Ray Davies, the Poet Laureate of popular music, is back singing the blues. Brian Boyd meets the chatty CBE and agrees with the Queen - what's not to like?
THE Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry which was established in 1917 by George V. The Order has five classes which are, in decreasing order of seniority: GBE, KBE, CBE, OBE, MBE. The two highest entail admission into knighthood. The CBE (Commander) and OBE (Officer) will probably get you a better seat in certain restaurants and a certain level of respect from the mad people who think these things actually carry some form of prestige.
Ray Davies was awarded a CBE last year. Now, the awards have nothing to do with the Queen herself; they're done up by civil servants. It is known, though, that Liz was more than a bit partial to The Kinks back in the day. When she presented Davies with his CBE at the Palace, she inquired about how he was feeling after being shot by a mugger two months previously in New Orleans. She said to Davies (and this is from first-hand sources): "I hope they catch the bastards who shot you".
An audience with Ray Davies is a privilege. And you pay for it. The first idea is to meet in the Savoy in central London, which is all fine and dandy until you're on the way there and you get a call to tell you that he doesn't really like the place. On this, despite the effort you've made, he's absolutely right: the place is full of vulgar, rich Eurotrash. The next idea is to do it in the legendary Konk Studios in Hornsey, north London, which is cool by me. But somewhere along the line he says he has to go to bed and would prefer to do it in a pub in Highgate instead (he knows a good one).
So you vibe around Highgate, waiting and waiting, until Davies finally decides he wants to do it in Konk studios after all.
"Did I tell you about the mad nightclub we used to have here in the '60s?" he says by way of introduction when he's showing you around Konk. "It was called Konks and I set it up here with Graham Chapman from Monty Python. You should have seen some of the people who came through the doors. It was all madness. I'd be in the studio trying to record and there'd be this big party going on around you. I had to close it down eventually. I'd be on tour in Milwaukee or somewhere and I'd get a call at five in the morning from the barman saying the police were in."
Thus begins a series of highly entertaining tales about times past and present from one of the best songwriters of his generation. Ray Davies is fabulous company. He talks in a soft, almost conspiratorial voice and everything is up for discussion. Not only has Davies written two of the most memorable pop songs of all time - Waterloo Sunset (see below) and Days - he was also the Godfather of Britpop (Blur borrowed left, right and centre from him) and he is (by their own admission) a massive influence on both Paul Weller and Morrissey.
When The Kinks were inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, Pete Townshend said of Davies: "He should be the poet laureate. He invented a new kind of poetry and a new kind of language for pop writing that influenced me from the very, very, very beginning." Davies was hailed as "almost indisputably rock's most literate, witty and insightful songwriter".
Chrissy Hynde, Davies's former long-term girlfriend, played at the ceremony, singing Davies's Stop Your Sobbing (a cover of which gave The Pretenders their first big hit). The two were to get married once, but the registrar turned them down on the day because they were fighting so much.
It comes as a big surprise when Davies tells you that his new album, Other People's Lives, is his first solo effort. The Kinks (who were really just Davies and band) stopped recording in 1993; since then he's been caught up with the massive live success of his Storyteller project.
"It all began with the autobiography called X-Ray, which was published in 1995," he says. "It did really well because it explained the stories behind all the songs. I didn't want to promote it as a writer, though, so I went on the road instead and did a bunch of shows called Storyteller, in which I played the Kinks songs, read from the book and told a few additional stories.
"What a lot of people don't know is that my Storyteller show is the reason why VH1's Storytellers came into being. They had seen one of the shows and wanted to televise it. I did the very first one. They took the name and kept it. I still get a credit at the end of each of the programmes."
It was on a Storyteller tour in the US immediately after September 11th that the idea for the new album arrived.
"All the flights were cancelled," Davies says. "I had to criss-cross the country by road and bus and train. The America I grew up with had vanished. It was America that made me pick up the guitar in the first place. We were all just English guys trying to play the blues back then. You Really Got Me was my attempt at a blues song. There was the blues, the folk music of Hank Williams, and the fact that I used to go down to a jazz club in Highgate when I was younger to listen to Dixieland music.
"During that tour, I ended up in New Orleans and decided to stay around for a while. It was the first time I felt I had fitted in somewhere since I left Muswell Hill."
The album wasn't easy. Davies was going through a relationship crisis and had just changed both his record label and manager. "The songs weren't a problem, I had loads of English-rooted songs. But I had become far too English for my own good and wanted to get away from that. I had this real crisis of confidence. I was so used to being in the studio with The Kinks - they were almost like a click track for me. There was personal stuff going on. I had to find a band. I was thinking of giving it all up. But it worked in the end and then, just after it was finished, I got shot."
Davies and his then girlfriend were in a New Orleans restaurant two years ago when someone stole her handbag. Davies rushed after the thief.
"I ran down the street after him. He stopped, took out a gun and aimed it at me. The bullet hit me in the leg. He got into a car and sped off. I was taken to the local hospital. I was tagged as 'Unknown Purple', which is how they classify you. Someone working at the hospital was a big fan and he recognised me. I told the people at the hospital to lie about the severity of my condition because soon the media began to gather outside. The story actually ran in some papers that it was only a flesh wound, but it was very serious. My leg actually snapped, as in broke, when I was walking across the room.
"The guy who shot me was from Atlanta. They're working on the extradition because it's a different state to where New Orleans is. Hurricane Katrina has put everything back. The guy's still free. I've a gig in Atlanta next month; I'm wondering if he'll show up."
Oddly, the letter from Buckingham Palace arrived the day before he was shot. "The office over here thought it was a tax claim so they ignored it. I didn't hear about the CBE until after I was shot, but it had been awarded before all that."
The new album opens with this line: "Things are gonna change, this is the morning after." And Other People's Lives is a change. Gone is the sometime ramshackle production of The Kinks - this is a far smoother sounding affair. There are plenty of nods to New Orleans: The Getaway is as close to country-blues as Davies has ever gotten, while The Tourist is about the huge disparity in wealth in the city.
Elsewhere, there's plenty of Davies's arch social observations at play. Stand Up Comic is a wry look at the rise of yob culture, while the title track slams the celebrification of the media.
"At least in the 1960s, you were famous for 15 minutes," he says. "Now they've got it down to 60 seconds."
WATERLOO SUNSET'S FINE
Ray Davies on the real story behind the best ever British pop song
Rivalled only by God Only Knows as one of music's best moments, Waterloo Sunset (1967) has been covered by scores of musicians over the years, including David Bowie, Cathy Dennis, David Essex and Damon Albarn.
The song, a response to The Beatles' Penny Lane, recalled a journey Ray Davies regularly took from north to south London while an art school student.
It's long been believed that the Terry and Julie characters in the song refer to actors Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, who were appearing together in the film Far from the Madding Crowd.
"People always think that," says Davies, "but the song's about my sister's husband, who was in the RAF - he was very embittered about his experiences with them. They went off to live in Australia. That may not mean anything, but when you hear the record it means a lot. It's a small play, there's a plot with two people and a bit of subplot."
Davies's wife of the time, Rasa, sings backing vocals on the song. The opening line, "Dirty Old River", refers to an incident in Davies's childhood when he was hospitalised with a serious illness. After a successful operation, he was wheeled out on to the balcony of the hospital, which was near the river Thames, and one of the nurses commented on how dirty the river was looking.
Davies claims that the song was originally titled Liverpool Sunset and was going to be about the decline of the Merseybeat boom. This could be mischief-making. On its release it only made it to No 2 in the singles charts and was kept off the top spot by an Irishman - Phil Coulter, who co-wrote Sandie Shaw's Puppet on a String.
Other People's Lives is out now on V.
