Ray Davies

Not Like Everybody Else

Thomas M. Kitts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135867942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Ray Davies: Not Like Everybody Else is a critical biography of Ray Davies, with a focus on his music and his times. The book studies Davies' work from the Kinks' first singles through his 2006 solo album, from his rock musicals in the early 1970s to his one-man stage show in the 1990s, and from his films to his autobiography. Based on interviews with his closest associates, as well as studies of the recordings themselves, this book creates the most thorough picture of Davies' work to date. Kitts situates Davies' work in the context of the British Invasion and the growth of rock in the '60s and '70s, and in the larger context of English cultural history. For fans of rock music and the music of the Kinks, this bookis a must have. It will finally place this legendary innovator in the pantheon of the great rock artists of the past half-century.

Thomas M. Kitts, Professor of English and Chair of the Division of English/Speech at St. John's University, NY, is the co-editor of Living on a Thin Line: Crossing Aesthetic Borders with The Kinks, the author of The Theatrical Life of George Henry Boker, articles on American literature and popular culture, reviews of books, CDs, and performances, and a play Gypsies. He is the book review editor of Popular Music and Society and the editor of The Mid-Atlantic Almanack.

1
NOT LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE

The shaping of Ray Davies, part I

Just after midnight, on June 6, 1944, the Allied forces undertook one of the greatest risks of World War II when they invaded Normandy. Preparations for the world’s largest invasion, dubbed Operation Overlord, were long, well over a year, and confidence was cautious. Certainly, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt expected success, but they also expected enormous casualties. Before retiring for the evening Clementine Churchill joined her husband in the Map Room where the Prime Minister is reported to have said to her, “Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?”¹

Operation Overlord proved an overwhelming success as wave after wave of Allied troops pounded the shores of occupied France so that within a month over one million new troops had arrived on the continent with far fewer casualties than expected. Fighting would remain intense over the next several months, but with the success of the invasion and the liberation of Rome on June 5, a spirit of optimism began to take hold in Great Britain, despite renewed German air attacks on England shortly after the invasion. Finally, it had begun to look as though England would emerge victorious.

Raymond Douglas Davies, who would develop into one of the most gifted songwriters of the rock era, was born two weeks after D-Day on June 21, 1944. He was the first son of Fred and Annie Davies, who had previously had six daughters, ranging in age, at the time of Ray’s birth, from approximately 6 to 20.² The daughters had all been born in the East End, a densely populated working-class stronghold of London. Fred and Annie moved their family to north London in 1939 rather than follow the government’s recommendation to evacuate children out of the city because of the threat of Nazi bombers—which, of course, materialized and inflicted large civilian casualties and decimated parts of London and other cities from August 1940 through March 1945.

The Davieses first moved to Huntingdon Road, East Finchley, some five miles outside of central London—“the leafy suburbs” as Ray would quip on occasion. Dave Davies, born three years after Ray, reports that his parents did not feel completely comfortable on Huntingdon Road. The Davieses were loud and noisy and had frequent family visitors from among their extended families—there were some thirty siblings between Fred and Annie. Most of the children in the area, like those in central London, had been evacuated. After about six months, in January 1940, the family decided to move to a smaller home about a mile and a half away at 6 Denmark Terrace, officially in the postal zone of East Finchley, but just up the road from the center of Muswell Hill in a small area sometimes called Fortis Green after the road that connects East Finchley and Muswell Hill. Money was always tight, the home always overcrowded, but the “leafy suburbs” were refreshing and the early morning smell of baked bread from the nearby bakery comforting.

It is in this north London community and in the post-War years where the artistic sensibility and vision of Ray Davies is rooted. Davies’s scope may have widened and deepened through the years, but by the time he left art college in January 1964, his vision was largely established.

The parents and the working-class home

Class consciousness came to the forefront of English daily existence in the late nineteenth century. At that time, according to Asa Briggs, the differences between the residents of London’s working-class East End and its upper-class West End began to be pronounced. Not only did the gap in wealth and lifestyles widen in the two communities, but so also did a powerful psychological schism. The result for the working class is that a collective identity developed based on shared experience or what Peter Bailey termed “knowingness,” which is, essentially, an awareness of situation.³ While not all members of the class respond in the same way to the outside world, they remain united in their differentness. For the Davies family and for others, being working class provides social and self-definition as well as a sense of authority in a world in which, until recent times, they had little opportunity.

As a family, the Davieses demonstrated many of the qualities associated with their class. They were practical, resilient, and family oriented. They were necessarily deferent at times and defiant at others, cynical of government bureaucrats and yet patriotic, reserved but capable of rage or elation. They firmly supported the Labour Party and passionately rooted for their favorite sports teams and for England in the World Cup. They enjoyed working-class entertainments like the pre-War music hall, the post-War cinema, the beach at Ramsgate and Southend, and always the pub. A working-class sensibility or “knowingness” is embedded throughout the Ray Davies song catalog from the angst of “You Really Got Me,” the satire of “A Well Respected Man,” the pride and contentment of “Autumn Almanac,” the confusion of “Definite Maybe,” and the frustration with his class in “Stand Up Comic.”

Solidly working class, Fred Davies, the father, was a fun-loving man and a drinker who chatted up the women in the local pubs and hosted regular Saturday night parties in the family home. Trained as a butcher and later as a gardener, he was nonetheless frequently unemployed. Both his sons, Ray and Dave, recognized their father’s shortcomings, and are far more understanding than resentful. After all, Fred included the entire family in his Saturday night parties; he took the family on picnics and to the beach in his black Vauxhall 12—he was one of the first to own a car in the neighborhood—and he supported his sons’ ambitions, whether in sports or music. In 1960, when Ray was 16 and Dave 13, Fred arranged their first ever gig at the Clissold Arms, the pub directly across the street from the Davies home and which, because of the brothers’ appearance, was honored as one of the first fourteen Britain Pubs in Time in 2006.⁴

While he certainly loved his family, the general response to Fred as a family man is mixed. At times, Dave said, to his mother he could be a “bastard” who would withhold money from her to buy a round at a pub.⁵ Others too discussed his shirking of familial responsibility and one interviewee, preferring anonymity, simply referred to him as a “wanker.” Fred may have been a bit lazy and selfish, but he was not mean spirited, and Ray has warm memories of going to Arsenal matches with his father, and, after stardom, of sitting at the piano and playing his latest songs for him. “My dad was kind of square, but in a cool way.”⁶

In the home Fred yielded authority to his wife Annie. If the mention of Mr. Davies provokes mixed reactions, the response to Mrs. Davies is unequivocal: she was admired by all. She managed the household on funds often scarce and inconsistent and yet she was generous and hospitable. Kinks co-founder Peter Quaife remembers Mrs. Davies’s always offering him food, no matter what time of day or no matter how busy she was. “She used to make these incredible egg sandwiches. God they were good! Thick slabs of white bread oozing with butter and a rich fried egg in between. Made a hell of a mess, but oh so satisfying!”⁷ Grenville Collins, part of the Kinks’ first management team, used to enjoy spending time with Annie: “She was down to earth, very brave, and very tough. I benefited from knowing her,” recalls the middle-class Collins. “What she said in the home was law.”⁸

Mrs. Davies had a chaotic household to manage. The population of the home might best be described as floating. “It was like a railway station,” Dave said of his home, “people in and out and the front door always open.”⁹ By the time Ray entered St. James Church of England Primary School, in addition to the nuclear family of ten, the small home, three bedrooms upstairs and kitchen and front room downstairs, could include grandparents, sons-in-law, grandchildren, and many aunts, uncles, cousins, who would drop in for an evening or a few days. Because of Mrs. Davies’s resourcefulness, neither Ray nor Dave ever remembers lacking food, clothing, or gifts at birthdays and Christmas.

As much as her time was stretched and as much as she relied on her daughters to look after her young sons, Annie oversaw all the details of the home with diligence and protectiveness. When her daughter Peg had an illegitimate child with a French West African, it caused a local scandal, but Mrs. Davies, a fierce defender of her children, comforted daughter and granddaughter and rallied her children on behalf of Jacqueline Michelle, who was teased by neighborhood children and cousins as “Blackie-Jackie.” She also confronted a teacher to end her discriminatory treatment of Jackie. A few years later, the ever-watchful mother confronted Mr. Bond, a well-intentioned art teacher who gave a teenage Ray after-school tutoring. With a kind of working-class suspicion of artist types, Mrs. Davies marched down to school and forbade Mr. Bond from working with Ray after school. Bond understood the concern and told Ray that his mother was “a woman of outstanding character.”¹⁰

Although always well intentioned, Mrs. Davies did make mistakes—one which would haunt Dave his entire life. When Dave was sixteen, his girlfriend and perhaps the love of his life, Sue Sheehan, became pregnant. Both Dave and Sue wanted to raise the child together. However, Mrs. Davies and the Sheehans plotted against the young lovers, sending Sue away to have the baby and telling each teen that the other had fallen out of love. The couple would not reunite until 1993 when Dave met his daughter Tracey for the first time and when the former lovers uncovered the scheme that kept them apart. The longing for Sue inspired many of Dave’s most poignant compositions: “Funny Face,” “Love Me Till the Sun Shines,” “Suzannah’s Still Alive,” “Mindless Child of Motherhood,” and “This Man He Weeps Tonight.”

Life in the Davies household was always lively, “like being in a Fellini movie,” Dave said, “a collage of weird wonderful people, all these big faces, drunk and dancing around the family piano.”¹¹ Despite Annie Davies’s best efforts, the home rarely ran smoothly and the family was always a bit different from their neighbors. The Davies’s problems were usually more extreme, and their home, even with the era’s housing shortage, was more crowded and noisier than the others. There was, to be sure, little privacy for anyone and the overcrowding led to constant rifts among members.

In many ways, the chaos of the home would come to resemble the chaos surrounding the Kinks, who have always been different, always outsiders in the rock world. They did not play Monterey Pop or Woodstock, the major rock festivals of the 1960s, or the Live Aid benefits of the 1980s, and although the Kinks, and Davies in particular, are greatly admired, musicians tend to keep their distance. Marianne Faithful toured with the Kinks in 1964 and recognized something dark about the band. They were “very gothic, creepy and silent. Uptight and fearful of everyone,” she said.¹² “Only the mad men in those bands would tolerate us,” says Quaife, “like Keith Moon, Brian Jones, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and the disc jockey Kenny Everett.”¹³ Chrissie Hynde summed it all when she termed the Kinks, and Ray and Dave specifically, as the Kray twins of rock-and-roll, after London’s most notorious gangsters.

At the head of the Kinks chaos has always stood Ray, much as his mother stood at the head of the Davies home—autocratic, stubborn, and proud.

Saturday night parties

The Davies family lived for Saturday nights and the Saturday night parties they hosted. After the pubs closed at 11:00 p.m., Fred would invite his drinking cronies to join his extended family and children’s friends for an after-hours party in what would be the family’s overcrowed front room, which, in these largely pre-television days, held the family’s old upright piano, the most important piece of furniture in the Davies’s home, and a 78 r.p.m. wind-up gramophone.

The parties featured plenty of beer and sandwiches and plenty of music and sing-alongs, especially to music-hall numbers with Rene, the most accomplished pianist in the family, on the upright, yielding at times to one of her other sisters, usually Joyce or Gwen. With only the slightest of urgings, Fred, a tap dancer in his younger days, would play his banjo and dance, and Annie a bit more reluctantly would sing, a favorite was “St. Teresa of the Roses,” a top-ten UK hit in 1956 for Malcolm Vaughn. Craving attention, Ray remembers his first performance, a pre-school croon of Perry Como’s “Temptation.” The highlight of the party and the most embarrassing moment for the young Ray and Dave was the father’s show-stopping rendition of Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher.” Fred, who Ray has referred to as a “closet vaudevillian,” would sing and dance about the room and more often than not end his inebriated performance by crashing to the floor.

The influence of these parties on the Kinks, particularly the campy Kinks of the early to mid-1970s, is remarkable. Whether consciously or unconsciously, it seemed as if Ray was trying to recreate the Saturday night parties of his family’s home—complete with chaos, beer, and sing-alongs. The band would perform with cases of beer on stage (at least in New York and other tolerant cities), although not much actually got consumed during the performance. Ray might feign drunkenness and spray beer on audiences, slip usually unintentionally, and he might balance a can of beer on his head, a favorite parlor trick, but he was never drunk for a performance. Mick Avory said that Davies “might have a beer or two on the day of a performance,” but that “he was never a great guzzler of anything.” He went on to say that Ray might take a puff on a joint now and then, but that “we were never a druggie band. We couldn’t afford it. Even when the cocaine was rife, no one used it. … I’ve seem more down the golf club.”¹⁴

Like the Saturday night parties, a Kinks concert could be a loose affair, but always within Ray’s control. He might engage in a dialogue with the audience, responding perhaps to paper plates ...