Fact #178154

Pete Quaife (bassist, The Kinks] : The way the group started, and I'll maintain this til the day I die, was that Ray and myself were both in the same music class at William Grimshaw School, in Creighton Avenue, Muswell Hill, and the teacher asked us if anyone could play an instrument. I said, "Yeah. I play guitar." I couldn't, but I did own a guitar so half the story was true. Then Ray put his hand up and said he played guitar as well. Cocky bastard. So the next week we brought our guitars along and I played something by The Shadows on this great big Futurama thing that I'd bought. It was horrible.

Then Ray got up with his Spanish acoustic and started playing things like Malaguena, finger-style, very impressive, and I went 'Whooops! Holy cow, this guy's good." Then afterwards, the teacher asked if we would like to form a small combo to play the school dance …and this is where the truth starts to come in, because it doesn't jibe with everything else that has been said … I didn't know Dave Davies in those days. I recognised him as a pupil at school, but I had nothing to do with him, didn't know he was related to Ray, he was much younger than me, four years. At school that's a lot.

So Ray and myself were talking about playing at the school dance and I was saying, 'Well, we need a drummer…" and so on, and he said, "Well, my brother plays." And I said, "Oh?" Like, "Have you got a brother?" And he said, "Yeah, Dave Davies. Him. That one over there." And that was the first time I'd ever known there was two of them.

Then Dave says (adopts surly tone) "Yeah, I'll do it." I had to go looking for a drummer and it was John Start, a friend of mine. It was real mish-mosh. We rehearsed at John's house in Ringwood Avenue, just round the corner from the school, because he had a large living room. It was near where Peter Sellars lived. We quickly realised that none of us could sing, so we got this other guy in from school, Rod Stewart. He was on the football team, and he and Ray hated each other. They were both very competitive. It didn't work out because Rod was into a different style of repertoire. We were trying to do a Big Bill Broonzy style of blues, but Rod was into the more upbeat pop stuff like Eddie Cochran, so he didn't stay around too long. I believe he moved on to another career.

So we played at the school dance, this would be late in 1961. We all had to take turns singing. The numbers we played were Greenback Dollar, Perfidia, Apache, Johnny B.Goode, Wheels, very a propos for those days. After that we were very popular. Not that we were particularly good, but we were four boys from that school playing on that stage. It worked out well.

It was pretty apparent that Ray and Dave were already rivals at school. Definitely. I was too naïve to really see what was going on. It was always a great surprise to me that they were so ready to get up and fight. I wasn't brought up like that.

Dave Davies (guitarist, The Kinks] : When I was about 11, and Ray would be 13, my brother in law lived nearby, he was married to my sister Dolly, his brother was a boxer, so they had boxing gloves at the house. Me and Ray used to box at school, and we were having a little lark around, and I caught him with a lucky punch and he fell and hit his head on the corner of the piano - the piano, the You Really Got Me piano, the Death Of A Clown piano. He was lying on the floor and I thought he was dead, like, oh shit, now I've really done it. I bent over him, he was lying there with his eyes closed, and I went to put my ear down where his mouth was to see if he was breathing, and his eyes flashed open with an angry glare and his fist hit me right in the face. So that says a lot about how he would wait for the right moment to hit back.

Pete Quaife : The next gig after the school dance was at the local Athenium, and we nearly got murdered because it was a teddy boy hangout and they didn't appreciate stuff like Perfidia or Wheels. It was a paying gig, but we didn't actually get paid. We got tossed off the stage and kicked out unceremoniously. Our name at that point changed depended on who arranged the gig. If I got it we were the Pete Quaife Quartet, if Ray got it we were The Ray Davies Quartet.

Then after that we played down at Crouch End in a school on a Thursday evening, and that became a regular gig which we did actually get paid for. We also did weddings, receptions, funerals, anything.

The definitive gig was about a year and a half after the first school gig, on Pages Lane in Muswell Hill, a place called Toc H, and we just ripped the house down when we played there. They wanted a teenage dance there and we were the only band available. We played very deep driving backbeat blues, very loud, very hard, very fast. We were just incredible that night.

By this point we had become The Ravens, and that was roughly when Robert Wace and Grenville Collins started appearing on the scene. They took us under their wing, and became our managers.

Dave Davies : It was music that actually brought Ray and I together. When I started The Ravens. Ray thought it was kind of a cool idea and we were very supportive of each other.

Pete Quaife : Robert and Grenville were looking for a band to back Robert. We'd already been playing for a couple of years, and we only took them on because it assured us of regular gigs. After about two weeks we'd decided it wasn't such a good idea. Robert was so upper class we had to teach him how to swear. He couldn't do it. He could say 'Fuck' but it didn't sound like a swear word.

Dave Davies (The Kinks] : Robert tried to be a pop star. He'd sing Buddy Holly songs but it was awful. He had one of these plummy blue-blood accents. It was awful, but it got us into some of these debutante gigs which paid very well. It was kind of fun for us, got us going, and meant we could buy some equipment, but we then had to tell Robert that it wasn't going to work. So we actually fired him before he became our manager.

Grenville was a stockbroker, but Robert was a bit of a rebel from an aristocratic background. He didn't want to follow in his father's footsteps. I think that's why he liked Ray and I, because we were also rebelling against everything. We had a lot of empathy. Robert was a great influence on Ray and Grenville was on me to a certain degree, later on.

They were really just looking for a band to back up Robert at his posh society dances, where he could pick up all these debutantes. He wasn't a bad vocalist. He was kind of like a mixture of Noel Coward and Buddy Holly, kind of cute in a silly way. He brought a lot of influences and ideas to our music.

Robert was tall and thin and dressed in £500 suits and had this very upper class voice. He used to take the piss out of my accent. "Ow are yer, Dave? Awl roight?" He'd copy the way we spoke, and we'd copy them. We used to call Robert Bob The Snob. In fact we hung a placard on his hotel room door once with that on it. He was quite pissed off by that, "I bet that was Dave's idea. How vulgarian." But there was an awful lot of mutual respect.

Robert and Grenville really saw that there was something happening. They didn't completely understand it, but they knew there was an energy, a life force, in the music, and it intrigued them. It's important to realise that all the Larry Pages and the rest were all a little bit more on the periphery. Robert and Grenville were the closest to us.
(Source : not known)