‘Our first official recording session took place at Pye Recording Studios at Marble Arch in January 1964. Although I had written a few songs for the group, Shel, Larry and Arthur Howes had decided between them that we should record the old Little Richard song, ‘Long Tall Sally’. This was a song that the Beatles had put into their stage act for their European tour and our management thought that it would make an excellent first release. Pye Records had agreed to release the record on their label, and we paid all our own recording costs. We also recorded three other songs which I had previously demoed: ‘You Do Something’, ‘You Still Want Me’ and ‘I Took My Baby Home’. We had also made demos of other songs I had written, ‘I Believed You’ and ‘You Really Got Me’. Page had said that the record company would not go for ‘You Really Got Me’. On a previous occasion when I had played the demo in his office, Page had even stopped the tape before it got to the end of the song. The general consensus was that it was either ‘too bluesy’ or ‘not pop enough’. We were starting to put the song into the stage act, but everybody thought that it was too risky to record it.
As Avory had not joined us at this point, it was decided we would use a session drummer called Bobby Graham. I had heard his playing on other records and was bowled over by his style and power, which was very reminiscent of Dave Clark’s drumming on all of his hits. Graham added a tidiness and a dimension to our sound, which had usually been dependent on the distorted fuzziness of Dave and me playing too loud through amplifiers that were not equipped for the volume.
As we were tuning up in the studio Dave played a chord which started to feed back through the amplifier. This caused the chord to oscillate between the pick-up on his guitar and the Vox AC 30-amp that Dave was plugged into. On top of the Vox was the little green amp that Dave had started using to get the fuzziness into the sound. The engineer, who was placing a microphone in front of Dave’s speaker, jumped backwards. Dave smiled and played an even louder chord. This time, instead of a low melodic whine, the feedback had a piercing whistle that made the engineer put his hands over his ears. Dave held the screeching guitar aloft to maximize the feedback. The engineer screamed and ran out of the building into the street and, as far as we know, he never returned.
Eventually Dave was persuaded to turn down his amp and we got on with the recording. The instrumental back tracks were recorded first and then it was time to put on the vocals. When we played back the songs at the end of the session, Dave and I were both amazed at how Shel Talmy had managed to smooth out all the rough edges in the track and make the songs sound very polished and professional. I was astonished at how good we sounded even though it didn’t sound like us at all.
‘Long Tall Sally’ was to be our first single, with ‘I Took My Baby Home’ on the B-side. Pye Records had offered us a contract to release three singles with an option in their favour to renew. Robert and Grenville took a percentage as Boscobel Productions and passed on a payment to Larry’s company. Shel Talmy was to produce the singles and Arthur Howes was set as our agent. All we needed now was the record to be a hit and we would all be destined for success.
‘Long Tall Sally’ was to be released in a few weeks, and we still needed a name for the group. While we had been playing the deb dances with Robert, we had been called the Boll Weevils, after a song by Bo Diddley. I always thought that this sounded a little too twee. Later we called ourselves the Ravens, but Robert thought this sounded too suburban. One evening, we were having a drink in a pub with Larry Page and somebody commented on the fake-leather capes Dave and Pete were wearing. Someone else said that we were wearing kinky boots, similar to those worn by Honor Blackman in The Avengers. Larry overheard someone call us ‘kinks’ and concluded that, because of the kinky clothes we wore, and the fact that the new drummer looked a little like a police identikit version of a pervert, we might as well call ourselves the Kinks. We looked at one another in an unimpressed sort of way, said no more, finished our drinks and left. A few days later Larry showed us the mock-up of the artwork for the advertisement for the single and there we were: the Kinks. I hated it, but Larry’s eyes were glowing with excitement.
‘Kinks. It’s short – five letters. You’ll be bottom of the bill, so you need something that will stand out.’
‘But people will think that we’re all weird!’
‘Well, that might not be such a bad thing. I can see it. The curiosity value will be incredible. That’s the gimmick. You’ll all dress in leather with whips and riding boots. Very kinky.’
Larry was walking around the room, in full flow. Dave and Pete were excited but not taking the whole thing seriously. Larry continued enthusiastically:
‘Then we’ll have some shots done of you wearing the leather gear. Whips and leather. We’ll put the pictures in the trades. They’ll love it. But you’ve got to get the new stage gear made. Lots of buckles and leather straps.’
I went along with it. I knew that we could change the name when the record flopped, so I didn’t care. Larry was the only member of our management team with showbiz experience and so it was considered that he knew best. I hated the name, but what did I know? I hated my own name even more, but I had been walking around with that all my life, so who was I to complain?
Several weeks later, we, the Kinks, found ourselves in John Steven’s boutique in Carnaby Street having the final fitting for our new stage gear, a mixture of Thames-green, skin-tight Robin Hood with Avengers-style leather trimmings. An amalgam of ‘period’ B-movie costumes and S and M. Like our first record, the gear was devised on a whim and hastily thrown together in order to cash in on a fad and meet a deadline. The only difference was that our record, at least, sounded finished, whereas our clothes looked as though the tailor had forgotten to sew the material together before delivering.
Then there was the problem of my teeth. To be precise, the gap between my two front teeth which appeared in photographs as a black space whenever I smiled. This particularly worried Larry, who, as a singer himself in the early days of pop music and skiffle, knew that singers had to have flawless looks, clear complexions and, most of all, rows of bright white sparkling teeth. I was the lead singer on the single and I had all three faults. Two could be overcome by large quantities of make-up, but the last and fatal flaw, namely the gap between my two front teeth, could not be easily overcome.
At least Larry was to the point. ‘They’ll never let you on the box with railings like that, cock. I’ve fixed you up an appointment with a dentist. He’ll sort you out.’
I sat quietly while the dentist looked at my teeth with disapproval. Then he became confident.
‘We’ve sorted out many big stars with worse problems than this. This will take no time at all.’
I felt immediately reassured, and not such a freak after all. Then I heard the sound of a drill being started. It was a sound that brought back memories of my endless visits to the dentist as a child. It was all too obvious that this was not going to be as simple or as temporary as I had been led to believe. When I asked what was going to be done, the dentist casually explained that he was going to cut away my existing two front teeth and replace them with caps. He assured me that it would be permanent and make me look more acceptable. I immediately jumped out of the chair. After frantic telephone calls to Larry and Grenville, we agreed to compromise and put temporary caps over my existing teeth for the television show. If I was comfortable with them, the dentist would do a more permanent job at a later date. And so I made my first appearance on Ready Steady Go! with the largest front teeth since Bugs Bunny.
A cameraman was heard to say to his director, ‘You want the singer in close-up. You mean the one with the goofy teeth?’
We did our spot on Ready Steady Go! After the song the interviewer, Michael Aldred, spoke to Dave and made some bitchy remark comparing us with the Rolling Stones. Dave gave a reply full of innocent wit, and a delightful smile at the camera, and it was all over. My only contribution, apart from miming the song, was to stand bolt upright in the background and smile my new smile as Dave did his interview. Cathy McGowan, the show’s female presenter, struck up a conversation with Pete after the show and they seemed to have a lot in common. The producer, Vicky Wickham, a large strapping lass, was tremendously enthusiastic about the Kinks; she seemed more than satisfied with our performance. Although I was the lead singer of the group, it was Dave with his long flowing hair and Pete with his gift of the gab who really grabbed centre stage after the show.
Outside the studios my niece Jackie and some of her friends, who had already formed a fan club, were waiting to mob us as we emerged. Robert and Grenville had also arranged a photographer to be on hand to take pictures of the event. We were surprised to see that a picture appeared in the New Musical Express the following week. The television exposure gave the single a tremendous boost and it entered the Melody Maker chart the following week at Number 42.
Someone in the family had taken a picture of us as we were miming the song on television. Pete Quaife insisted on wearing his stage gear for days afterwards, even though it was impractical for normal everyday activities, such as sitting down. Fame and fortune seemed to be waiting around the corner for us, as if they were only two stops on the 102 bus. In the week after our television debut the Arthur Howes Agency was busily filling our diary with engagements up and down the country. Photographic sessions and interviews followed, and that single chart entry at Number 42, although a small first step, made us all feel that we were walking on air.
The following week, the record had dropped away out of sight and there was even a rumour that somebody had bought the record into the chart for that single week. If such rumours were true, we were in no mood to believe them. As far as we were concerned, the name the Kinks was on the map and we had, albeit in a modest way, made our first little dent in the world of pop music.
The first ever official Kinks gig took place at the Town Hall, Oxford, on a cold night in February 1964. The opening act was an R and B group from London called the Downliner Sect. Both groups were playing Bo Diddley songs, and so it was a night notable for the sound of maracas, which echoed around the half-empty hall. This gave the impression that somebody was shaking a giant pepper pot.
A series of gigs followed, and we started travelling to small clubs up and down the country. The Kinks were billed as having appeared on Ready Steady Go! and would sing their chart-smashing hit, ‘Long Tall Sally’. They were assorted gigs with strange-sounding names like Club Noriek, the Jungfrau, Mr Smith’s, the Goldhawk Social Club, Klooks Kleek and the Ram Jam. We were billed as R and B, but our pop-sounding record was not treated seriously by the blues snobs, who, because we had appeared on television and made a single, all of a sudden decided that we had sold out. We were starting to attract an audience of fans outside of our normal circle of friends and relatives, and I was surprised to see that they were a pretty snazzy-looking bunch, even though they were predominantly mods.
Just after we had taken Mick Avory on as drummer, I was asked by Larry Page to write a song for another group he was producing. He played the tape of my song and immediately asked me to sign a contract for it. Later I found myself standing in a crowded underground train on the Northern line, clutching the agreement for a song called ‘I’ve Got That Feeling’. It was the height of the evening rush hour, and sweaty commuters were being thrown around by the erratic motion of the train. Office workers going back to the suburbs from the city. Back to homes, evening meals, cocoa, families, television. I hadn’t bothered to read the small print of the contract. Surely that was irrelevant. What mattered was that my song had been accepted by the publishers and I was a ‘songwriter’ All I knew and cared was that the song had my name as composer next to the title. I vaguely remembered seeing ‘For the payment of one penny’, and ‘50 per cent to the composer-writer’. That meant I was to receive 50 per cent of every record and performance, whatever the figure was. Later that night my mother looked at both me and the contract with suspicion, almost as if I had done something illegal to get it. In fact the publisher’s signature was already stamped on to the bottom of the standard one-page agreement. Eddie Kassner probably didn’t even know that I had written the song.
The song was to be recorded by an all-girl trio called the Orchids, and produced by Larry for Decca Records, who had previously turned down the Kinks, and so the fact that my song was recorded for that label added a little sugar to what had been a bitter pill. There was no actual money involved yet. That would come later, when the record became a success. My work was done. All I had to do was turn up at the session and brood in the corner, like the average moody young genius songwriter. In my dreams, I imagined the musicians looking over for a nod of approval from me at the end of the take. Then I expected everyone would applaud and carry me out of the studio to the strains of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. I had no idea that the musicians would all be session men. Unlike my group, who would have willingly recorded for nothing, these musicians were professionals doing a session as part of a job. The realities of the situation were far from my mind. In my dreams, the song had already reached Number 1 and had been voted song of the year by the critics. Frank Sinatra had chosen it for his next film. What next? An Oscar nomination? A Nobel Prize perhaps? Now I realize it was just a lousy little pop song, but in my imagination it was the greatest piece of art yet created by man. What an innocent fool I was. But as I looked around the subway train the ordinariness of the commuters crushed together around it was as though I was already free.
The weekend before the Orchids recorded ‘I’ve Got That Feeling’, the Kinks had some gigs up north. But not ordinary gigs, because we would be playing in the heart of ‘Beatlemania’ at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. The club, which was responsible for discovering the Beatles, was the centre of the world of the Merseybeat, and we, an untogether group of pretenders from London, would be trying to encroach on their territory. In February 1964 the Beatles were at their most popular in Liverpool, and the northern groups had a monopoly on the charts, with a few exceptions like the Rolling Stones and Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Bob Wooler was the manager of the Cavern and he had booked us in for one of the lunch-time beat sessions. His approval was vital to our future. If he liked us and we went down well, the word would spread to other promoters around the country who would book us on the strength of this gig. If we failed to impress, then we might as well throw our instruments into the River Mersey, because if you couldn’t break the Liverpool scene, there was no future anywhere else. But more than anything else, we were to be paid £25 for the gig. If they paid it here, they would pay it anywhere.
We drove up to Liverpool in a converted ambulance, which Robert and Grenville had purchased for £200. My brother-in-law Brian had left his job as a test-flight engineer at Handley Page Aircraft to become our tour manager. He had met my sister Gwen at the Atheneum Ballroom in Muswell Hill. He had watched her week after week as she danced with one boyfriend after another, but he was terrified of asking her for a date in case she refused. When eventually he plucked up the courage, the romance escalated, and after a brief courtship Gwen and Brian decided to get married. Soon they realized that Gwen had become pregnant, which brought the wedding forward, and after the briefest of engagements, Brian and Gwen walked down the aisle at St James’s Church, Muswell Hill. By the time he became our tour manager he and Gwen had brought three delightful daughters into the world.
Our arrival at Lime Street, Liverpool, was on a bright, winter’s morning. The air was crisp and the sun, which cast large shadows across the cobbled streets up to the station, was as bright with enthusiasm as we were. We were tired, dirty, uncomfortable and excited as hell to be there. Brian suggested that we freshen up in the public toilets in the station and get changed in the ambulance, as he was not sure what the backstage conditions were like at the Cavern. This gig would be in front of the most hard-to-please audiences in the country, well known for their down-to-earth honesty, which at times bordered on cruelty. A real ‘Scouse’ has the ability to ask you a question with an exclamation mark at the same time. When a Liverpudlian tells you that you look like crap, you’d better believe it. Anywhere else, a criticism is received as an opinion which may or may not be right. In Liverpool if they say you stink, you go to the bathroom and wash.
After we had washed and brushed ourselves up, we found ourselves setting up on stage at the Cavern Club. The lunchtime audience was already in, and watched stern-faced as we carried on our equipment and began to organize ourselves. Waiting for their judgement, we were like condemned men erecting our own gallows while gawping masses awaited our execution. Fortunately, like an execution, it came and went quickly and nobody felt a thing. Unlike the condemned, we hung around afterwards and mingled with the crowd to see how we had gone down. By all accounts Wooler thought we had done well, and said to Brian that he would book us again. A local girl called Diane said that we were quite original. Her girlfriend had also been impressed by us and they were both coming to see us play later that night at a ballroom on top of a desolate hill top just outside Liverpool, In fact they were so impressed that they decided to bring a few more girlfriends and travel up with us in the back of the ambulance.
The gig was in the middle of the moorland on the top of a windy hill. Diane had said that a female beat group, called the Liverbirds, were opening the show for us. We would both be playing two forty-five-minute sets, and even though the Liverbirds were alternating with us, the Kinks’ name was bigger on the poster, by virtue of the fact that we had been advertised as being on Ready Steady Go! Diane and her friends were concerned that we would leave Liverpool with a good impression. She seemed to know everything. All the sights were pointed out to us. All the necking with her girlfriends in the back of the ambulance was polite and well organized. The girls sucked Polo mints to keep their breath smelling fresh, and also not to give away where their mouths had been. And as I watched the Liverbirds’ singer with the bouffoned hair belt out ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’, it struck me that these Scousers had a most wonderful warm sense of humour all their own. They celebrated human failings instead of trying to cover up the faults. They were absolutely unimpressed by the rest of the world and by what people thought of them. They were honest, proud, emotional, scruffy and soulful. Nowhere else could have produced the Beatles. Lennon and McCartney would write great songs as long as they had the heartbeat of Liverpool behind them. For once I was not ashamed of being ordinary, and when I felt sorry for myself I thought of these no-nonsense, northern people, shut my mouth and sucked on a Polo. There were no dark clouds over my head when I was in Liverpool.
We were tired but confident as we started our long drive back to London. Brian, partly because he was an intrepid adventurer, and partly to save money on Bed and Breakfasts, had decided to face the cold night and return to London straight after the show. The band sat at the back of the ambulance, and Jonah, our next-door neighbour and equipment boy, sat in the front with my nephew Terry, who was talking to Brian to keep him awake. As we fell asleep one by one, Brian started to reminisce about his days in the RAF, when he had been stationed in Hong Kong. ‘The greatest days of my life,’ he said nostalgically, ‘until now. This is nearly as exciting.’ Brian was an optimist. A true Kinks believer and fan. To Brian, the group was like a little army on manoeuvres. Our battleground was the motorway.
On the drive down the motorway, Brian’s conversation moved back from the RAF to the present. He was looking forward to getting home, and kept referring to Gwen: ‘Gwen would have liked this, Gwen would have enjoyed that, Gwen will laugh when I tell her about this and that.’ Suddenly there was a crunch, a pop and a dull thud. Then the ambulance shook and choked. Brian pulled over, and after an inspection of the underside of the vehicle declared that the ‘big end’s gone’. I didn’t know what big ends were, and even after subsequent detailed explanations by Brian, to this day I’m none the wiser. Brian’s bubbly humour descended into pitiful concern as he delicately persuaded and coaxed the ailing ambulance down the motorway at ten miles an hour. By the time we arrived back home, Brian’s eyes were like organ stops – out on the end of stalks. Dark rings under his eyes. White, pallid face. He was still mumbling to himself: ‘The big ends, it was the big ends.’
We had stopped listening 250 miles before. We had returned triumphant, even if our chariot was somewhat disabled and our driver reduced to a quivering wreck. The road had certainly given Brian a new outlook on the world. In the RAF there was always someone else to give orders in a state of emergency. What seemed to hit Brian more than the big ends was the fact that we were truly on our own. No one would help us except the Automobile Association. We couldn’t send an SOS for ground- or air-support because there was nobody else fighting our war with us. And yet there was something else in Brian’s eyes: a realization that touring on the road meant freedom. As long as we got to the gig on time and played on time, the world was ours. This was an excitement we all felt. That’s what pulled us together and turned us into a group.
Despite our success at the Cavern we went into the Dave Clark tour a little under-prepared and disorganized. The Kinks were being paid £250 a week and that was like a steady job. But out of that we had to pay commission of 40 per cent to assorted managers and agents as well as our own bed and breakfast, which meant that there was hardly any money left for us. But we were keen and ready for the big time which we thought was just around the corner, so the fact that we were making no money didn’t bother us.
Although we travelled on the same coach as the other acts, it was every man for himself when we reached the theatre. (Brian had been left at home to cut down the overheads.) When we arrived in a town the stars, Dave Clark and the Hollies, were dropped off at their hotels. Then we drove to the theatre to unload the gear. All the other bands had road managers on board to lift the equipment off the bus and assemble it but the Kinks had neither the finances nor the space allocated on the bus for any extra bodies. So we hauled our own amps onstage and set up ourselves. After that came the task of finding the cheapest Bed and Breakfast to stay in. Once this was done, we rushed back to the theatre just in time for the show.
Package shows usually performed twice daily in each town, and had six bands on the tour playing sets lasting between fifteen and thirty minutes, depending on their popularity and fame at the time. The opening act on this tour was a group from Liverpool called the Mojos. The Kinks were on second, by virtue of our one television appearance and our record having reached 42. Mark Wynter, a solo singer in the traditional heart-throb mould, was on next with his backing group, and the Hollies, riding high after hits such as ‘Stay’ and ‘Just One Look’, closed the first half. After the interval Mark Wynter’s back-up band played a few more songs, then the comedian who acted as master of ceremonies told some jokes while the stage was quickly re-set. Then the Dave Clark Five performed. After a short break to let the first house out, we set up again and repeated the show for the second audience.
We thought that we had done enough at the opening concert at the Coventry Theatre to earn some praise in the press, but we were to have a double disappointment the following week, when not only did our record drop out of the charts but an article in the New Musical Express by Richard ‘the Beast’ Green gave us the worst review of the whole show. The only song that earned any praise at all was ‘You Really Got Me’.
On the stage of the De Montfort Hall, Leicester, the following day, the tour manager, Malcolm Cooke, added to our shame when he announced in front of the whole touring company that the Kinks were to be moved to the opening spot in the show and that the Mojos, whose recording ‘Everything’s Alright’ was now entering the charts, were to go on after us. We had suddenly gone from being the blue-eyed boys to being the whipping boys. Everybody on the tour felt it their duty to advise and criticize, and the more they told us what a shambles we were, the worse we performed. Before the tour we had wanted to put in some blues songs, like Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’ and Slim Harpo’s ‘Got Love if You Want It’, but we were told that this was a pop-music tour and all the songs either had to be in the charts or at least covered by another chart-topping group. We had already started playing ‘You Really Got Me’, and even though nobody knew the song, it seemed to go down well. But opening the show meant that we would have to cut our act from five songs to four, and so ‘You Really Got Me’ was thrown out and replaced by something more familiar to the audience.
At first, we took our relegation to heart and played with our heads down, but after a few nights Dave started to jump around again and a few girls in the audience started to scream. I was still depressed and humiliated, and as a result my raving was restricted to shaking my head and arms and shimmying on the spot: I refused to move my feet from the ground. I had decided that I was to be totally professional and do this tour just for the money. All £20 a week of it.
After the show, while the other bands went off to their hotels, we would stay to pack our equipment back on to the bus. This was the one time we actually scored over the other groups because we got to talk to the fans that had stayed behind, waiting backstage. We were given a lot of encouragement from fans of the other bands. If our show was not a hit with the press, we made up for it by doing our own PR after the show. Quaife was particularly at home doing this, so much so that on many occasions he converted Hollies and Dave Clark fans into Kinks fans as well.
As the tour travelled from town to town, Avory began to come out of his shell. He kept everyone amused with stories of working on a building site with a gang of Yugoslav refugees. Another of his stories concerned an early sexual experience with a Scout master in East Molesey who persuaded him that in order to be a good scout he had to massage a certain part of the Scout master’s anatomy every day while swearing the oath of allegiance to the Scout troop. It was only on reading the life story of Lord Baden-Powell that he discovered to his relief that the stroking of Scout masters’ private parts was not essential when taking the pledge.
Quaife was becoming more outrageously showbiz by the day. His thick stage make-up was never washed off after the show, and the collar of his stage shirt became caked with Max Factor. However Pete was the band’s best ambassador when it came to negotiating space for us to change backstage, and his powers of persuasion over Malcolm Cooke, the tour manager, often saved us from changing in the nearest public lavatory. Pete finally reached the conclusion that it was more expedient to stay in his stage gear all the time, eliminating the need to change at all. He had the ability to make it seem as though he was continually pursued by admiring fans. If Number 42 in the charts was to be the pinnacle of our achievement, then Pete Quaife was going to make sure the world remembered him for it for as long as possible.
Even though Dave was still barely seventeen, he was fast becoming known as the resident raver of the tour: staying up later, getting drunk more, getting into trouble more and sleeping less than anybody else on the tour. The Kinks may have been the least known and the worst act on stage, but we had affectionately been taken on as the tour mascots by some of the other bands.
The tour bus became a friendlier place once everybody assumed their position according to their chart status. Eric Haydock, the Hollies’ bass player, had taken the Kinks under his wing, and was constantly advising me to trade in my imitation blond Gretsch guitar for a Fender Telecaster. Eric was a friendly, chubby-faced Lancastrian with an accent straight out of Coronation Street, and he made a point of calling us by our full Christian names: ‘Raymond this, David that, Peter should and Michael should never do this or that’.
All Eric’s references to the Dave Clark Five were not so complimentary. Dave Clark was a quiet north Londoner who had become amazingly successful, not so much because of his musicianship but because he had a shrewd head for business. He also had an astonishingly dark suntan for a musician touring England in the depths of winter, and his stage act was somehow presented with a kind of contrived machismo that proved to be timeless in the sense that it was both decades ahead and behind its time. The Dave Clark Five were definitely a product, and it was probably for this reason that Eric had taken such a negative response to their act. They were also Number One in the charts with ‘Bits and Pieces’, to which they insisted on doing a military-style goose-step every time they performed it on stage.
There was so much equipment and so many cables connected to their equipment that on several occasions the whole power supply would blow up, causing an embarrassing delay while the long-suffering electrician repaired the fault. After a while Dave Clark and his four chums started to suspect that it was sabotage, and one night after a show in Southampton Clark stopped the coach on the way back to London to hold an official inquiry. He threatened that when the saboteur was eventually caught, the offender would be summoned to his quarters where ‘a punishment of the severest nature’ would be implemented. Graham Nash of the Hollies wondered if the sun-tanned drummer was showing signs of cracking. Mick Avory asked if Clark had been a boy scout, and, if so, offered to help administer the punishment. Dave Davies swigged his beer and gave a V-sign, and Eric Haydock looked innocent and said nothing.
Halfway through the tour, Pye Records released the second single from our first recording session, ‘You Still Want Me’. The message came via Malcolm Cooke that our management wanted us to put the song in the stage act, which we reluctantly did. We breathed a sigh of relief a few weeks later when the record was officially written off as a flop. Although it was a sweet enough pop song with a good beat, the only thing worse than its eventual failure was the possibility of it being such a big hit that we would be forced to perform it every night for the rest of our careers. Even so, we were disappointed that we had not got into the charts, and we had seen enough of the music business to know that unless we made a hit record, and soon, we would be on our first and last major package tour.
The Kinks were still considered the sloppiest group on the tour and messages were reaching us that even our biggest supporter, Arthur Howes, was thinking of replacing us. Our act needed help. Enter Hal Carter.
The Kinks had set up at the Bedford Granada ready for the performance. I had stayed behind so that I could wash my hair in a sink backstage. It was almost impossible to get hot water backstage in those days, but the Bedford Granada was one of the better equipped theatres on the circuit. I was just starting to wash the lather out of my hair when a voice – a hard Liverpudlian twang with a hint of an American drawl – floated across to me:
‘Are the Kinks here?’
I remembered a line from an old John Wayne movie:
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Hal Carter, that’s who. I’ve been sent by Arthur Howes to work on your stage act, which, I understand, is in desperate need of attention.’
Hal stood in the doorway of the dressing room, his head was cocked over to one side, similar to the classic shots of James Dean in Giant. That’s where the similarity ended. Hal had a little turned-up nose which seemed to lift his whole face with it. This included the top lip, which exposed his protruding front teeth and gave his mouth a cocky sneer. This produced an angry punk image, similar to early Elvis Presley or Cliff Richard, and was probably acquired by Hal after many hours in front of a mirror. The only problem was that Hal didn’t look like Elvis or even Cliff. He looked like Hal. Also, Hal was slightly cross-eyed, which made a mockery of the look of inner turmoil and menace he was trying to project. I could sympathize to a certain extent because his crossed eyes had exactly the same effect on his image as the gap in my two front teeth had on mine. It made us both look a little vulnerable and, to less sensitive people, stupid. Hal tore into me verbally; without pity.
‘I wasn’t aware you were in the group. I thought you were a roadie, the way you were washing your hair in the sink.’
His eyes squinted as if he were about to reach for a gun. His voice dropped to a whisper, the Scouse ‘R’s rolling through the veneer of acquired Americana. My eyes zoomed into close-up of his face as he spoke.
‘You are one of the brothers, aren’t you? Well, dry your hair. Let’s get the group on stage and work on this act.’
Hal made me smile, and somehow gave me confidence. If our stage act was half as good as Hal’s real life performance, then the Kinks were assured of stardom. Even if only in ‘B’ movies.
After watching our act for the first time, Hal came silently into our dressing room. He walked up to us all individually, and stared each of us out for a second, similar to the way a prize-fighter stalks his opponent before a boxing match. Then he stood and watched as we packed up our few belongings. Avory stood behind Hal and mimicked him, striking a similar moody pose; he pushed up the end of his nose with a finger and crossed his eyes. The rest of us tried our best to carry on without sniggering, but eventually Dave burst out laughing. Hal’s eyes grew larger and went slightly more cross-eyed as he spoke in a calm but rapid, contemptuous monotone:
‘You were rubbish tonight, lads. I’m here to improve your act by the time we reach London. And if it has not improved significantly by then, you are off the tour and back on the street. So I want you all onstage tomorrow afternoon for a rehearsal as soon as you’ve loaded the equipment.’
During the next few days Carter put us through a series of vigorous rehearsals. He told us where to stand, how to behave and what to play, shouting out corrections to us from the auditorium while we ran through our songs:
‘Quaife, stop posing. Ray, let’s see some sign of life. Dave, let’s see you rave on your own. Avory … it doesn’t matter, forget it.’
He suggested that we cut some of our blues songs and put in some conventional pop hits of the day.
‘That song, “You Really Got Me”, is all right, put it back in … Cut out that “Smokestack Lightning” number. You’re not doing yourselves or anybody else any favours by playing that … Change this … Try that … And try not to cover your eyes with your hands every time the spotlight comes on your face … you’re supposed to be professionals.’
On one occasion, Hal was giving us a particularly harsh criticism when he was interrupted by Graham Nash of the Hollies. Graham said Hal should let us be a blues group if that was what we wanted to be, and not try to turn us into a cabaret act. After Graham finished, Hal resumed his tirade, adding that it was he, Hal Carter, who was responsible for the success of most of the pop groups in the country, and that even the Hollies had been indirectly influenced by some of Hal’s innovations. We were not in a position to argue or question his claims. Our act was beginning to go down slightly better, and we assumed that it was because of Hal. Even so, Carter was not going to let us think we had improved.
Hal assumed that, as I was supposed to be the songwriter of the group, I was the person with the most influence over the other members. In thinking this way, Hal had missed the most important thing we had going for us: nobody had a say over what we did or didn’t do. Everything was a group decision at that time. If we weren’t a group, it would be a solo act. I had been a solo act from the day I was born, and it was very lonely at times. Playing with other musicians taught me that it was easier playing with other people than it was on my own. The writing part was lonely enough. It was almost a relief when I heard the group play something that I’d written. Proof that I wasn’t going mad. Our first two singles had been flops, and, although I felt mainly to blame for the situation we found ourselves in, I didn’t feel that desperate because we had that one song, ‘You Really Got Me’, which nearly always got a good reaction.
But somehow the spark wasn’t quite there. I think it had something to do with the way we were being projected. Hal deduced that the song was right, but there was something in our stage presence which failed to communicate to the audience. They applauded every night, but there was always a darkness between us and them. We did not feel as one with them. Hal had done a good job on our stage act, but that’s all it was … an act.
It was decided that we needed to smarten ourselves up by purchasing some new stage clothes. Robert took us to Berman and Nathan, the theatrical costumiers. During the tour we had started to get a reputation as Dickensian-type characters. Avory was called Bill Sikes; Dave was the Artful Dodger, I was Smike from Nicholas Nickleby and Quaife insisted on being Pip from Great Expectations, even though his manner suggested that he was more like Mr Micawber. We tried on what we thought were clothes from the Victorian era, but Monty Berman explained that they were in fact hunting jackets. He matched the red hunting jackets with white frilly shirts from another period in history, put us in black riding trousers and Chelsea boots, and lo and behold, we looked like us.
Our first concert with the new red hunting jackets was at the Gaumont Theatre in Bournemouth. We were standing behind the curtain ready to open the show as usual when Graham Nash and Allan Clarke of the Hollies were seen staring at us from the wings. Graham came up to me and, after scrutinizing my new stage gear closely, announced that, in his opinion, our new gear was fab. ‘Now you look like the Kinks.’
The new clothes were an instant hit, and although we were still the opening act with two flop singles behind us, our spirits were high and we were optimistic about our future.’
Raymond Douglas paused, as if he wanted this particular event in his life to last as long as possible. Then he did one of his instant turnarounds. From being an optimistic old timer reliving his youth, he became a confused old man.
‘It’s only life, anyway. What can I tell you? I can’t possibly explain it all to you. Most of what would mean a lot to me would probably bore you. I could tell you every intimate moment, and describe it all in the most grandiose manner, using an eloquence far beyond most people’s capabilities, but still I would never capture that single moment of magnificence, when an original thought is born, and you know that nobody else has ever seen the world in quite the same way. We had our own identity. That knowledge. That millisecond, my dear boy, is a lifetime. Now turn off that bloody tape machine. I’m knackered.’
There was a silence. I turned off my tape recorder and tried to rest my eyes. We had been talking for some time and I hadn’t realized it. I yawned and began to nod off. Soon I was asleep, drifting in R.D.’s memoryland.