simple Victorian military marching beat, while “All of my friends were there”, a song about a nervous public house entertainer, is executed in the English music hall tradition; sung in a cockney accent with a touch of the George Formbys about it. Indeed, the lyrical style of some Kinks songs, particularly on Something Else By the Kinks, positively flaunts the style of pre-war British culture. Rhyming slang, occasional upper-class affectations, and ever-so-decorous references to ladies abound. Musically, rolling piano, harpischords and an assortment of fairground noises take precedence over the humble guitar. Yet the progressive nature of these songs is rarely recognised, or understood by contemporary copycats.

The music of the Kinks provided subtle social commentary, using the very mannerisms and music of the class at whom they directed their criticism. Davies subverted the old time music hall theme through his vocal affectations. While his lyrics appeared to be an ode to the good old days, his lush, nasal, effeminate singing voice took his terribly pompous caricatures of the boys club into the realm of the camp, expressing a subversive theme of homosexuality which belied (and made a mockery of) the facade of innocent nostalgia. This theme was made explicit in 1970, when in “Lola” Ray joyfully proclaimed that “girls will be boys and boys will be girls”… In 1994 – on an album that unabashedly borrowed from the Kinks’ tradition of parochial British pop – Damon Albarn and Blur finally took heed.

Some commentators compare the Kinks unfavourably to the music of the time:

At a time when psychedelia, kaftans, dayglo and incense were rife, the Kinks’ more down-to-earth concerns were highly unfashionable. Worse, the musical verities in which the Kinks traded were mundane by comparison to the new experimentation of ..Jimi Hendrix or Pink Floyd.

But the Kinks, far from being old-fashioned, proved themselves to be timeless, and way ahead of their generation. Davies’ endearing, idiosyncratic vocal was often the focal point of a song, and the odd assortment of individuals he portrayed and mimicked became the prototypes for the urban parody of bands as diverse as the Buzzcocks, the Smiths and Denim; to more obvious (and inept) contemporary devotees like Sleeper who moan on about being lower-middle class kids from Ilford. Ray Davies is, whether or not he likes it, the most readily identifiable influence on the current British scene.

Appeared in Britpack fanzine January 1997.