Hi, Ray! [He is two hours late.]
Hello. Sorry! I’m so busy, in the middle of rehearsing and recording. I’m starting a record of my book, Americana (1). There’s a lot of songs to go in and I’m working out the best way to do it. I develop projects all the time, but I’ve had two or three come together all at once.
And you’re due to play at Greenwich Music Time with Hugh Cornwell and Hazel O’Connor later this month. You were quite an icon for the punk-era generation (2).
I don’t know really. It was like Britpop, there was a new energy that put pop music into a new gear. It was nice to be seen as having inspired that, but I’m not a godfather … More a concerned uncle.
Talking about respect, did Bruce Springsteen really once grill you for four hours about how you wrote songs?
We spent a good afternoon together, and when songwriters get together it’s inevitable that they’re going to talk about songwriting. He’s a great admirer and he’s very knowledgeable about the music.
And none other than the Who’s Pete Townshend once said that you should one day become poet laureate, because you invented a “new form of poetry and pop writing” that influenced him “from the very beginning”. You seem to be falling over gushing tributes from pop legends.
That’s a wonderful thing for Pete to say, but the thing is not to internalise it too much. The book will be my next big show, so the Greenwich gig and others I’m about to do will probably be the last time people will hear certain songs. Because I’m moving on. Once I’ve finished the Americana thing, I might not go back on the road for a while.
Ray Davies by Johnny Rogan review – the ‘complicated life’ of the Kinks frontman
You’re stopping playing the hits?
Well, everyone knows the Kinks’ hits, but Americana is about a body of work that not everyone is familiar with. It goes back to the fact that we were banned from America for four years [from 1965-69] and couldn’t play there.
Did you ever find out precisely why you were banned? It’s rather shrouded in mystery.
Yeah, but it’s very complicated. I allude to it in the book Americana. I’m trying to contextualise it in songs. It was a number of things: bad luck, bad management, bad behaviour.
Didn’t you punch an official who called the Kinks “a bunch of Commie wimps”?
[Chuckles] That was one of the issues. I only hit back in self defence!
And did you really infuriate an audience by playing You Really Got Me for 45 minutes?
I dread to think. The fact that I can’t remember probably means we did, but when we went back after the ban, in the 1970s, we found a whole new audience. We’d fallen off the radar a bit in the UK, but we were playing stadiums in America and had a huge hit with Come Dancing. It was a new lease of life. It’s been a strange path.
Going back to the beginning, your creative surge seems to have been triggered by the death of your sister Rene, shortly after she gave you your first guitar.
I think the event itself was quite traumatising. She died on my 13th birthday: my birthday present was the guitar. It would almost be poetic if it wasn’t so tragic. It traumatised me quite a bit at the time. When you’re 13, you don’t know how to take these things anyway. I would have written songs anyway, but I don’t think I would have produced such a … furious output.
Wasn’t Come Dancing about her?
It wasn’t just about her. Or my other sisters. It was about a generation who found their mates and partners by going ballroom dancing.
You wrote songs about a world that was already disappearing around you. Which is unusual for a young person.
I wasn’t rebelling against the older generation, I was celebrating the wonderful generation of my parents and grandparents. I’m not a traditionalist, but I’m aware of the value of traditions. I’m not saying everybody should be retro, but at the same time it’s too easy to move on and not take something from the past.
Why do even the chirpiest Kinks songs have an undercurrent of melancholy?
It’s the nature of the British Isles … damp. We’re on an island, but I’m not a wistful or nostalgic person, generally. I’ve got a wicked sense of humour and a cruel wit. Britain and the English countryside is very dear to my heart, but things like the Village Green Preservation Society are celebrating values, rather than saying we’ve all got to live that way. I try to live in the moment, but when I look back on my songs, they’re a celebration of a time when I was born, even though I’m critical of many things. I don’t know any writer who can create something that hasn’t touched them personally.
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