Fact #191658

Ray Davies (The Kinks] : The reason we chose the name The Kinks, is that it only had five letters and it fitted on the Billboards. I've always hated the name. I remember a man named Patrick Doncaster, who used to write for the Daily Mirror, who said that there was a new group out, and they had good records and everything, but unfortunately they're called The Kinks. It's unfortunate for them, because the name is really gonna do them in. And I think it was a bad choice in the long term; in the short term, we were at the bottom of the bill on a show and there were five other acts on, and even though we were bottom of the bill, our name still looked big. That was the whole idea of it.

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TALES OF DRUNKENESS AND CRUELTY.

It was a dark and stormy night.

A car speeding four grim-faced young Englishmen towards Springfield, Illinois, sliced through the humid heat. Rolls of thunder crashed above their heads. Sudden stabs of lightning bleached their faces white as zombies, but not one of them suspected that they would spend their next night in … THE HOUSE OF DEATH!

"We had a gig at the Illinois State Armory," recalls The Kinks' bassist Pete Quaife. "And the local promoter who was looking after us, turned out to be a real greaseball. He was polite enough, but a greaseball nonetheless. After the gig, he invites us back to his house. Says he's got some people coming round and he's got some booze, so we say, OK. We get there, and the place has an awful, sickly smell about it. But he's our promoter, so we stay there, drinking, 'til about three am. When we decide to go, he gets upset, says can't a couple of us stay? By now we were beginning to get a bit antsy about this guy, so we took off to the hotel and that was the last we saw of him."

But it wasn't the last they heard. Over ten years later, The Kinks learned that the police had dug up 33 corpses of young men in the basement and garden of their greaseball host, the serial killer Mr John Wayne Gacy. "We could have ended up as mementoes bricked up in his walls," says Quaife, still wincing at the thought.

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The gothic nightmares that usually happen only to friends of friends in urban myths - heads slashed open by razor sharp instruments of terror, orgies of meaningless violence, young innocents trapped by webs of machiavellian intrigue - were the stuff of daily routine for Ray and Dave Davies, the brothers at the heart of The Kinks. And it started early.

It's not recorded whether there was a storm of preternatural ferocity over Denmark Terrace, Fortis Green, on 21 June 1944 - the night Raymond Douglas Davies entered the world - but, Hell's teeth, there should have been. The first boy born to a family of six girls, baby Ray was coccooned by their affection until 3 February 1947, when his brother Dave popped into the world. From that moment, Ray was no longer the centre of his doting sisters' universe, and he knew it.

The Davies family was large and poor. The house, in a run-down area of Muswell Hill, was too small. At the head of the family was Fred, a gardener by trade and a womaniser by habit. Usually to be found down the pub, he has been described by his son Dave as "a bastard to my mother". That mother, Annie, stoically ignored Fred's philandering and struggled to keep her eight kids fed, clothed, amused and under some semblance of control. It wasn't easy.

There was beautiful little Peggy, hit by a stolen lorry which left her with a damaged arm and impaired hearing. There was fragile Rene, born with a heart problem and later married to an abusive husband. Ray, highly intelligent and able to sing before he could talk, exhibited disturbing emotional traits. And, like his dad, Dave had a wild streak that would lead to his expulsion from the local secondary modern after being caught in the long grass of Hampstead Heath during school hours with a compliant young lady.

As the sisters grew older, married and moved out, the boys found sanctuary from the turbulent family home whenever trouble loomed. Ray lived with his his sister Rose for much of his youth, while Dave farmed himself out to Dolly for much of the time. It would be difficult to overstate how important the sisters, older and wiser, were to the brothers.

But Ray's simmering resentment of Dave grew daily. It was while running out of the house to escape the presence of his sibling, that Ray fell and smashed his front teeth, leaving behind the crooked smile he still bears. By the age of 11, Ray was a seriously troubled loner - sleepwalking, skipping school, showing little emotion except in extreme outbursts - attending regular psychiatric sessions and, briefly, a school for disturbed children.

Dave acknowledges that the rivalry goes back a long way. Much of it was the normal healthy aggression of brothers playing table-tennis or squabbling for control of the record player. Other incidents, though, had darker resonances. "When I was 11, and Ray would be 13, we used to box. We were having a lark around, and I caught him with a lucky punch. He fell and hit his head on the corner of the piano. He was lying on the floor with his eyes shut and I thought he was dead. I bent over him, to see if he was breathing, and his eyes suddenly flashed open and his fist hit me right in the face. I think that says a lot, about how he would wait for the right moment to hit back."

One light that shone throughout the Davies' boys life was the love of music. The family and relatives enjoyed regular post-pub Saturday night get-togethers. "Mum used to sing when she'd had a few drinks," recalls Dave fondly, "and my dad used to dance." The sisters too, contributed to the lads' musical education, playing popular records and teaching them a few piano chords. Of all the sisters though, Rene was the one who truly recognised and nurtured Ray's talents

Getting close enough to find out what makes Ray or Dave tick has never been easy but, in the late 60s, the director/broadcaster Ned Sherrin became a dearly valued friend to both. "There's always a watershed in people's lives that affects their work," said Sherrin in 1996, "and in Dave and Ray's case it was the death of their elder sister Rene."

Ray recalls how, "My oldest sister went to live in Canada, and when she came to visit, she brought back rock'n'roll music, Elvis Presley and things like that." Dave goes further, explaining that "Rene was the most artistic one in the family. And she was a really good pianist. When she came back to England to live, she taught Ray to play the piano, and she gave me mum the money to get Ray's first guitar. She died, because of her heart problems, on Ray's birthday - the very day he was to be given the guitar, so that brought up all sorts of mixed emotions. Ned's right, that was important."

But, as Sherrin had noted, Rene's death affected Dave as well. "I was eleven years old, and I remember my dad was crying and I felt like I had to be strong. So that made me feel like I'd grown up. Like I was a grown up."

Outside the troubled family home, the music that sustained the boys was beginning to play a bigger role in their lives. "Ray and myself were in the same music class at William Grimshaw School, in Creighton Avenue, Muswell Hill," recalls Pete Quaife. "One day the teacher asked if anyone could play an instrument. I said, "Yeah. I play guitar." I couldn't, but I owned a big, horrible, Futurama, so half the story was true. Then Ray put his hand up. Cocky bastard. So the next week we brought our guitars and I played something by The Shadows."

Then Ray stepped forward with his Spanish acoustic and delivered a note perfect finger-style rendition of Malaguena. Quaife felt instantly out-classed. "I went 'Whooops! Holy cow, this guy's good.' Then the teacher asked if we'd be interested in forming a combo to play at the school dance."

Rounding up a bunch of likely suspects, including Dave who Quaife hadn't previously known, they set about rehearsing at the home of drummer John Start. "We quickly realised that none of us could sing," notes Quaife, "so we got this guy in from school, Rod Stewart. He was on the football team, and he and Ray were both very competitive and hated each other. Another reason it didn't work out was because we were trying to do Big Bill Broonzy-style blues, but Rod was into upbeat pop, like Eddie Cochran. I believe he moved on to another career."

So, at the school dance in late 1961, they were obliged to take turns handling vocal duties on standards like Greenback Dollar and Johnny B. Goode, while fleshing the set out with instrumentals including Perfidia, Apache and Wheels. "After that we were very popular," says Quaife. "Not that we were particularly good, but we were four boys from that school playing on that stage."

The group continued and, for a while, Dave Davies felt that he and his brother were getting along better. "Music actually brought Ray and I together. During that time, and right through The Ravens era before we became The Kinks, we were very supportive of each other."

For the next eighteen months, regular paid bookings at a Crouch End school supplemented their unpredictable income from weddings, receptions and youth clubs until they landed a gig at "a place called Toc H on Pages Lane in Muswell Hill. We just ripped the house down that night, playing a very deep driving backbeat blues, very loud, very hard, very fast. That was a bit of a turning point gig."

By now, inspired by the Vincent Price horror movie The Raven, they had become The Ravens, but they were The Bo Weevils by the time they attracted the attention of Robert Wace. The band's then-drummer, one Mickey Willett, had encountered Wace in a pub and the pair fell to talking about rock music. "Robert fancied himself as a singer," says Dave Davies, "and wanted a band to back him at posh society dances, where he could pick up debutantes." Despite the yawning chasm between the band's working class origins and Wace's aristocratic background, Dave took to him quickly. "He wasn't a bad vocalist, kind of a mixture of Noel Coward and Buddy Holly, cute in a silly way." The less demonstrative Ray, needless to say, was taking mental notes.

Typical gigs would start with the Bo Weevils charging through their energetic r'n'b repertoire, after which Wace would flounce on and deliver four markedly more pop-oriented hits. "I didn't have enough confidence to stay up there for half an hour," Wace told Kinks biographer Johnny Rogan in 1984. "It was mainly for a particular social circle."

Even so, after a gig at which Wace was roundly booed off, it became evident that the creative liaison was not going to gel. However, unwilling to let a source of easy funds slip through his fingers, Ray suggested that Wace might like to stay on as manager. They had reverted to The Ravens moniker by the time Wace brought in his stockbroker chum,Grenville Collins, as co-manager, on the basis that Collins would make 50% of his annual profits available in return for a percentage of the band's earnings.

It was now 1963. The Beatles were in full flow and The Rolling Stones were beginning to make an impact. Although Wace and Collins had no knowledge whatsoever of music industry management, they could see that, after a decade of imitating American artists, British bands were coming through with original ideas and, as a consequence, big money was there for the earning. They formed a management company, Boscobel, signed up their Muswell Hill quartet and, in so doing, sealed the fate of Ray Davies.

"We were still so young that our parents had to sign the contract for us," points out Ray. "And, of course, they never read it. It included a clause that gave Boscobel the right to assign part of their management duties to anybody they wanted. And they picked Larry Page. What we didn't realise was that his company was owned by Kassner Music - a publisher."

Although the Davies' brothers affection for Wace and Collins remains undimmed to this day, it wasn't long before the working relationship hit rocky ground. At a gig in Lewisham, where the band, having reverted again to being The Ravens, was being paid £5 each, Mickey Willett's wife Maria, learned that the fee for the gig had been £64, so the management was pocketing a significantly heftier £44. "I told Ray and Dave about this and they were up in arms," said Willett later. "That was the start of the rot."

But, for his trouble, Willett ironically found himself ejected from The Ravens. The super-smooth Wace and Collins had convinced the brothers that the outspoken drummer was little more than a thorn in their flesh. "When I confronted Ray," claimed Willett, "he got upset and said, 'To be honest, Mike, I don't want you to go, but what can I do?'" Not for the last time, Davies Senior seems to have been twisting a painful situation to create the illusion that he was the one doing the suffering.

In accordance with the terms of their contract, and aware that their lack of music business experience was a considerable handicap, Wace and Collins approached Larry Page, boss of Denmark Productions, asking him to join the management team.

A former EMI Records packer and a good-looking young man, Page had formerly enjoyed a brief career as a 50s pop idol. Complete with blue-rinsed hair, he made his bid for stardom under the banner of Larry Page - The Teenage Rage, but when that failed he was astute enough to make the transition to management. His uncommon entrepreneurial flare attracted the attention of Ed Kassner, whose Kassner Music included Rock Around The Clock among its many lucrative copyrights. Kassner employed him as general manager of Kassner Music and also set him up with his own management company, Denmark Productions.

"Denmark Street was the hub of the music publishing business in those days," explains Page. "Wace and Collins were working their way round, trying to get a deal going for The Ravens, and they came to me. I went to see the band at a pub in Islington. I watched them rehearsing, playing r'n'b covers, and I liked the energy. They weren't writing songs, but I saw their potential to do the business world-wide. Dave was very striking, for a start. He was just fifteen, and he had shoulder-length hair. I thought it was good that there was two brothers in the band, but I didn't know then that it was brothers at war."

The tangled contractual web by which the Davies brothers were already bound, pulled its threads tighter as Boscobel now signed a deal with Page's company, Denmark Productions, giving it a 10% stake in the band's recordings and live gigs. What Wace and Collins didn't grasp was that, as part of Page's deal with Ed Kassner , the publishing rights of any artist signed to Denmark Productions were automatically assigned to Kassner Music. This elevated Page into the enviably powerful position of being able to act for the band not only as a manager but as their publisher.

And this powerful entrepreneur had a very low opinion of Wace and Collins. "They were both dandies. They were each about six foot six and when you spoke to them they'd stand there in their £500 pinstripe suits, bouncing on the balls of their feet. They weren't managing. They were investing. When they finished in the city, they'd give me a call. I controlled the band and all they did was take their share. They had no knowledge whatsoever of the music business, so whatever I told them to do was what they did."

Wace, although never denying his lack of expertise, begs to differ. "He was never the manager of the group, although he may like to think of himself as one."

Dave Davies offers a more balanced perspective, saying, "Superficially, they were upper class twits, with these plummy very upper class voices. But there was more than that to them. Robert 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 him Bob The Snob. In fact we hung a placard on his hotel room door once with that on it. But there was an awful lot of mutual respect."

In Dave's telling, even if Wace and Collins didn't completely understand the music, they did recognise that it had an energy, a life force, which intrigued them. They also contributed not just cash but important ideas and influences which shaped the way the band evolved. "All the real creative decisions came from us and Robert and Grenville, and then Larry would apply his practical knowledge to help us put those ideas into practice. But, being of the old school of business, Larry'd say one thing to your face, then he'd be bad-mouthing you the next. It creates a lot of negativity, and that's what eventually led to the management bust-up."

After Mickey Willett had been dumped from the drumstool he was briefly replaced by John Stewart who soon proved unsuited to the band. Responding to an ad in the Melody Maker - "Drummer wanted for smart go-ahead group" - Crawdaddy Club regular Mick Avory, who had rehearsed with an early incarnation of The Stones, was put through his paces at the Camden Head in Islington. "He was the best drummer we'd seen up to that point," admits Dave Davies, "but I didn't really have a gut feeling that he was the right guy. But the pressure was mounting to do stuff, and he looked good, he was a nice guy, played well and stuff, but I wasn't happy with it at the start."

Meanwhile, in the vital matter of securing The Ravens a record deal, Page was making decisive moves. "I started by going for the biggest companies, with an international situation. I had a very good relationship with Dick Rowe at Decca, but he turned them down because they already had the Stones. Then I took them to Phillips. The A + R man, Jack Baverstock, sat and listened while he was reading his paper, and he turned them down. There were only about four significant record companies and I tried them all. Then I went to Louis Benjamin at Pye. The deal we got was only about 2 or 3%, but when that's the only deal left in town, you take it."

Wace, however, was instrumental in putting the next block into place. Arthur Howes, the man who booked tours for The Beatles, was perhaps the most influential concert promoter of the era, and Wace didn't want to settle for less. "Arthur was a funny little guy with crew-cropped hair and a cigar but, if he said jump, people jumped. His favourite restaurant was The Lotus House on Edgeware Road. Robert had the idea that we should play there on New Year's Eve of 1963, while Arthur was eating. They had a little area in the corner where we set up and played for him. He was one of those guys who made instant decisions. I like it. I don't like it. Then he'd be gone. Luckily, he loved us."

The Ravens now had management, publishing, a record deal, a booking agent and a settled line-up but, with fairly standard stage gear of leather jackets and long-hair, they lacked an image distinctive enough to set them apart from either the loveably working class mop-top Beatles or the even longer-haired surly Stones.

"The image we settled on was all done because of the Avengers on tv," says Page. "The word kinky was floating around, and we fixed up a session with the photographer Bruce Fleming, with whips and riding crops, which was really just to create a sense of outrage. I came up with the name. Ray didn't like it. He didn't like it when I tried to get the gap between his teeth filled in either, but then that's just Ray."

It was one of Arthur Howes' instant decisions that decided their debut single. While in Paris to see The Beatles at The Olympia on 17 January 1964, he noticed that their rendition of the Little Richard hit Long Tall Sally was bringing the house down. He immediately rang Page and instructed him to get the newly re-christened Kinks into Pye's studios to record the track.

The Pye recording deal, like every other contract the band had signed, came with strings attached. "When we did that deal," explains Larry Page, "Louis Benjamin said to me, 'We've got a bit of a problem here, because we have done a deal with an American producer called Shel Talmy. We'll sign the band but we'd like Talmy to produce, because we've already paid him money to produce something, so we have to find acts for him to work on.' It was a time when anything American was considered hot. Benjie had done a deal with this guy and he was determined to get his money's worth as soon as possible."

By his own admission, Talmy was merely a Los Angeles studio engineer, a likeable rogue who had bullshitted his way into production jobs in the British music business. "I took some demos to London with me that belonged to my friend Nick Venet, head of A + R at Capitol Records. The first person I was directed to was Dick Rowe at Decca. I went in and reeled off a load of records that I hadn't done and played Nick's demos. So Dick Rowe said, OK, you can start today."

Adding to the proliferation of versions of events provided by Wace, Page and sundry Kinks, Talmy retails a thematic variation in which he, not Page, had actually landed The Ravens their Pye deal. "I was standing in Mills Music in Denmark St when Robert Wace walked in with The Ravens under his arm. He wanted to know if anyone would listen to it. I heard it and liked it. That was the first thing I took away from Decca. They'd already turned down both Manfred Mann and Georgie Fame who I'd both brought in. I walked into Pye and got them a deal. I had the balls of a brass monkey, probably. I was brash, because I didn't have anything to lose."

Whoever took them to Pye, Talmy certainly oversaw the first two unsuccessful Kinks singles, Long Tall Sally and You Still Want Me but his burgeoning reputation as a hotshot US producer would soon suffer a significant setback.

To help push Long Tall Sally, Page used his influence to land The Kinks an appearance on the most influential tv pop show of the day, Ready, Steady, Go!, on 3 February 1964. Ray, unfortunately, remembers the show through a haze of agonising back pain. "Thank God I don't have to take very strong pills for it any more. It's a different era we're talking about, when I was ill. If you had a bad back, they simply put you in a corset for the rest of your life, hence you lose all control of your muscles and they seize up. I remember doing Ready, Steady, Go! and standing completely bolt upright. Fortunately, we were miming. I couldn't move without falling over with the pain."

Asked if he had been aware, in 1964, that Ray was taking strong painkillers to ward off potentially crippling backache, Larry Page snorts dismissively. "I was aware that Ray had a mental problem. A history of mental problems. I wasn't aware of it right away, but I soon became aware of it. But the painkiller thing, you know... Ray would always come up with some reason not to turn up at shows, so that would be as feasible as anything. He'd call me up from a phone box and say "I won't be doing this show." So I'd say, "Well, Ray, I will be there." And I'd fuckin' put the phone down. And he'd turn up and nothing would ever be said." This might be dismissed as just another of Page's gripes, except that both Shel Talmy and Pye Records promo man Johnny Wise, who was a close friend of Ray's for many years, also deny any awareness of Ray's back problems or painkillers.

Co-inciding with the April release of their second single, You Still Want Me, The Kinks were added to a UK package tour, headlined by The Dave Clark Five. Long experienced tour manager Hal Carter was drafted in by Page for the tour, with a brief to polish up their somewhat ramshackle stage presentation and bring it more in line with the elegantly decadent upper class image that now exuded from their press photographs. In pursuit of this task, Carter had occasion to visit the Davies family home and found it worlds away from the image he was being paid to bolster. "The house was so crowded that Ray and Dave slept in the front room, with their amps under the bed and gear all around them." Roadie Sam Curtis took away an even more disquieting impression that "They came from a very sad home, in my opinion. I felt uncomfortable sitting down in it."

Nevertheless, Carter buckled in and set to work. "I taught them some stage craft. Never tell jokes among yourselves because the audience feels excluded. Never turn your back on the crowd. How to introduce a song properly. Ray took it all on board, but Dave just moaned and bitched the whole time."

Carter's most significant contribution came when Ray played him a song he'd just written. "It was a six minute long version of You Really Got Me. I told him that if he could cut it down to three we might be able to squeeze it in to the live show as an opener." Carter saw very little merit in the song, but he did make a memorable suggestion. He pointed out that the opening line, "You, You Really Got Me going," was sexually ambiguous. If they were hoping to attract teenage female fans, he observed, the first word should be a girl's name or, at the very least, the word 'girl' itself. Ray changed it.

According to Larry Page, You Really Got Me, had come about because he suggested that Ray should write a riff-based song in the manner of The Kingsmen's Louie Louie. Then again, Dave Davies contends that they already loved Louie Louie anyway and drew their inspiration from it with no coaxing from Page. The composer himself, Ray Davies, traces its birth to an eclectic mixture of Gregorian Chant, musique concrete and the instrumental hit Tequila.

Almost the only detail they all agree on is that, although Shel Talmy's job can't have been made any easier by the brothers' fist-fights on the studio floor, his production of the song was a disaster. The Kinks original demo featured a distorted, dirty guitar sound that Dave had achieved by slashing his speakers with his father's razor blades. Yet, when Talmy played back the version he'd recorded, what Dave Davies heard was "a full Phil Spector production, swamped in echo so you could hardly hear the guitar. He'd completely missed the point."

But Pye's Louis Benjamin, a notorious penny pincher, was insistent that his pet producer's version was the one that would be released. "As the band's manager," remembers Page, "I asked him not to release it, but he wouldn't listen. So, as the band's publisher, I told him categorically that he couldn't release it, because the publisher controls the song." In this instance, Page's powerful double status worked to The Kinks' advantage, earning them the right to re-record the song exactly the way they wanted it, but before long Ray Davies would realise that the sword Page was weilding could cut both ways.

Released on 17 August 1964, You Really Got Me bulleted The Kinks to the top of the UK charts on 10 September but, even as they started to think about a possible follow-up Dave Davies was beginning to realise that the fastlane lifestyle he'd fallen into was already becoming a problem. He woke up one morning with a bruised and battered girlfriend beside him, to be told that he had inflicted the damage the night before in a rage brought on by an excess of drink and pills. He had no memory of the incident.

There was no time to consider the implications though, because The Kinks career had roared into high gear. All Day And All Of The Night followed You Really Got Me into the Top Five, and was a much more satisfactory experience for all concerned. "If you play the first two records one after the other," says Dave, "All Day And All Of The Night has a dirty, sexy aggression and energy that we didn't get on You Really Got Me, because Shel now had a template to work with. Shel really did help the music once he understood it."

In Bradford, South Yorkshire, on 12 December, at the end of a one-week tour with Gene Pitney, Ray Davies married a seventeen year old Lithuanian art student Rasa Didzipetris. "I'd pulled her for him when he was looking for shoes in a shop in Sheffield," recalls Hal Carter. "Ray and Dave were completely different about girls. Dave would shag anything that still had blood pumping round its veins. Ray was very shy, not good around women at all. But when I introduced him to Rasa, he was completely besotted. It was love at first sight."

After knocking a debut album together quickly from the r'n'b standards they performed live, The Kinks found themselves flying first to Australia, then to America, arriving back in the UK as their third single, Tired Of Waiting For You became their second No1. It was more than Ray could bear.

"We'd had, I think, three Number 1s and a Top 10 in six months, right? I sat down and said, I can't do this anymore. We were going to Southampton to do a television program, and we were like celebrities enough to be presenting awards to people, and I didn't go, I said, I won't stand for this shit anymore. I don't want to do it. I've just had enough of doing publicity. I'm not very good with the press and I don't like my pictures in the paper."

As 1965 progresssed, The Kinks'collective misery increased as fast as their success escalated. Pete Quaife remembers a fist-fight erupting in a limo because he'd inadvertently whistled the first two bars of a Beatles tune. Hal Carter remembers that the usual form of address reserved for Mick Avory by the Davies brothers began with a c and didn't take long to end in a t, but two incidents really characterise the period. First, on 9 April, came a riot at the Tivoli Concert Hall in Copenhagen. "The police were beating the kids up," remembers Ray, "and they locked us up in a room. The people were very abusive to us as if they thought we'd brought the devil with us. It was very frightening … It was things like that which caused a lot of insecurity with the other guys."

Surveying the damage afterwards, Dave Davies was horrified. "The kids had destroyed everything in this beautiful old building in the Tivoli gardens. I was so saddened and depressed. As Ray and I walked out, I looked up and the only thing left unsmashed, all of the windows, mirrors and chairs were smashed, was a picture of Jim Reeves." But, being Dave Davies, an evening of quiet reflection on life's little ironies was out of the question. He pulled a chick, drank a bottle of brandy from a pint glass and went on a personal orgy of destruction that included smashing a huge ornate mirror over the hotel bar. In a police cell the following morning, he was woken, the clipped tones of the unflappable Grenville Collins, "Come along, David, we're going now. We've got the NME Poll Winners concert tomorrow."

Before the month was out, The Kinks had set off another UK tour, which would make even the psychodramas that had gone before look like episodes in a prime-time family sitcom. With The Kinks supported by The Yardbirds and all-girl American band Goldie and the Gingerbreads, it started on 30 April with a show at the Adelphi Cinema, Slough. Bassist Pete Quaife was congratulating himself on having pulled Goldie,when the show rolled into Cardiff on 19 May.

"It actually started the night before, in Torquay," he recalls. "Dave got invited to a party which meant he would do as many drugs and as much booze as he could possibly shove down his throat. We decided we'd better get him out of the party before any damage was done. So we drive over in the car and literally drag him out. He was furious. In the car he started fighting with Ray, and we kind of calmed him down, briefly, but at the hotel he went after the road manager, he was really out of his head. Then he went after the night porter. Mick and myself decided to get away from it all, because the guy was going nuts. We ran up the stairs but Dave saw us and came running after us weilding a suitcase, which he threw, hitting Mick right on the back, wham! So Mick turned round and proceeded to thump Dave to pieces. He was doing a lot of damage, but Dave was so whacked out he didn't notice."

Separate dressing rooms were arranged in Cardiff the next day to keep the warring factions apart but, inevitably, they had to meet up on stage. "Everything was going fine," says Quaife, "until I realised, just as it happened, that when we finished You Really Got Me, Dave would have to turn round to Mick and count in the next number, Too Much Monkey Business."

Actually looking into the eyes of Mick - the drummer he'd never wanted in the band to start with - was more than Dave could deal with. "I thought he looked like a real chump," remembers the guitarist. "I looked at him and I said, 'Why don't you get your cock out and play the snare drum with it. It'd probably sound better.' Then I kicked his drums over, walked back to the mike, and started into the song."

Quaife, watching in utter disbelief, saw that, "The look on Mick's face was incredible. He spat on his hands, picked up the cymbal, walked behind Dave and went ka-wham right across his head. Dave passed out, straight away, blood all over the place. Mick ran off stage, Ray was just dumbfounded. The only person still playing was me. I'm right in the middle of this chaos, five thousand people staring in disbelief, and I'm still playing my bass. What else could I do?"

Dave went to hospital, Mick went on the run and Ray went to pieces. "A moment like that was always a good opportunity for Ray to emote," points out Quaife. "He ran around shrieking 'My brother! My brother! He's killed my little brother.' We all thought that was the end of The Kinks."

And it might well have been, if Larry Page hadn't already negotiated a contract for an American tour. "It was due to start in three-weeks, but the band had actually broken up. I phoned them up individually and invited them to my office the following Friday, not telling them that the others would be there. So they all appear in my office and I decide just to steam ahead, not give them a chance to talk. So I started, 'Right, American tour, we open at the Academy of Music, New York ...' I think I must have spieled away for fifteen minutes before I stopped and said, 'Right, any questions?' And Mick said, 'I'm gonna need a new cymbal, ain't I?'"

America was hell. Cardiff had delivered the death blow and the original incarnation of The Kinks were now headless chickens running around only because they weren't allowed to lay down and die.

"It certainly wasn't the American tour we'd been promised," says Quaife. "We'd had big hits over there, so it should have been a good tour and we did start out doing nice big theatres. Then it started to degrade into silly little tv shows and smaller venues, crappier hotels. We played in one Hicksville country club where the punters didn't even know who we were. At one point we were in a plane flying through a hurricane. It shouldn't have been in the air but nobody cared."

They ran into John Wayne Gacy in Illinois, Page was arrested in Philadelphia for non-payment of a local entertainment tax, a promoter refused to pay them for one gig because they didn't play for their allotted 45 minutes. Even the hard-nosed Larry Page was close to breaking point. "On all the bus journeys, I had to have Mick and Pete at the front. I would sit in the middle with the crew, and the brothers would sit at the back. Then Ray would creep up towards the middle of the bus, and he'd call out, "Mick!" And Mick would go, "Yeah?" And Ray would go, "You're a c**t!" And it would all be off again. It was a tinder box ready to go off."

And it went off at the Hollywood Bowl, easily the most prestigious gig of the tour, alongside The Beach Boys, Righteous Brothers and Sam The Sham. "It was a magnificent venue. I felt pleased with myself," says Page. "I'd taken this band from a little pub in Islington to the biggest show of their lives." Then the phone rang. A Daily Mirror journalist was calling long-distance from London, to tell Page that The Kinks were not going on that night. Page was incredulous. "I'm getting a phone call from England telling me what's happening in the room next door. So I knocked on Ray's door and he's like (adopts nasal whine), 'I'm not going on' His excuse was that he was married to Rasa, an Estonian, and obviously you couldn't easily get a US visa for someone from an Iron Curtain country. It didn't make any sense, but if it hadn't been that it would have been the colour of the toothpaste. He just didn't want to go on."

Just as he had done when catching Dave off guard during their boxing match years earlier, Ray had chosen his moment to perfection. "There's no way I wasn't going on," he says now. "Miss the chance of playing with all those people I admired? No chance." Squirming inside, Page found himself grovelling, begging and pleading, until Ray finally conceded that he would, after all, go on stage. "We played a great show too."

But, when they came off, Page was already at the airport, waiting for his plane back to London, England, UK, Europe. "I wasn't handing in my notice as manager," he insists, "just getting out of the way because I couldn't take it any longer."

From The Kinks perspective, however, he'd deserted them in a foreign land. "We didn't know anybody," laments Quaife. "Didn't know where the next gig was, what the travelling arrangements were, which hotel we were booked in…"

Robert Wace, understandably, seems to relish pointing out that he and Collins would never have deserted their boys in the hour of need. "That group were capable of anything - you couldn't leave them. They were capable of getting involved in a fight… or getting knifed… If, even on one morning, we decided to leave and not tell Ray, I would not expect to manage them on my return."

Almost as soon as The Kinks touched down in London, they lined up with Wace and Collins to have Page removed from the management team. The subsequent court case was finally decided in The Kinks favour in 1970 by the House Of Lords, but it meant that during the last five years of the 60s, all royalties earned by the band were frozen. In that same period, arising from the carnage of their US tour, the band's income suffered further from a US live performance ban, applied by the American Federation of Musicians.

In retrospect, Page rationalises that his removal from the team had nothing to do with his behaviour in America. "Once Ray came aware of money, when he saw how big they were getting in America, he realised he was paying out two lots of money to management, and he realised that he could get rid of one of them and save himself some cash. Now it didn't matter to him whether it was me or them. The court case was all an excuse. Ray was out to save money."

Musically, though, many of The Kinks' finest 60s moments were yet to come with the increasingly sophisticated and melodic songs like Well Respected Man, Waterloo Sunset, Dedicated Follower of Fashion and Dead End Street. These were the songs that, quite rightly, established Ray Davies as one of the greatest British songwriters of the 20th century, but they brought little satisfaction to The Kinks as a whole. "Those were great songs," admits Pete Quaife, "but it was absolute murder recording them. At one point, during Dedicated Follower of Fashion, Ray took a whole spool of tape, tipped it on the studio floor and set fire to it. Dave couldn't get the right sound from the guitar at the beginning of the number. Ray wanted a kind of ukelele sound, and couldn't get it, so he threw a fit."

Although Quaife had learned to distance himself from Ray and Dave's battles, he also found his role in the band diminished. "At the start, I had some freedom with my basslines but, as time went on, Ray treated us all more and more like session men. He told us all what to play. Count how many times I play a note in each bar of Dedicated Follower. And then count how many times I repeat it. It was an incredibly boring song to play, and I had to play it night after night after night. The descending bass part in Sunny Afternoon is great, but it was Ray's, not mine."

In March 1969, after several comings and goings, Quaife finally threw in the towel and moved to Denmark, unwittingly making life even harder for Mick Avory. "After Pete left, Mick's role in the band changed," says Dave. "He become a kind of buffer between me and Ray." For buffer, its entirely possible to read 'emotional punchbag'. Whatever magic had existed in the original quartet was now utterly dissipated, leaving only the self-destructive creative tension between Ray and Dave to fuel future successes.

In October 1969, they saw out the sixties with the ambitious concept album Arthur (Or The Rise And Fall Of The British Empire). Although now acknowledged as one of their greatest moments, it was a commercial flop, unfairly dismissed as a pale attempt to steal some thunder from The Who's Tommy.

In retrospect, Dave Davies has pinpointed that album as a major factor in The Kinks decline. "I think there were two main factors to our problems," he says. "One, we were banned from working in the States for three years because our manager had fucked up with the unions. And the other was ... well, my favourite Kinks album is Arthur, I thought we'd really found a path. At the time it felt so right; it was like another You Really Got Me. Ray was writing fantastic, sensitive words that were so relevant to what was going on - better than any politician. I was really surprised at the response we got to (the single) Shangri-La, because I thought it was going to be a massive, massive hit."

It wasn't. It failed to chart at all in either the UK or the USA. There would be other successes in the future, but like the successes of the 60s, they would do little to make Ray Davies into a happy man."Im not sure he can ever be a happy man," says Pete Quaife. "I think the root of his problem is that he was ashamed of his upbringing, his father, his mother, the house they lived in. Everything. Dave never had that problem and, in a way, the saddest thing was that it never mattered to Mick or me. It was always just Ray's problem."
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Carl Leighton-Pope (promoter / entrepreneur) : If you look at the origins of our business, in the 50s everything was a flat fee deal. If you wanna play, you’ll get £10, or if you’re bigger maybe £25. It didn’t matter how many people came in through the door, or how much the tickets cost, that was your fee. And those deals were done on a handshake, there was no paperwork. Right up until the 1970s I spent my life doing all my deals on the phone, because we had no faxes or e-mails or any of that. Even if you turned up at the gig and there were 10,000 people there, you didn’t even think to ask the promoter for more than the flat fee. If you were lucky you might get a bonus. There was one famous club where, if you got a second encore, they’d give you a bottle of brandy, and you thought that was great. Nobody spoke in terms of percentage deals.

I was very lucky in the early sixties because I was working in a club with a load of great bands, but really we all just lived for the weekend. Friday night you took a handful of pills, which kept you awake til Monday, then you’d go into the West End to The Flamingo, The Scene, The Marquee, The Roaring 20s. This was when The Who were just starting out, they’d only lately changed their name from The High Numbers, and only 35 people came to see their first night at The Marquee.

If you went to the Gioconda in Denmark Street at lunchtime everybody would be in there talking. If you walked down the street you'd bump into a music publisher and he'd be looking for a boy-girl duo because he had a hit song that was perfect for that combination. It was our equivalent of the Brill Building in New York.

Denmark Street was on the east side of Charing Cross Road, then Shaftesbury Avenue was the theatres, Oxford Street and Regent Street was the shops, and Soho was in the middle of it all. It was like a square which was our village.

So many people who started then went on to become huge figures in the music business. Harvey Goldsmith, Barry Dickins, Tony Smith, Neil Warnock, and myself, we started this business and we’re still here.

By the end of the seventies and the beginning of the 80s, agents were starting to ask the promoters questions about these deals, like, "How many people?" "What’s the capacity?", "What’s the ticket price?" People suddenly wanted to see ticket manifests, legal stamped documents, showing exactly how many tickets were sold. Then we started to count what we called "deadwood" which was every unsold ticket, and if you deducted that from the venue capacity you knew how many tickets had been sold.

All that started in the early 80s. We wanted to know what the expenses had been, for things like putting up posters, stuff like that. This all happened because the acts became more powerful, and we took the power away from the promoters. We were in charge of the deal.

(Source : interview with Johnny Black, for Audience magazine, Feb 2019)