Nick Hasted - You Really Got Me: The Story of the Kinks

To a great Mum, Ann Hasted,
without whom I wouldnt have written much.

Copyright 2013 Omnibus Press
This edition 2017 Omnibus Press
(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

ISBN: 978-1-78038-862-5
EISBN: 978-0-85712-991-8

Cover designed by Fresh Lemon
Picture research by Jacqui Black & Nick Hasted

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Y oure gonna find out just how powerful America is, you limey bastard! It is June 1965, backstage in an LA TV studio, and The Kinks Ray Davies and a US union official are swapping screamed insults. The American has just likened The Kinks first US tour to the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbour. Now he is calling them Commie wimps, and Davies a talentless fuck, threatening to file a report so theyll never sully his countrys shores again. Seconds later, the pair trade punches, and Davies storms out. He barricades his hotel door, raging and fearful, thinking of what the Americans did to Kennedy, and Lee Harvey Oswald, paranoid a Mob hit is coming. The Kinks return to Britain soon afterwards, leaving behind a trail of confusion and hatred. By the time America lets them back in, the Sixties will be almost over.

In those lost years, The Beatles and the Stones cemented their American fame, Kinks copyists The Who played Woodstock, and gradually, denied the spotlight, The Kinks own legend faded. When the great British bands of the Sixties are recalled, they usually come a poor fourth. But while the Stones stopped surprising in 1968, The Beatles blew apart in 1970, and The Who became a bloated self-parody, The Kinks 40-year career is one of pops most musically brilliant, contrary and barely known tales.

Founded on the combustible creative core of brothers Ray and Dave Davies, The Kinks have survived regular fist-fights, copious sex with women and men, riots, breakdowns, attempted suicides and a shooting. There have been walk-on parts from the Krays, Andy Warhol and the Queen. More lasting than this is a musical legacy bettered only by The Beatles. In a golden run of singles stretching from You Really Got Me in 1964 to Days in 1968, they invented heavy metal, introduced Indian music to Western pop, became delicate social satirists, flirted with gayness, sang of suburban ordinariness at the height of psychedelia, and crowned the decade with Waterloo Sunset.

Then, just as their peers atrophied, Ray Davies went underground, with a series of unbought, interior albums from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968) to Muswell Hillbillies (1971), deliberately buried treasures only now being unearthed. Having invented the rock opera with Arthur (1969), he then spent the early seventies writing ambitious concept albums, which The Kinks toured as vaudeville musicals. Triumphantly re-emerging in Reagans America as unlikely stadium kings, the shock of success made them self-destruct. The Kinks last played together in Norway in 1996.

The cultural juggernaut of the sixties the Redlands bust and the Stones rebel soap opera, John and Yoko, the Grosvenor Square riot, Jimi and Janis thunders on unstoppably today, endlessly referenced and replayed. The Kinks music exists as a quiet London backwater pub the motorway passed by, where Ray sits in the corner, still anonymously watching and writing. His songs are a sedimentary layer in all subsequent British pop linking Nol Coward to Johnny Rotten, matching how Bob Dylans revolutionary writing underpins rock in America where Daves violent riffs helped spark a thousand garage bands.

Ray is as out of place today as he was in 1964. But he has, uniquely among his peers, kept on his restless path, trying to describe a world hell always feel apart from. His destructive need for control has often left managers, labels, journalists and film-makers who have tried to help him and his band depressed and defeated. Like another icon of early sixties working-class rebellion, Alan Sillitoes lonely long-distance runner, who pulls up short at the finish line to spite the Establishment, even his often wilfully self-inflicted defeats are victories of a kind. He and Dave have never been able to give up, and only occasionally, incompetently conformed. There is a wound in their greatest music, a wish for something better thats been lost, to the past or the future.

Its become a clich, when writing about America and its art, to refer to the green light F. Scott Fitzgeralds Gatsby sees on the horizon, symbolising the countrys unreachable promise. The Kinks Village Green offers that place in Britain. Its a musical haven for misfits and innocents, where selfish progress can be stopped in its tracks, for the three minutes most Davies tunes play. And just as the doomed romantic Gatsby ended up (like their contemporary Brian Jones) face down in a grubby swimming pool, The Kinks safe place is braced by awareness that the bulldozers and bullshit, age and decay will crash through anyway. The quixotic courage of Kinks songs is still to insist they shouldnt.

The vibrant, embattled working-class culture the band embody perhaps has less in common with the American home of the blues they spent so much of their lives trying to conquer, than Italys bawdy humanist films, which accept people with all their self-defeating flaws. No one was more flawed, funny, forgiving and forgivable than The Kinks.

I first met Ray and Dave in 2004; always apart, by then. Dave arrived in a 15th floor central London bar, a high stones throw from where he recorded You Really Got Me 40 years before. His city was spread out below. Surprised theres so much left, sniffed the man who backed his brothers Preservation plans, before holding forth with passionate openness even the major stroke that temporarily felled him days later has not extinguished.

The notoriously cautious Ray proved more elusive. For weeks he remained a weary, cagey voice on the end of the phoneline, taping himself even as I did, The Kinks storys Deep Throat and Nixon. I spent an afternoon at Konk, The Kinks old north London studio, believing he was upstairs recording. A phone call eventually revealed he was a mile away wanting to be alone, the Garbo of Muswell Hill. He had been shot by a mugger in New Orleans the year before, and the physical and psychic injury went deep. But this was also a classic Ray game of brinkmanship and patience. When he relented, he was charming, amused, and bursting with articulate pride in his band. Private demons seemed to assail him, and he kept feeling his shot leg, as if to check it was still there. He was still remarkably open, even about his notorious relationship with Chrissie Hynde (who spoke to me too, and still loved him).