Fact #195374

Ray Davies – The Kinks (transcript of interview by Johnny Black prior to release of State Of Confusion)

Are you doing a lot of press at the moment?
This week, yeah. I've been working hard so I've had to squash it all in. It's always mad, never a casual thing.

How do you remain interested in playing live?

Well, last night we were in the grottiest rehearsal room I’ve ever seen, in South London. I saw the guitar, and I looked at it and it was a toy, a new toy that Dave had bought, a lovely Fender Telecaster. I picked it up and started playing it, and by the end of the evening we were just steaming along. It’s just something I do naturally, like, eh, runners and wanting to run.

Has it ever deserted you?

Everybody has their bad days when they think it’s the last time they’re ever going to do it, or “Can I keep doing it?”, which is more the question… But with me now it’s like an addiction. I walk into a room and I hear Howlin’ Wolf or Culture Club on a gramophone and I wanna know how the song is constructed, why it’d been done that way.

I’d have to go to severe deprogramming therapy if I wanted to give up music. Or they’d have to pass a law against music, or I’ll just keep coming out with my silly little songs.

Also, I’m not a great musician per se, I’m just competent on the piano and the guitar, so I keep trying to improve that, which often happens with people who write songs… they don’t have time to practise. I’m always trying to get my chops together.

Would you really like to be very accomplished?

*(Amused sneer) No, not really. I’d like to get good enough so that maybe in a few years’ time I could do a one man show.

I see you as a Hoagy Carmichael type…

That’s a nice thing to say, thank you. I know what you mean, he wasn’t a great pianist, was he? He was good enough to do his own stuff really well, but he probably couldn’t sit in. I’m good at working with musicians who are technically far better than me, but I like to tone them down, because you usually find musicians play fantastic riffs but it’s too much, it needs to be modified, so I have to negotiate with them. They can be very self-indulgent… but I think Brian Eno’s got it off. It’s very restful, very good stuff, probably because he does it all, plays it, produces it, and just escapes self-indulgence. I’ve got a tape of him playing You Really Got Me, which is great fun. I’ve often thought I’d like to work with him. Contrary to what people think, I enjoy working with other people and getting feedback.

Is it difficult in your position to approach other artists you’d like to work with?

No, what it is… if I want to work with someone else my manager would phone up his manager and then they’d start talking about the package, and the publishing deal, the music rights. There are so many business things and merchandising procedures you have to go through that I’m almost afraid to initiate something like that. I’d love to work with other people. Pete Townshend phoned me up years ago and asked if I’d do an album with him, but I was just going on tour, so he ended up doing it with Ronnie Lane [1977’s *Rough Mix]. It was a good little album.
I feel ashamed sometimes, because our roadies are much better guitarists than I am, they can play all these amazing Santana licks, and I start plonking away and I feel like a bit of an idiot. But I’ve got my own space, and that’s what makes the difference.

But the talent of songwriting is quite different than the talent of playing…

Yeah. This is a difficult time for emotion at the moment. I’m finding that most commercial records, most record companies, most radio stations hate any deviation in metre. I mean some of the best drummers around now have to play to a click track, and to me that’s knocked a little bit of the adventure out of it. There’s nothing better than hearing a drummer laying down a backbeat that’s spot on with no drum machine… I’m not opposed to machines. I just used a Linn drum in a song I’ve done, because it needed it, it had a syncopated vocal over it so it needed a solid beat.

Who do you listen to among modern bands?

I listen to Culture Club. I like Big Country because there’s so much humanity in them, there’s an element of looking for the horizon in them. I was listening to The Smiths and I was amazed at how laid back they were, and I liked that.

You can be anything now except an old pop star…

Almost. It’s a sin to have been around for three years. Last time we toured though we had a lot of kids, particularly in Belfast, all these kids in their anoraks jumping up and down. In the States we get a lot of younger ones.

The States is a different market, though…

I hate the word market. But you know what it has done for us? We’ve become video stars, I guess. We made two very highly rated videos, according to other people. Predictable, which is a little-known album track here [from 1981’s *Give The People What They Want], is because of MTV one of the great audio-visual events of America. And Come Dancing wasn’t a hit here until after the video was a success in America. It took six months and it didn’t do a thing at first.
I’ve always wanted to do visual things. When we did *Everybody’s In Showbiz I tried to convince RCA to do it as a visual album, but they wouldn’t do it. Now it’s RCA putting money up for the film I’ve just made for Channel 4, Return To Waterloo. So it all comes around.

What’s the film about?
It’s about a man who gets on a train at Guilford and comes to London and he says nothing throughout the movie but by the end of the journey you know all about him… God, it’s difficult to describe what it’s about. About a wanted rapist, and there are elements built up around characters in the train. Kinda weird.

Is there any of you in the central character in the film?
No, not really, I took notes on the train… I’m always doing that, I do character studies of people.

You seem to be an observer.
Little bits of me creep in there.

Does [then partner] Chrissie Hynde being part of the New Wave, keep you alert?

Not really, I think part of her crisis is that it’s four years, and a lot has happened since then, and she has to substantiate herself as a mainstream now. No, I’ve always been alert to music. I get around. I hate the showbiz idea of ligging around backstage after a gig, I just go in my own quiet way.
I remember seeing the Sex Pistols on TV just before they signed a deal, and I thought they were wonderful. I keep aware. I wander into record shops and look for albums that aren’t in the chart, trying to find something interesting. But the record retailing industry is killing that off, like they killed off [jazz and blues record shop] Dobell’s and other specialists. The record industry is insidious, it’s much too big for such a small country as this.

What keeps you going?

A lot of different things. I love the optimism that playing a gig brings. We played Middlesbrough which is a really depressed town, and you get on stage and they’re jumping up and down. For a couple of hours you can just forget everything. It helps me as much as it helps them. Occasionally I get diverted, there’s a sort of psychotic behaviour pattern about it.
When we do big stadiums in America I can tell the band to play small and think inwardly, because there’s no way you can put yourself across to all those people in Madison Square Garden. At the US Festival in California [in September 1982] we played to 350,000 people, and I wasn’t really nervous, but what helped me to go out and face them was that I had a big fight with the promoter, Bill Graham. We had a good light show so I wanted to go on at dusk, which was what we’d agreed, but Bill was gonna pull the gear off the stage, and he had our managers car towed away by a breakdown truck… *(Imitates Bill Graham’s gruff, rasping voice) “Whaddaya gonna do? Whaddaya gonna do?”
He was gonna pull the plugs, but because of that fight when I went on stage I played better because I wasn’t thinking about the crowd, my mind was concentrated. Then I was halfway through All Day And All Of The Night and I can see Bill signalling us from the side of the stage to come off, so I stop the number right there, and say to the crowd, 350,000 of them, that Bill wants us to stop. It got very childish. We walked off, the audience went wild, Bill came on and said, “Let’s see if we can persuade Ray to do some more songs.” A silly game, and we went on and did some more, and I really enjoyed it.

After all these years do you still get stage nerves?

I do. I never used to realise it, but I stand and snap my fingers and crack my knuckles, winding myself up. The other guys pace around. I try to forget about music and I think about what jacket I’m going to wear, and I try to put off the thought of going on as long as possible. In a way it all helps to get my heart rate up, get me into a state where I can go out there, like a runner warming up before a race. Some nights, though, it really is nerves…

You have a sort of old trouper…

*(Interrupts) No, it’s not that because I’m not Mick Jagger. See, every song Mick does he projects his rock’n’roll image, but I write songs for different characters. The man who sings Low Budget is not the man who sings Celluloid Heroes. I have to get into character for those songs, I think that adds a unique element to the Kinks.

Is that understood by the audience or do they think you believe everything you sing?

This I don’t know. There are songs where I have to become the character. I write a lot in third person, because if I go into character and sing, “I hate trees,” people think that Ray Davies hates trees, but it isn’t true, it’s that character who hates them. Do you know, I think I’m actually getting better at songwriting now. I hope I go on this way too.
What saddens me is that the music coming out now is non-political, but the industry is obsessed with being political. All these bands like Culture Club just want to write good pop songs and Big Country want to establish a way of feeling about things, I don’t know…

In your quiet way you’re still an angry man…

I’m totally angry. I’m tired of seeing all the limp anger around me. I’m angry in my personal life. I’m angry with this society of ours which is on the edge of poverty, the edge of change, but nobody wants to push it further. I’d rather make films about it than records now. People have forgotten we have real problems and they’re gonna get worse.

You mean in terms of poverty?

Yes! Poverty and inequality.

And Maggie doesn’t help it.

I’m not condoning her, but at least she is strong. Give her points for that. Then she wears silly hats. What can I do? She frightens me.

Why? Things like GCHQ and work permits?

What about the GCE? Why should kids have to sit exams, why are they taught to be competitive from age five? Isn’t that frightening? Then they get judged when they’re 15. I remember going to a school sports day in 1976 and there were kids walking around who had left school and they didn’t have jobs, but they just wanted to have the security of being around the school, because it was all they had.
We all so conscious of the unemployment figures, but nothing is being done. We should be like Switzerland, be a tax haven. Do something really radical. We’re not a world power anymore. We’re a joke apart from pop music, it’s our big export, the only thing in which we lead the world. Isn’t it curious, that the British invented a drink called bitter? I’m not being nasty to England, because I love this place, it’s where I get my breath from.

Where do you live most of the time?

This year I’ve been here mostly because of the film, but I have a flat in New York, and I think we’ll have to do the next album in America because we can’t use our own studio, Konk, because it is so booked up.

The other thing I sense in you is sadness?

I’m glad you feel that, because you don’t want to be in my presence when I feel anger. Maybe my sadness is something to do with the fact that the man who lives in that house over there has to confront juggernauts screaming past his window every day. I’m an instinctive person, maybe I’m too emotional at the moment. I want to get strong, but unfortunately you have to change when you get strong. Strength can be really negative.

What kind of fame do you have?

Tell you what happens. People either want to be noticed or they don’t. You turn it on and off. Some days everybody notices me, but it isn’t because of who I am, it’s because I’m smiling, I feel good about myself. Sometimes people can monopolise you for hours when you’re out having a meal, but sometimes they’re great. I was in a restaurant last week and a man at the next table passed me a note, saying “It was a sunny afternoon, wasn’t it?!” so I wrote, “Yes, it was”, and passed it back. Made me feel great.
One problem in this country is that we tend to put down success. We like people to achieve, but once they’ve made it, they become enemies. It isn’t like that in America, where they applaud success.

If your house was burning down, what would you grab?

We don’t have very much in our house. As long as Chrissie and the baby were safe… it would probably be something like the other shoe I didn’t have on. You fancy a sandwich?

What do you do when you’re not being Ray Davies the pop star?

I like to run, wherever I am. I run in Central Park and Regent’s Park. I like to relax. I’ve run since I was a kid, and I used to be a footballer. Norman Mailer once justified the fact that at 50 he still liked to box. He said it was because he never learned to play golf properly. I’m like that, I’ll keep running.

What did you learn from directing Return To Waterloo?

I found I had to be more on top than anything I’ve ever done. It was done to such a tight schedule. It should have taken about six months and we did it in three weeks. I had a great crew and they all helped.

Are you happy with it?

I’m trying not to be too much of a perfectionist. These are the shots, that’s it, and I think it works all right. You have to be all these different people. Directing you have to be a general going into battle. A writer has to be careful and a bit of a juggler. To edit you need a Zen mentality, and to answer to producers you have to be The Godfather.
But no way will I give up the band.