Davies - X-Ray

I was trying to set up a living base in Ireland in the early 1990s after recovering from a serious illness, when I was askedto write an autobiography. At the time I thought, somewhat cynically, that the publisher involved must have been thinkingthat it would be a good idea to get me to put my story down because it was likely that I was not long for this world. Whilerecovering from major surgery, I had written a short novel about the last days of a hit man, but the editor assigned to meby my publisher insisted that it was my story they really wanted. I did actually finish the novel as a film script but itnever went anywhere further.

I then started to look through various clippings that had made some mention of me, in an attempt to research myself, the wayI imagined a proper writer would. But I quickly abandoned this idea.

I did examine various diaries I had written over the years but the entries were sporadic and while I thought they might proveuseful at later times for specific references, they didnt seem to have either continuity or narrative flow. I tried talkingto a few old acquaintances but their points of view varied so much from mine that the book would have ended up as a seriesof other peoples impressions of me.

In the end I decided to go to the most reliable source. The music. It seemed to be the only thing that accurately catalogued my progression as a person. Even the Sonics on a record brought back vivid memories about the way I had felt atthat time.

The next issue I had to confront was my identity. I had read several other auto biogs but didnt want mine to be a simplerecollection of names, dates and places. My life has been full of subtext almost as though I had had no identity beforeI discovered song writing. I had been to art school, not especially successfully, but I discovered that nothing provided mewith as much freedom as did song.

I am not qualified as a psychoanalyst so I wont pretend to fully understand how I have evolved emotionally. My life, it seemsto me, has been vague and unstructured. I have never been convinced that even fact is black and white. Facts are the domainof historians: although a sequence of facts put down in a time line can convey a certain type of journey, they tend to rushto a conclusion in order to wrap up the whole story in a neat package.

Maybe my real life has existed as a sub plot to my songs. All I will say is that the young 19-year-old me written about inthe book is as true and accurate account of myself as anything you will read in a newspaper clipping. That 19-year-old boyis still inside me, insecure, living with a sense of foreboding about his world. All his insecurities are there. In a similarway, the 70-year-old RD has always been inside me. Im not qualified to dissect this, and I wouldnt even know where to start.

Finally, this book is really like a long song or series of songs. I switch persona and tense as often in this book as I doin my songs. Its not an attempt to be literal but when I finished it I thought there was a good deal of heartfelt truth.I may have approached the writing process a little differently from most, but at the time I wrote X-Ray I could not have writtenit any other way. The voice drifts from first to third person, even in gender as in many of my songs. Even time and spaceare sometimes in doubt.

Written with a mixture of young mans innocence and perhaps sometimes an older mans cynicism, when I look back on X-Ray now, I wonder if I should have made the story shorter, but it too is history and I think it must stand for what it is. Thestyle might strike some as nave but then most of my songs that people enjoy best are like that too.

When I set out on this journey I had no idea how much writing X-Ray would affect my life or more to the point how much it would denote how much my life was in transition. The Kinks stoppedtouring shortly around the time X-Ray was first published, but in a way this went unnoticed due to the fact that in my one-man show I sang many old hits for twoor three hours and talked about the band. Since the first publication of the book my life has changed drastically. X-Ray projected me into another phase of my life. The events that have taken place since would probably fill another book. Whatremains is an impression of a time in which I am glad and lucky to have lived.

X-Ray also served, albeit unexpectedly, as a foundation for my one-man show which evolved first as a book reading, then as a one-manshow which I ended up performing all over the world, which inspired a VHI television series called Storyteller.

Though the cast of characters in my life seem to border on the fictitious, I hope Ive accurately and lovingly recapturedthese people as we came across each other.

If I were asked to write the book again I think I would have declined and instead pursued my novel about a hit man. It stands as an example of someone trying to stretch the mediumto its extreme. Ive never taken on simple projects, and a simple biography would have bored me. It probably would have endedup being more acceptable but less successful in my own sense of things. I wanted aspects of my journey to reflect somethingmore than a simple dwelling on the past.

RD May 2007