1. The Village Green Preservation Society
2. Do You Remember Walter
3. Picture Book
4. Johnny Thunder
5. Last of the Steam Powered Trains
6. Big Sky
7. Sitting by the Riverside
8. Animal Farm
9. Village Green
10. Starstruck
11. Phenomenal Cat
12. All of My Friends Were There
13. Wicked Annabella
14. Monica
15. People Take Pictures of Each Other
Author and journalist, currently columnist for the Mail on Sunday, born 1951.
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony
Concerti Grossi – Arcangelo Corelli
Messiah – G. F. Handel
So here we are, the final chapter, and I’m over the moon it’s The Kinks.
Let’s go.
Everything started so well for Ray.
Born in 1944, he was the youngest member of the family and star of the house. Six older sisters would take turns mothering him, reading him stories and playing records to send him off to sleep.
Sounds like the perfect life. But then Dave was born.
‘I fucked it up for him,’ Dave said. ‘He was the baby of the family, the centre of attention for three years. Then I came along and stole his thunder.’
Great start then – a baby is born and, with that act alone, he’s already ruined his brother’s life and set in motion a rivalry that lasts to this day.
The brothers would grow up as very different children.
Ray was insular, thoughtful, and would often go for long periods without speaking to anyone. He also suffered from insomnia and, when he did finally get some sleep, he was prone to bouts of sleepwalking. His parents became so concerned with Ray’s subdued behaviour they sent him to a child psychiatrist for counselling.
Dave, on the other hand, was hotheaded and enthusiastic – determined to get as much fun out of life as possible. He threw mud at his neighbour’s washing lines and, on his third day at school, he threw some plasticine at his teacher because she shouted too much.
Basically, he was good at throwing things.
Despite these personality differences, though, there’s an interesting story that explains the strong connection between them.
When Ray was ten years old he was admitted to hospital for an operation and, at one point, it looked as if he might die – only an emergency tracheotomy saved him. Meanwhile, back at home, Dave suddenly awoke in the middle of the night, covered in sweat and gasping for breath. He hurried into his parents’ room, gesturing to his throat and, in between his erratic breathing, pleaded for help. His mum calmed him down, wiping away his sweat and giving him glasses of water until his breathing was under control again.
She would later discover that Dave woke up from his sleep at exactly the same time the hospital was performing the tracheotomy on Ray.
Spooky.
Ray had looked into the future and decided he didn’t want the mundane life that his parents lived in Muswell Hill. He wanted to be a leader, a star.
He threw all his efforts into sport and became a talented footballer, athlete and local boxing champion. A star of track and field, until he injured his back by falling awkwardly on a goalpost.
Next up, a girl passed him a note during class and said he’d been voted ‘Best Bum in School’. A nice compliment, one of the best, but in 1960 that wasn’t the career move it probably is today.
And Dave? What was he up to?
When he wasn’t throwing things, he spent a large portion of his childhood building a papier-mâché mountain in his room that got so big he couldn’t get it out of the door.
Now put yourself in the position of their parents for a moment.
They’ve spawned a nice bum with a bad back and an early version of Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What would you do? Probably the same as them – buy them both guitars and hope they stop mucking about and become one of the best bands of the sixties.
Ray of course played his guitar thoughtfully and artistically, leaning over the instrument and picking out Spanish-style arpeggios and complex chord arrangements. Dave, on the other hand, just cranked up the volume and played a load of power chords as powerfully as he could.
Course he did.
I’m going to rush through the whole ‘forming the band and getting signed thing’.
All you really need to know is they recruited Peter Quaife on bass and a succession of drummers until they settled on Mick Avory. That just left a vacancy for a singer, which was temporarily filled by a young Rod Stewart and a variety of others, until one of them smashed his mouth on a microphone during a gig and exited the stage to tend his wounds.
Without a ready-made replacement, Ray stepped up, and that was that.
They were subsequently signed to Pye and given the opportunity to record three singles to prove themselves.
No pressure.
The first single was a mediocre cover of Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’. It reached number forty-two in the charts.
The second single was a Ray Davies original called ‘You Still Want Me?’ It fared even worse – failing to chart at all.
With one single left to save their career, Pye were already considering dropping them.
Ray then comes into the studio and plays the opening bars of ‘You Really Got Me’ on a piano, originally thinking it would be a nice, relaxed tune that might give them a chance in the charts.
Whether he was right we’ll never know, because as soon as Dave hears it he realises it would sound better sped up, through an electric guitar. Not only that, he also thinks it would be a good idea to take a razor blade to his amp so it sounds ‘different’ and then adds one of the great solos to top it off.
‘You Really Got Me’ went to number one.
It was Ray’s song, but Dave, by being Dave, had saved The Kinks.
The Kinks and The Beatles came face to face on 2 August at the Gaumont Cinema in Bournemouth.
As The Kinks’ support slot drew closer and closer, Lennon was hanging about on stage basking in the adoration of an audience that was there for him. Ray Davies watched him mark his ground and felt anxiety at the prospect ahead – supporting The Beatles, the biggest band in the world.
Still, he walked up to Lennon and said, ‘It’s our turn. You’re on after us.’
Lennon, the absolute Scouser, immediately put him in his place.
‘With The Beatles, laddie, nobody gets a turn. You’re just there to keep the crowd occupied until we go on.’
Laddie? I’m surprised Dave Davies didn’t throw something at him from the wings.
Chastened by the experience, The Kinks meandered through their set while a Beatlemania audience chanted for their band. They then finished with ‘You Really Got Me’ and the place went nuts.
‘Later I watched The Beatles play and actually heard some fans screaming,“We Want The Kinks”,’ said Ray.
London 1, Liverpool 0.
I have a theory about these early Kinks singles – they all tell one story.
In ‘You Really Got Me’, Ray is madly in love. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he can’t even sleep at night (he never could to be honest) and says ‘See, don’t ever set me free. I always wanna be your side.’
He continues in ‘All Day and All of the Night’. Still desperately in love, he now wants a twenty-four-hour companion and the only time he feels all right is by her side – ‘I believe that you and me last forever.’
He then goes through the ups and down of a fragile romance. Impatient and fed up in ‘Tired of Waiting for You’, followed by one last optimistic plea to her in ‘Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy’ – including you and me my love.
But then he throws the towel in for good.
In ‘Set Me Free’ he literally tells her to do just that and, in ‘See My Friends’, he declares that ‘She is gone, she is gone and now there’s no one left.’ He ends by telling her he’ll probably be OK because he’s got loads of great mates that lie around in rivers.
Finally, in ‘Till the End of the Day’, he validates everything by saying ‘Baby I feel good, from the moment I rise, feel good from morning till the end of the day.’ He’s back on that twenty-four-hour thing again and tells her that they’re both free and their life can now begin.
There you go, over the course of a few singles, through a continuing narrative, Ray writes himself out of the boy/girl love song.
Really short this, but worth including.
Ray got married and Dave was the best man. Ah, that’s nice. They’ve finally realised that blood is thicker than water and put all their differences aside for Ray’s big day.
However, when the time came for Dave to do his duty and give a speech, no one could find him. The sisters organised a search party and eventually discovered him upstairs having sex with one of the guests.
I told you it was short but, I think you’ll agree, definitely worth including.
A lot’s been said about the rivalry and explosive relationship between the two brothers but, arguably, the biggest fight was the one between Dave Davies and the drummer, Mick Avory.
It all started in the hotel, the night before a gig. Dave and Mick had got into an argument and Mick, the tallest drummer ever, had punched Dave in the face – giving him two black eyes. The next night, Dave goes on stage wearing sunglasses to hide his defeat.
Suddenly, in between songs, he turns to Mick and says something.
Mick immediately leaps from his drum kit and hits Dave over the head with his drum pedal, leaving him unconscious on the floor.
He actually thought he’d killed him and, with his own preservation in mind, he ran out of the venue and tried to lie low – a difficult task for someone wearing an Edwardian hunting jacket and a pink frilly shirt. Still, he managed to find sanctuary at a friend’s house and nervously passed the time away with all the anxiety of someone who thinks he’s just murdered the lead guitarist of The Kinks.
Of course, he hadn’t. Dave awoke in hospital covered in blood but lived to fight another day.
So what had Dave said to him during the gig? What could be so bad that it would lead to such an altercation?
During a break in songs, Dave had turned to the drummer and said, ‘Hey Mick, you’d be better off playing the drums with your cock, mate.’
As last words go, they’re up there with Nelson’s if you ask me.
The band would continue to fight at nearly every opportunity and were eventually banned from playing America after a chaotic tour where they beat everyone up.
Having freed himself from the love song, and an American audience, Ray then wrote a series of English character studies: ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’, ‘Dead End Street’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and ‘Autumn Almanac’.
What sets these songs apart is the lack of broad brush in the storytelling. The attention to detail, to the minutiae, holds sway and Ray produces little vignettes of living with cracks in the ceiling, men in frilly nylons, and a couple that are so in love they imagine Waterloo not to be the grimy train station that it undoubtedly was, but a sun-drenched vista that solves everything.
My particular favourite is ‘Autumn Almanac’ – the best song Blur never wrote and a pre-emptive strike against the chaos of Sky Sports’ kick-off times.
I like my football on a Saturday,
Roast beef on Sundays, all right.
Dave Davies may have saved The Kinks, but it was now Ray’s eye, and his imagination, that took them in another direction.
And this is where it took him. This is where we end.
Like all nostalgia, it’s a con, an outright lie – a symptom of someone with an active imagination who isn’t happy with the present day.
Yet, like all nostalgia, it’s seductive in what it promises and careful in what it avoids.
Was there ever a Merrie England of village greens and cheerful cricketers? Was it ever this bright? This clear?
I’m not sure it was and I’m equally sure that throwing our lot into ‘preserving the old ways’ is a recipe for disaster. We all have our own imagined past but those that shout the loudest about theirs are often those who are most unhappy today.
That, more than anything, worries me – an Unmerrie England that takes refuge in its past.
So I take two things.
The songs are great, the songs are really great, but it won’t be God, or even The Kinks, that save the little shops.
What’s wrong with me is a puritanical desire to be serious, and an actual inability to take popular music seriously. I pretty much gave up listening to pop music round about the time Radio London (Big L, 266 on the medium wave band, not the BBC one) went off the air in 1967, and absolutely gave up soon after I crashed my motorbike in the late summer of 1969, an event that strengthened my wish to be serious.
I’d been listening to Tin Pan Alley, I can now work out, since about 1963 (Pick of the Pops on Sunday afternoons was eventually permitted by my boarding school headmaster who until then had insisted nobody could listen to the radio unless he could make his own set, which a couple of my schoolfellows did, so subverting the ban). So I was in on the beginning of it, and it was all catchy, memorable singles which quickly came and quickly went, and the waters closed over them. I don’t think anyone ever expected to hear them again once they’d dropped off the charts, and it was amazing how quickly singles vanished from the shops once they had stopped selling.
As a result, they’re great memory-joggers, instantly taking me back to certain long-ago moments. But most of them are pretty artless. I never thought it was anything more than an ephemeral pleasure, and I still don’t, though one or two singles, e.g. ‘We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place’ and ‘Meet on the Ledge’, appealed to my gloomy instincts more than the rest.
It seemed to have run out of energy and originality, and after Big L, BBC Radio 1 was impossible to listen to, for some reason. I saw the whole thing as entertainment, ice cream for the mind, except for Bob Dylan, which was something separate anyway, and I kept up an interest in him until Blood on the Tracks in 1975 (I’m surprised, on looking this up, to find out that this was so late. My lying memory would have put it four or five years earlier). Even then, I suspected (and still suspect) that Dylan was having us on, most of the time. Who was going to dare to laugh, however pretentious and obscure he got? Mind you, I get the same feeling about The Waste Land.
A schoolfriend urged early Pink Floyd on to me, but I just got bored. And then, though utterly musically uneducated, I found out about Beethoven, whose music is like a cathedral, whereas this stuff is like an asbestos youth club hut.
Bored. Bored. And bored again. Did you think I was a nostalgist? Common mistake. The past is dead, that’s the point about it. I quite liked ‘Days’, which has a faintly elegiac, plangent tinge to it, especially if you can’t make out the words properly. I have heard it somewhere else, long ago, without having any idea who was singing it (this is quite common for me – once you stop listening systematically you have quite a lot of these half-memories and then discover that everybody else knows what they are called and who sang them. This can be quite funny sometimes). Mostly, the album (as we must now call it) reminds me of that early Pink Floyd, especially something which began ‘I’ve got a bike, you can ride it if you like…’ – and these were grown men, singing this nursery stuff. And then more boredom. And then even more boredom. I looked up the lyrics, to see if there was anything there either. Banality, and a feeling of someone trying to fill up an LP (as this must have been when it started life). It’s a search for meaning, but it doesn’t find anything. But by then I’d found revolutionary socialism, which had plenty of meaning, even if it was all a mistake.
So, I received Peter’s piece and, while I liked it, I wanted more. I hadn’t really got to know him through his writing and felt a little brushed aside – like one of those fellas in the Question Time audience who has made a cheap point just for the applause. But no one applauded.
An over-sensitivity on my part? Always.
Still, I did want more. It’s the final entry in the book and I wasn’t happy with it being left there.
With that in mind I contacted Peter. What follows is the correspondence we had on a bank holiday some time ago. It wasn’t intended for publication, it was just two fellas emailing each other, but once I realised it gave me everything I was after, I approached Peter and he kindly agreed for me to use it here.
Here it is.
Martin: Hi Peter. Thanks for your piece and apologies for not getting back to you sooner. Had a crazy weekend with Tim Farron listening to N.W.A. for the first time – you know how it is.
Anyway, I love it.
If you have anything to add then please do as, if anything, it’s a little short.
The second part may be hard to expand on as you have nothing really to say about the album other than what you’ve said. Except maybe, did you have a memory of The Kinks from the sixties?
The first part is fascinating though. I could have read so much more. You were the right age in what people often say is the right decade to be the right age (I wouldn’t know, I was born in 1971). Yet there seemed to be a clash and you didn’t want ice cream. In fact, you hated ice cream so much that you haven’t ever tasted it since.
Don’t you miss ice cream? On a hot day?
Appreciate I’m imposing on you to do more and you’ve already done enough by giving your time for free. But it’s only because I know me, the readers, and the ice cream makers – we all want more.
I probably overplayed the ice cream analogy there – forgive me.
Peter: I’ll take another look in a week or two, and if I feel the urge, I’ll add. But not for the moment. Ice cream’s a thing for the young. I didn’t hate it. I just reckoned I was too old for it. I used to like corned beef sandwiches and Corona fizzy drinks, too, but I don’t now. These days ice cream hurts and rots my teeth and makes me fatter.
If I remember anything about The Kinks from the 1960s it is the words ‘…to the end of the day’. I can’t recall what came before or afterwards.
To be ‘the right age’ you had to have experienced the world before pop culture. I wasn’t sure it was a good thing, and now I’m sure it wasn’t.
Martin: Firstly, delighted you’re carrying on the ice cream analogy. I feel much better about the whole thing now.
Secondly, I’ve always been more than a little annoyed that the sixties is now told through its stock footage – miniskirts in Carnaby Street and everything’s swinging all over the place. I’m sure it wasn’t like that, it must be a lie. Mustn’t it?
Our club is about trying to tell different truths, to come at things from other angles. The sixties as a concept now seems overplayed to me, but it’s still incredibly pervasive. So I guess I’m just interested in hearing a different take for a change.
It can’t have been fab and groovy in Darlington, and it sounds like it wasn’t for Peter Hitchens. Not that I’m comparing you to Darlington – I’ve never actually been.
But, yes, only if you feel the urge and have the time.
Peter: I was mostly in non-university Oxford (and non-university Cambridge, oddly enough). There was definitely something going on, a kind of shiver through the landscape, a feeling of weakened authority and infinite possibility. Take a look at the original film of Far from the Madding Crowd with Julie Christie and Terence Stamp (so much better than the recent remake, and now available on DVD), or Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and you’ll get a hint of how thrilling it was. Those girls! The feeling of a summer morning and an endless blue day coming (like almost all English days, it clouded over quite quickly, of course).
But the ordinary world carried on often quite obliviously, while all this gestated in the middle of it.
There’s a lovely YouTube film (a tiny bit of Carnaby Street but lots of more normal London) in which B. Dylan singing ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ (that’s how to find it) is played as background to a series of scenes from London as it was in about 1965.
It was *exactly* like that.
Martin: Did you ever see Bob Dylan in the sixties? My imagination tells me it must have been brilliant but that’s the problem with my imagination – it’s endlessly cheerful. In reality, I suspect I would have had to sit next to a beatnik who wore a beret and smoked Gauloises all evening.
It’s interesting that you use colour to describe what was happening.
As someone who wasn’t there and has only seen it on the TV it always strikes me that the sixties is about a transition from a supposedly black and white world to full technicolour. Then I remind myself that I’m being misled again – i.e. people actually live in colour. There were no black and white lives, just televisions.
Yet, there was a promise, or at the very least a suggestion, of an endless blue for you?
Just to touch on a previous email. I had some corned beef recently and was reminded of how nice it was. It’s the beef that works best with vinegar I think.
Peter: No, never saw Dylan. Too young and too broke to do the necessary travel, I think. In any case, I think you’d have had to be around in the early sixties, and in the USA, to see the real thing, before he went electric. There’s a wonderful YouTube of him singing ‘Tambourine Man’ (one verse missing) at Newport, before he was a megastar. You can see the wind blowing in the trees.
My wife (a Londoner) did see Mick Jagger in his dress at the Hyde Park Brian Jones benefit. Of course that time was lived in colour, though in fact the colours of clothes, cars, buses, advertising billboards etc. were different (and cruder) in that largely pre-synthetic age. And it was a lot shabbier and more run down, even in the parts that were supposed to be OK. But now it somehow seems more real in black and white, which underlines that these events are impossibly unreachable, and the people you can see in them are irrecoverably altered or dead.
Here’s an odd thing, coincidental for me but for nobody else.
I think you noticed my recent interest in Sandy Denny. This isn’t especially musical, though I think her voice in ‘Meet on the Ledge’ and ‘Farewell, Farewell’ is fit to break your heart if you were alive then, and know what happened to her later. Notice how Irish, or at least Gaelic, she gets, in ‘Farewell, Farewell’, and that strange skirling yell she lets out in ‘Meet on the Ledge’. Ancestry coming out, I think.
Well, I’d never heard ‘Farewell, Farewell’ until about a year ago. And now I have, I cannot get it out of my head and I am quite sure it was about that terrible crash they had in early 1969, and I know why Richard Thompson never sings it any more. I didn’t know about that then.
But I had my own crash later that same year in which, by the grace of God, I hurt nobody but myself. And, my goodness, that was the end of the blue day. From then till now, I’m set apart from everyone who’s never been in such a thing. The veil comes right off, you feel real fear, and real pain, and then real remorse, and the old naked skull is there grinning at you, as he does on all those old tombstones. I’ve never been the same since, though I have to walk about ten miles before the old broken bone begins to ache, and the scars aren’t where anyone can see them.
Poor old Sandy wasn’t in the Fairport crash, of course. She had a different kind of crash later. But look at her little happy face, with the big red scarf, in that picture of them all in the midst of a load of hay, and you’ll see what the sixties were like at the beginning. Then look at the later pictures of her (not the posed, glamorised ones, the ordinary ones, a bit bloated and sagging) and you’ll see what happened later. We all thought we were playing harmless games in a safe suburban garden. And we were in a jungle.
Martin: That’s incredible, Peter. I hope the after-effects of the crash continue to lessen. I’ve never really had my Fairport Convention phase yet, although I know I will. All these things are about timing don’t you think?
I mean, if you weren’t there, absorbing it at the time, then you have to choose wisely when approaching ‘the great works’.
Catcher in the Rye, Portnoy’s Complaint – best appreciated when adolescent I suspect.
Blood on the Tracks – well, that’s probably a different thing. For me anyway.
And Village Green? Well, probably anytime other than when it came out, in 1968.
So, I think so much of what’s in the past is probably ahead of me. Sandy Denny, Beethoven, and Lawrence of Arabia – a film I try every ten years and still can’t grasp.
Yet people say you had to be there. So much of any generation teases future travellers as if their time and works of art can only be enjoyed in that context. But I’m never sure that’s as vital as the personal – the place that you exist in when approaching the past.
Throughout the last year and a half of running this club it’s the thing that’s struck me the most – there is no objective good or bad, of course there isn’t, there’s just people colliding with things at different times, with different sentiments.
Peter: Oh, I’m very grateful for the crash. It did me very little harm, killed or seriously injured nobody else, and did me a great deal of lasting good, though it could explain why so many things seem obvious to me that are baffling to others, and why I am such a physical coward.
I had no Fairport phase or moment. I was just thrilled by ‘Meet on the Ledge’ at the time, and amazed long years afterwards to find it had become a sort of classic. I also intuitively understood it at the time, in a way I now recognise was more or less accurate. The poor things (well, some of them) were already doomed when they sang it, in their various ways.
Films are very personal. And when Lawrence first came out, in an era of 405-line black and white TVs with ten-inch screens, there probably was no more powerful aesthetic experience available. Though I’m surprised it doesn’t resonate at all, as David Lean was a genius (Great Expectations was far better, but never mind) and I can instantly recall several scenes, from ‘no prisoners!’ to Lawrence bringing the Arab boy into the officers’ mess in Cairo after Aqaba, and the filthy hospital in Damascus.
Beethoven, well, just listen to the slow (second) movement of the seventh symphony, with no distractions to hand, through headphones, preferably at twilight. Do it three times. You won’t regret it. Then you can move outwards from there.
And there is an objective measure, though few of us know how to use it.
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.