IN 2014 I interviewed Ray Davies at the Stratford Literary Festival. I wanted to know how he wrote all those great Kinks songs in the sixties. ‘Some people wait for inspiration,’ he said. ‘I waited for a deadline.’
At the time the Kinks needed a new hit single roughly every three months, and Ray was the one who supplied them: ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘All Day And All Of The Night’, ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’, ‘Ev’rybody’s Gonna Be Happy’, ‘Set Me Free’, ‘See My Friends’, ‘Till The End Of The Day’, ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’, ‘Dandy’, ‘Dead End Street’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Autumn Almanac’ and ‘Days’.
That’s fourteen smash hits in four years. My friend Mark Ellen’s fond of describing it as the greatest hot streak in the history of pop. It’s even more amazing when you consider they were all written and sung by one person. Ray wasn’t sharing the responsibility with John or Paul or Mick or Keith. That’s what you call pressure, and judging by the outcome pressure appears to be every bit as effective as inspiration.
There’s one further single which sometimes gets forgotten in that sequence and it was raised by somebody in the audience at Stratford. ‘Wonderboy’ came out in the spring of 1968 and stalled at number thirty-six, which was disappointing by Kinks standards. Davies draws comfort from the fact that somebody told him that John Lennon loved it, demanding it was played three times in a row by a DJ in a club because he liked the middle eight so much. That may be an apocryphal tale but if it was my song I too would do my best to keep it alive.