Newly knighted rocker Ray Davies tells Event about his old mate Elton, how he got ripped off with The Kinks and his doomed affair with Chrissie Hynde
On July 27 Sir Mick Jagger released an urgent EP, Gotta Get A Grip/England Lost, targeting Brexit, immigration and terrorism. That afternoon, sitting in his front parlour, Sir Ray Davies CBE, considers his chateau-dwelling contemporary’s edgy effort.
‘How inspired,’ The Kinks kingpin hisses, his voice dripping with sibilant sarcasm. ‘I haven’t listened to it yet, but we’ve had the decorators in and I’ve been busy watching paint dry in the bathroom.’
Davies has agreed to a rare interview to discuss his forthcoming performance at Proms In The Park, where he will reimagine a selection of his best-known songs with the BBC Concert Orchestra.
The last time he appeared in Hyde Park, in the summer of 2013, he was filling in for a poorly Sir Elton John, whom he insisted on referring to throughout his turn as ‘Bunter’. ‘There was a horn section in the Sixties called the Mike Cotton Sound,’ Davies recalls. ‘Elton wanted to join them as a keyboard player and they called him Bunter because he looked like the character Billy Bunter from the TV series – a little fat schoolboy snitch with glasses – so I picked it up from them. ‘He’s a good guy, Elton,’ he relents. ‘Lovely personality. He opened for The Kinks in the Fillmore West in California but it only had one dressing room, and as we were topping the bill, Bunter had to change in the toilets.’
Proms In The Park will be Davies’s first gig as ‘Sir Ray’ – he was knighted by the Prince of Wales in March for services to the arts. ‘If I don’t feel like coming to work,’ he confides, ‘I say to myself, “You’re a Sir now, you have to go”.’ ‘But we Sirs don’t have a funny handshake,’ he deadpans. ‘It’s more of a knight of the realm nod.’ The word ‘genius’ is recklessly tossed around in rock music circles, but Davies may have a more valid claim than many of his be-knighted contemporaries.
His witty, angry and romantic songs speak to successive generations: You Really Got Me, Days, Waterloo Sunset, Lola. Many of Davies’s maddeningly memorable hits featured in the Olivier-winning musical Sunny Afternoon, which is about to go to America and Australia.
He speaks in a gentle whisper, constantly cracking daft jokes, derailing the conversation as often as possible and remains one the few interviewees who ask more questions than they answer. ‘I’m interested in people,’ he reasons. ‘Everybody has a story, or a song.’ At 73, he regards his career’s ups and downs philosophically.
‘There have been some bad decisions,’ he reflects. ‘But I’m not a bitter person.’ The songwriter is estimated to be worth £10 million, but should he be richer? ‘Everybody says so,’ he sighs. ‘I got a letter from Texas this week from a fan who’d put two dollar bills in the envelope saying, “This is for the royalties you won’t get from the records that have given me so much pleasure.” I was deeply moved. ‘Obviously I’ve lost out on a lot of royalties, got conned out of a lot of money, ripped off, but you make a decision to do music for a living because you like it.
‘I don’t think I could handle massive monetary wealth,’ he concludes. ‘I need the anxiety of when the bills come in. Although I’m not claiming to be skint – I’ve still got my art student grant in a Post Office account.’ We meet at Konk, the renowned recording studio in north London which has been home to The Kinks since the early Seventies. As he shuffles about the ramshackle building, with his high hairline, old corduroys and well-loved shirt, he could pass for a retired art forger or a longserving librarian. ‘I pace around a lot in my job,’ he explains. ‘You argue with yourself when you’re writing songs. ‘I’m trying to get my writing simpler and to the point. It’s like writing a suicide note: why bother with some detailed examination of your life when you can just write, “F*** it?”’
‘Songwriting is my release,’ adds Davies, who attempted suicide in 1973 and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. ‘It defines me as a person but it’s lonely.’ It’s hard to equate this singular, mildmannered gent with the cocksure rocker who takes to the world’s stages with such gusto. ‘Some sort of strange voodoo occurs,’ he mumbles. For many volcanic years, Davies’s accomplice stage-left was his younger brother, The Kinks’ visceral guitarist Dave, whose raw sound begat heavy rock.
Their tumultuous, verbally and sometimes physically violent relationship has come to define inter-band sibling rivalry. The fights were furious and frequent. ‘Things got broken,’ admits Davies, who stamped on Dave’s 50th birthday cake and once stuck a fork into his little brother’s hand during a fraternal squabble over a plate of chips.
But it would seem that the battleweary brothers’ ire is simmering down: they played together briefly at a show in Islington two Christmases ago. ‘I saw Dave fairly recently,’ he says of his brother, who lives in New Jersey. ‘He stayed for a few days. Dave’s a good man, he’s smarter than I am. ‘I miss being in a band,’ he groans, although his reconvening The Kinks remains a distant prospect at present. ‘I’m a team player. I miss the spirit, you don’t realise until you don’t have them around you. When you’re a solo artist you’ve got nobody to blame if you play badly.’
Davies prefers not to speak about his affair with Chrissie Hynde in the Eighties, but when I tell him that she introduced Stop Your Sobbing at this year’s Glastonbury as being by ‘the greatest English songwriter ever’ he softens slightly. ‘Yeah, sure,’ he says sardonically. ‘She’s a good mid-Western girl.
I think meeting me was a cry for help. She was looking for a father figure and I’m the wrong person.’ He exhales. ‘Ships that pass in the night.’ Davies has been married three times and has four daughters. He is currently unmarried but has a girlfriend, actress Karen Eyo, characterising himself as ‘easy to love but impossible to live with’. He claims to be in good health, both emotionally and physically. ‘I’m 73 years old with the body of a 72-year-old,’ Davies giggles, reviving the old gag. ‘I play football in the park with my granddaughter Lily. She is nine and she’s nut-megging me. The problem is, I’ve got a bit of a gammy leg.’
On this occasion, he’s not joking. In 2004, while chasing a mugger in New Orleans, where Davies was living, in an attempt to retrieve a handbag snatched from his female companion, the singer was shot. ‘It was fight or flight,’ he says. ‘I wanted to smack him.’ The bullet went through Davies’s right thigh, breaking his femur. ‘There was a bloody great rod in there for a year or so that’s been taken out now,’ he winces, rubbing the limb.
‘They stick it right through the centre of the bone. ‘I used to be a runner but now I have to work out at the gym and if I don’t go three times a week the leg gets pretty stiff.’ He rocks with mirth at the idea that he could have written a song about the traumatic episode, called You Really Shot Me. Davies is endearingly eccentric company. I last met him in the spring, on the 50th anniversary of Waterloo Sunset’s 1967 release. He mentioned some grainy YouTube footage, still viewable, of himself and David Bowie singing the iconic song at Carnegie Hall in 2003. ‘We did Waterloo Sunset and he said, “Who’s going to take what line? How shall we sing this?” And I said, “Let’s imitate each other.”
So that’s what we did. David was a great mimic. That ability gave him his diversity as a performer. He was a smart kid.’ In the week of the 40th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, Davies casually lets slip that not only did he meet Elvis but that The King came to see The Kinks. ‘It was in the Whisky a Go Go, a small club in LA,’ says Davies. ‘We had a very brief conversation, just brushed past each other really. He said, “Hello”, I said, “I’ve got to go on in five minutes.”
Not now, Elvis!’ Today, the veteran showman enjoys the ‘joyous, invigorating’ company of younger artists. Describing himself as ‘not so much the godfather of Britpop, more a concerned uncle’, he has followed Oasis’s career with interest, its warring brothers often echoing the antics of The Kinks before them. ‘I know both the guys, Liam lives up near me. They’re chalk and cheese but they’ll get back together.’ Does he believe they should have reunited for Ariana Grande’s One Love benefit concert in Manchester? ‘I suppose so, but I don’t criticise them for not getting together. One of them [Liam] made an appearance.
There’s a certain amount of bandwagonism that goes on with those things. It’s like with Grenfell Tower – how did that Simon Cowell record do?’ Aware that he may be sounding cynical, Davies declares that he was amused to hear his restless classic Tired Of Waiting in a TV commercial, although due to The Kinks’ complex publishing affairs he may not profit from it.
‘They used it for a McCain’s potato ad,’ he smirks approvingly. ‘I saw a potato in a microwave on the telly and they were playing Tired Of Waiting as it cooked. Still, I don’t think I get any money for that – not a sausage!’ Spud-shifting soundtracks aside, Davies has just completed the storyline to a new musical about siblings ‘partially’ reflecting his own fractious history and is about to mix the second solo album of his Americana trilogy – the first satisfying instalment of which arrived earlier this year – entitled The Invaders. Davies keeps busy but insists he doesn’t feel the pressure of the advancing years. ‘What will be will be,’ he shrugs. ‘I try to enjoy the moment.
You just have to make sure your braces don’t snap and your trousers fall down.’ When he was knighted this year, Davies says his only concern was positioning his problematic leg correctly on the ceremonial cushion as he knelt before a sword-wielding Prince Charles.
‘The honours system is a unique thing,’ he says. ‘We should hang on to it.’ Prior to his knighthood, Davies received a CBE from the Queen in 2004. ‘I’m a commander,’ he winks, saluting comically. During the investiture, Davies remembers Her Majesty saying, ‘So many songs.’ I tell him that would make a fitting epitaph. He closes his eyes, picturing the simple inscription on his headstone. ‘Maybe if they could put “And even a few good ones” in brackets underneath,’ he says, with a wonky grin. ‘That would do me.’
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