“I don’t want to see the legacy of The Kinks soured by two miserable old men doing it for the money,” says Dave Davies. In a series of frank interviews, Uncut discovers the state of The Kinks in the 21st Century – a saga involving Godfather-style confrontations, flamenco songs, cursed concep...
A month later, Ray greets Uncut in what used to be the private bar at Konk Studios [see sidebar, p26]. At 69, his thinning hair is defiantly arranged in twin arches over his head. He’s wearing a brown cardigan to guard against the cold. Konk has recently undergone a rebirth as a gallery space. Two nights previously this room was packed with guests attending an exhibition opening, many of whom were oblivious to the building’s lengthy history as The Kinks’ studio. Today, meanwhile, Ray is in a particularly good mood. “I’m cocky because Arsenal are top of the league,” he assures Uncut. Like his brother, Ray has recently been tempted back to 6 Denmark Terrace.
“When we had an exhibition opening a few weeks ago,” he says, “this six-year-old kid came up to me and said, ‘Are you Ray?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘Well, I live in the house where you grew up.’ I met the family who lived there. They were a nice, thirtysomething family, and I’m going to go and have a cup of tea with them.”
As both Ray and Dave attest, 6 Denmark Terrace was a lively place to grow up in, with the brothers sharing the three-bedroom house with their parents, six older sisters and, frequently, other members of their extended family. The four surviving Davies sisters, meanwhile, continue to play an important role in both men’s lives.
“I spoke to three of my sisters today,” Ray acknowledges. “I’ve got a big, big deal being negotiated tomorrow, but my priority is getting a little picture blown up of my sister Rosie with my first two daughters. It’s the only picture that exists.” Ray admits he was often sent off to stay at Rosie’s during his adolescence. “It was such a madhouse at Mum’s, she was probably glad to see the back of him for a bit,” Dave explains. “I’d often pop up to my sister Dolly’s for a few days, too, and sit in the candle-light because she could never pay the electric bill.” He laughs fondly. “Ray would often go up to stay with Rosie. She seemed one of the few people who knew how to deal with him. I admit our upbringings were pretty weird. Ray was a very difficult child. Very withdrawn.”
“A lot of the problems between us stem from the fact that we didn’t have the majority of our childhood as conventional, live-in brothers,” Ray confirms. “So there’s an emotional gap there. We only became brothers again when we went on the road with The Kinks, and found an element of dysfunctionality in our work.”
The brothers’ frequent bust-ups with each other – and Dave’s with drummer Mick Avory – have been well documented, not least in Uncut’s cover story from 2004. They seemed to run in tandem with the band’s own, remarkable career – the peerless run of hit singles during the ’60s, through the early ’70s concept albums to their unexpected American success during the early ’80s and their dissolution in the mid-’90s. The violence was so serious it drove bassist Pete Quaife from the band in 1969. Avory, meanwhile, quit in 1984. All the same, the brothers are adamant it was never the whole story. “When things felt great between me and Ray, I knew that everybody would love it,” Dave recalls. “Play an old Kinks record, and you think, ‘What’s that?’ The beautiful intangibilities, those out of time moments when you don’t know what you’re doing on songs like ‘Sunny Afternoon’, was a great magic that me and Ray had when it worked well. It was because there was total trust between us.”
“This is an insight into Dave and I,” Ray adds. “The other day I was playing this song on The Kinks’ Preservation Act 2 [1974], ‘Shepherds Of The Nation’. When I wrote it I was in quite a bad emotional state as my marriage had broken up. It changes from D minor to D major for the chorus, and when I played it to Dave he understood what I was doing. Maybe it came from a cowboy movie we saw as kids where we liked the chord changes. It was an acknowledgement of us growing up together.”
Dave, meanwhile, has his own happy memories of time with Ray during The Kinks’ heyday. “When my boys from my first marriage were small,” he recalls, “and Ray was with [first wife] Rasa, we’d come off a tour, drive down to Cornwall or go on the train, and meet up with my sisters. We’d have a lovely time, hanging out at the pub, going on the beach playing with the kids. Just what normal, everyday people do. The simple things have always been more important than what we do for jobs.”
The Kinks rallied for one final studio record, Phobia (1993). One of the album’s best songs, “Hatred (A Duet)”, was a parody Ray wrote about his and Dave’s most hostile moments. But the truth was that by the time the band finished, Ray and Dave had become indifferent towards each other. By the start of the ’90s, Dave was living in Los Angeles, effectively scaling back his involvement with the band. He was offended, too, by what he perceived as Ray’s constant belittling of his contributions to The Kinks. In California, meanwhile, he began to further explore his interests in spirituality and different styles of guitar playing; both of which were derided by Ray. Effectively, the Davies brothers had grown apart.
“It was a relief, those last few gigs,” Dave remembers. “I really didn’t want to do it any more. To be honest, being out of The Kinks felt like when I was thrown out of school when I was 15. Pure liberation. Why am I doing this fucking thing anyway? And I think if I’d had the money, I probably would’ve gone to Tibet, or done something else, painted even, and never come back.”