‘The group had just headlined a Sunday-night concert at the Torquay Theatre and our record was at Number 2 in the charts. We had originally been booked by the promoter as a back-up to two girl singers, performing somewhat predictably as the Other Two, but since our chart success the very shrewd promoter had decided to elevate us to headliners and close the show as well as using us as a backing group for the girl duo. This somewhat odd situation could have easily been avoided by hiring another group to play behind the Other Two. But as that would have necessitated paying an extra fee, the promoter decided that in order to fulfil our contract, we would play behind a gauze drape to conceal our identities while the girls stomped through their songs. Then during the interval we could slip into our red hunting jackets and be transformed into the stars of the show. This would have worked but for Tony Marsh, the compère of the show, who let it slip to the audience that the blurred figures behind the net curtain were special mystery guests.
Marsh had built up a reputation for himself by standing in the wings and dropping his trousers, exposing his balls to the artists onstage. As well as this, he was well known for his incredible sexual capers in Bed and Breakfasts and hotels up and down the country. Tales of his exploits as a formidable drinkist and raconteur were legendary in the music biz and Arthur Howes often travelled to a show not so much because of the artists performing but because he knew that Tony Marsh would be the compère. Arthur was the typical ‘Mr Entertainment’, and he believed that everyone should play his own particular role in the great music hall of life. He addressed us in a quiet, deep, calculating Cockney accent, as if he was parting with a secret every time he spoke: ‘You see, boys, I love performers, and Tony Marsh is a performer, on and off stage.’
Arthur then pointed to Terry McGrath, his booking agent, who was propped up in a corner of the dressing room, downing whisky and water. McGrath was small and red-faced. He wore a trilby hat that made him look like a racecourse tout rather than a theatrical agent. On one occasion, the Kinks arrived at a gig to find McGrath in the promoter’s office doing the financial settlement. McGrath had obviously been overwhelmed by the shrewd promoter’s hospitality and had apparently had ‘one too many’. As the Kinks walked past Terry, he looked up at his artists and inquired ‘Who are these people?’ But we needn’t have worried. Terry may have had a tipple or two and forgotten the name of his act, but when it came to the financial settlement he was always on the ball for us. Arthur spoke as if McGrath was not there. ‘Terry drinks a lot, as we all well know. But Terry is a grafter and as long as he grafts, he stays regardless of the drink; if Terry doesn’t graft, he goes. Terry knows that, don’t you, Terry?’ Terry only half responded to the sound of his name.
Arthur then moved across to Dave, who was quietly strumming his guitar. ‘Now David here is a raver. No question about it. I know where I stand with Dave the Rave. That’s what I expect and I’m happy because as long as Dave raves, I know that I won’t be disappointed. I’ve come down to see the Kinks and Tony Marsh and I expect to see ravers and performers who won’t disappoint me. There, boys. The secret of success. Don’t disappoint the punters.’
That night was no exception and Arthur was not disappointed. Marsh had not only created complete havoc for the unfortunate Other Two by blowing our cover to the audience, he also insisted on drinking a toast to the Kinks backstage after the show. There was nothing wrong with this except that local dignitaries, including several middle-aged lady councillors, were present and Tony’s balls were protruding effortlessly through the unzipped trousers of his dinner suit. As the embarrassed entourage headed for the nearest exit, the slightly cross-eyed compère was heard to inquire innocently whether it was something that he had said that had offended anyone?
Grenville ushered us out of the theatre, past the waiting fans, to catch the night train back to London. We had a concert at the Streatham Ice Rink the following night, but the main reason for us being in London so soon was that ‘You Really Got Me’ might go to Number I, and Brian Somerville, our press agent, wanted us to be available for the interviews that were bound to crop up. Grenville’s qualities of leadership were starting to shine as he bribed a ticket-collector into finding us all seats in the third-class compartment of a train that was already full. He later bribed the same ticket-collector into upgrading himself into first class, leaving the rest of us freezing in the rear carriages. By the time we reached London we all had colds except for Grenville, who strutted along the platform to the nearest black cab. He roared straight off to his office, leaving the rest of us sniffling in line at the cab rank.
My mother had dreaded the sound of the telephone ringing ever since she had received the call telling her that my sister Rene had died. Telegrams were worse. Only the very best or the very worst news was carried in a telegram. When my Auntie Dolly’s husband was ‘missing in action’ during the Second World War, she must have received the news by telegram. That day, however, I received my first ever telegram. It informed me that our record had reached Number I in the charts.
I had gone straight to bed after the train journey, but almost as soon as the telegram arrived there was another knock at the front door and there was Grenville, with a large, chauffeur-driven Daimler to take us to the West End for interviews and photographs. As the car drove us through Trafalgar Square, we stopped at a zebra crossing to let some pedestrians across. One of them was John Cowan, who six months earlier had started making that film with us. I wound down the window and shouted, ‘John, our record has just gone to Number I.’
Cowan looked in the car and gave a deep sigh. ‘I should have finished that bloody film.’
We drove off, leaving him pondering his lost opportunity.
The rest of the day was a complete whirl. Interviews, photographs, handshakes, pats on the back and smiling faces.
That evening we played Streatham Ice Rink. The ice had been covered with boards, and a stage erected at one end, but the place was so full of people that the ice melted, which meant we had to cut our concert short. Nobody seemed to care, and as far as I know nobody complained. There was only one song that everybody wanted to hear that night, and I think we played ‘You Really Got Me’ twice.
As we left the backstage area for the upstairs bar, my dad came towards me with a group of people. He was wearing a dashing blue suit and his hair had been smarmed down with Brylcreem specially for the occasion. I thought he was going to shake hands with me, but instead he put his arms around me and kissed me on the cheek. Then, as I tried to think of something appropriate to say, someone plonked a camera in my face and a flash bulb went off. I just said something inane like, ‘I’m sorry it wasn’t football or cricket, or something. Sorry it had to be this.’ Dad laughed and said that he was proud of me. I truly cannot remember anything else after that moment. Perhaps the world should have stopped turning there and then. Everything should have ended.
The next day we all met in Arthur Howes’ office to read the newspaper stories about ourselves and listen to Arthur’s plans for tours. For once Grenville, Robert and Larry were all in the same room together with us and the barriers and petty squabbles were forgotten. Everybody was genuinely delighted. Arthur Howes opened yet another bottle of champagne and declared, ‘Well, boys, just goes to show what a bit of teamwork can do.’ Nobody argued. We felt like a complete team. Perhaps I was the one who had written the song, but the success belonged to every one of us. The others had probably experienced personal moments similar to the one I had with my dad. I hadn’t played for a famous football or cricket team, but I was playing in a winning team of sorts and now nobody could stop us.
The first recording dates for the album were pretty wild events, with various guest musicians calling in to see Shel in the control room. To watch the latest ‘hot’ band recording and hanging out, just in case there was something going down that was worth knowing about. To see if there was some secret that would change people’s lives. The obvious focus of attention was Dave’s little green amp plugged into a Vox AC30. It had been responsible for the unique sound on ‘You Really Got Me’.
All the tracks were put down with the same recording team as the single. We recorded songs by Chuck Berry, Slim Harpo and Bo Diddley, and a song I had just written called ‘Stop Your Sobbing’. With the exception of ‘Sobbing’, Bobby Graham played drums on all the tracks and a songwriter called Perry Ford played piano in place of Arthur Greenslade. The only time a few outside session men came into the studio was when we recorded ‘Bald-Headed Woman’, a song which Shel’s own company had published and which credited Shel as composer. The group was a little insecure with the song and so Shel invited John Lord to play Hammond organ and Jimmy Page twelve-string rhythm guitar in an attempt to add some professionalism to the performance and guarantee the song a place on the album (and some songwriting royalties for Shel). The same crowd stayed around while we put down back tracks to ‘Long Tall Shorty’ and ‘Lover not a Fighter’ and everybody went home happy.
Rasa had come to a few of the sessions and had contributed some backing vocals. She sang the same vocal line as Dave but hers was an octave higher. The two of them together sounded like one animal, half male, half female. Shel liked the sound and encouraged her to come to the sessions whenever we did back-up vocals. I wasn’t opposed to this as Rasa and I were seeing each other regularly by now.
Larry Page and his girlfriend Lee took Rasa and me out to dinner and then dropped us off in a place called Isleworth. We ended up in a house that belonged to somebody who was a friend of Rasa’s elder sister. Even though Rasa had been given the key to the house, we both felt that we were entering the house illegally. It was rather like the story of the three bears. ‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’ said the Daddy Bear. The next morning the sun shone through the bedroom window and woke me up. I had to be at Pye Studios by ten o’clock to start a recording session and I had no idea how long it would take to get there.
As we rode into central London on the underground I started to think of something to record at the upcoming session. We had more or less exhausted our supply of cover songs, and I was definitely not going to sing another Shel Talmy composition, so I toyed with a melody I had composed as a guitar instrumental years before, at Rosie’s house. When I got to the studio I showed the chords to Dave and Pete and we ran through the song. While we put down the back track I called out the chords to them, through the microphone and sang some impromptu lyrics to give some idea of the melody. I had intended to make up angry and passionate lyrics similar to ‘You Really Got Me’, but somehow this gentle melody started happening in my head and the words ‘It’s your life and you can do what you want’ came out instead. It was as if my own guilty conscience was supplying lyrics for me.
Everybody in the studio liked the rhythm track and they were very excited about hearing the lyric. I said that I had a sore throat and asked if I could do the vocal the next day. Everybody believed me but in fact there was nothing wrong with me at all. I just didn’t have the lyrics to the song completed yet. When we started work the following morning I asked everyone to put the backing vocals on first, making the excuse that I wanted to sing along with them. As Dave, Rasa, Pete and myself sang our ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ I was still trying to think of something for the lead vocal. I thought back to some poems I had written the previous year in a small exercise book. There was one about being tired of waiting for success to happen. When it eventually came time for me to sing my part, I sang the first words that came into my head. Afterwards, when we played back the song in the control room, Shel turned and said that I had written another Number I song, but we should leave it off the album so that we could release a more up-tempo record to follow ‘You Really Got Me’.
Even though I was pleased about the record, the whole song had somehow managed to make me feel depressed, because I felt that I had not been in control of what I was doing. In the course of less than twelve hours I had both written and recorded a Number 1 song in Marble Arch and helped produce a new human being in Isleworth. I should have felt elated, but instead something inside me protested, something which had always resisted normality and all the ensuing traps and restrictions that accompanied this condition.’
Raymond Douglas stopped and looked down at the empty can of Guinness that was lying on the console. There was no need to ask him why he had suddenly come to a halt. I could see that he was scouring through his past in order to figure out exactly where everything had started to go wrong for him, and I thought how ungrateful he seemed for his success, particularly as he had wanted success so desperately. Maybe he had ended up with the wrong girl, maybe not. One thing was for sure, Raymond Douglas had certainly started out with the wrong music publisher. To add to this first error, little refugee Rasa, whether she knew it or not, had a creation happening inside her that neither Raymond Douglas nor she had any control over whatsoever. No publisher on earth could stop this creation coming out.
‘At the end of that week, Rasa had to go up north to start the winter term at St Joseph’s Roman Catholic girls’ school in Bradford.
The Kinks were doing dates up and down the country, pursued everywhere by screaming fans. There were dates in the Lake District arranged by a promoter who was aptly named Terry Blood, and for the first time we found ourselves playing Scotland. After one of the concerts we were invited back to a castle by an eccentric Scottish laird who insisted that we stay the night to sample his twenty-five-year-old malt whisky. Dave was later found swinging on the chandelier dressed in full armour and brandishing a sword while the laird looked on in fear for the family treasures. I sat outside and thought of a lyric for a song that I was writing for Dave to sing called ‘Come On Now’.
The next date was at the Barrowlands Ballroom in Glasgow. The concert had sold out faster than any other and, fearing a riot, the promoters had built a giant stairway from the dressing rooms, located at the back of the hall, to the stage at the opposite end. We had to walk over the audience like circus performers on a tightrope, and we reached the stage to find that nearly all our shoes had been pulled off by the fans as we crossed. This was almost a typical occurrence at the concerts during this period. After each show Brian Longstaff and Ray Lovegrove (our new assistant roadie) repaired torn shirts and trousers that had been ripped from our bodies as we performed. This was becoming a daily ritual. Brian joked that he should be paid extra as he was acting as seamstress as well as road manager.
After the Scottish segment of the tour, we played a small club in Halifax and I was reunited with Rasa. Backstage after the concert, she announced that she was pregnant. I did my best to make her feel happy about this, but in the car on the drive back to London afterwards, I felt a deep shiver of fear in the pit of my stomach. Rasa’s sister had supplied the house; Larry Page had driven us to it. No, it was just paranoia. I thought of the terrible scenes at home a few years before when Dave had put a schoolgirl in the family way, but now it would be even worse: the newspapers were following us around everywhere looking for juicy stories to print. I thought of all those times when I had slept with Anita and nothing like this had happened. Maybe the best policy was to say and do nothing. For the time being. Perhaps it would all go away.
Eddie Kassner asked me to his office. Kassner was short and so stocky in stature that he was almost square-shaped.
‘Raymond,’ he said. ‘“You Really Got Me” has been to the top and is starting to do very well for us all over the world. Soon it will be released in America and we anticipate that it will be just as successful over there. Now’ – and this was like an order – ‘Now we need a follow up single immediately.’
Kassner opened a door to a little reception room with an upright piano against the wall. He spoke in his Austrian-refugee accent that bore a strong resemblance to Peter Sellers’ in Dr Strangelove.
A few days earlier, Eddie had taken Rasa and me to dinner and told us about his hard life during the War. His tragic tale had made an immense impact on me and as I sat down at the piano stool I still had Eddie’s life story echoing around my head. Eddie had told us how he had started publishing songs in Austria before the Nazis came and put him and his family in Auschwitz. He was the only member of his family to survive. When he came to London, he and his wife were so poor that their baby had to have a cardboard box for a cradle. Even so, Eddie dreamed of building a music publishing empire.
By now Kassner had me sitting at the piano and he was standing next to me with his hand firmly on my shoulder. I started to play the chords to a song I had been writing called ‘All Day and All of the Night’. Suddenly, another door opened and to my surprise I saw Anita standing there. She looked as attractive as ever, with her black hair now down to shoulder length. There was no plausible explanation of why Anita happened to be there unless Kassner and possibly Larry Page had asked her to come along for old times’ sake. It was certainly not my idea, I hadn’t seen her since the night I left her crying in her flat in Chalk Farm. I wanted to speak to her but now Kassner was in full flow, speaking loudly above my stabbing piano chords. It was as if I were providing a melodramatic accompaniment to the silent movie of Eddie’s life.
‘In order to provide food for my wife and child I sold sheet music in the streets by day and worked as a waiter in the evenings. Then I would go to Covent Garden market and pick up vegetables that had fallen off of the backs of delivery trucks into the gutter. Eventually I managed to get Vera Lynn to sing one of the songs I published, and she recorded it and put it on the B-side of a record that went to Number I.’
I was still thumping out the chords of ‘All Day’ on the piano and although Kassner was back in the past, he still managed to acknowledge the occasional lyric that I shouted through his maniacal rantings.
‘Yes, Raymond. Good. I like it. Then I managed to obtain the world publishing rights to “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley. It was then that the Kassner Empire was formed.’ Anita came and sat next to me and for a moment there was the same loving look on her face as when we had first met. She leant into me and kissed me on the cheek. I slipped into another key on the piano and sang,
‘The only time I feel all right is by your side.
Girl, I want to be with you all of the time.
All day and all of the night.’
Anita whispered ‘I love you’ in my ear and left the room. There was no way I would be allowed to pursue her: my exit from the piano was firmly blocked by Kassner. ‘Raymond, I definitely feel that if you give me this song I will make it such a hit that it will put you up there with the immortal ones: George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Ivor Novello.’ I wondered why Kassner had not put Chuck Berry and Lennon and McCartney in with the immortal ones, but I quickly concluded that in Kassner’s view the only good songwriter was a dead one. This didn’t much matter to me at the time, as I was more interested in the whereabouts of Anita, who had disappeared as mysteriously as she had appeared. Kassner took me back into his office and lit a cigar in celebration of his prodigies’ latest composition.
I walked over to the window and looked down at the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of Anita, but she was long gone. There were plenty of tall slim girls with thick mascara round their eyes and black shoulder-length hair. They all had the look, but somehow it seemed superficial: it would change as soon as the next look came along. Anita had the spirit of the time inside her, and whereas the times were having a profound effect on me, somehow it was impossible to have a similar effect any sort of change in her. I felt Kassner’s hand on my shoulder, but this time the publisher’s voice was more restrained:
‘Raymond, I will make you wealthy beyond your wildest imagining, but first we must sort out your management situation.’
I looked back over my shoulder to see Larry at the doorway:
‘Eddie’s right. This just isn’t their world. It’s a joke; it’s a miracle that you’ve managed to get this far. If it hadn’t been for Eddie and me, you and the group would be out on the street now, instead of coming off a Number I single. Eddie is about to make you an offer so generous that you will find it difficult to believe.’
Kassner butted in before Larry had a chance to continue:
‘Forty pounds.’
I was confused: ‘Forty pounds?’
Larry reiterated: ‘Forty pounds – a week.’
Kassner’s eyes glinted at the sound of money. ‘Forty pounds a week, for life.’
‘If, and only if, you sign all of your songs over to Kassner Music,’ Larry continued.
I understood Larry’s desires: fame, money, success – recognition. These were all normal to me. But as I looked over at Eddie Kassner, past those thick, horn-rimmed spectacles, there was a completely empty look in his eyes. It was a look of a man who had been exposed to extreme suffering and whose soul had been punished to the point where all feelings for the rest of humanity had been squeezed out of him. No amount of money, no matter how great the Kassner empire might become, could take away that look of emptiness in those dark soulless eyes, which still carried the horrific scars from the wounds that had been inflicted in the concentration camps during the Second World War. It was as if part of Kassner’s soul had perished and what was left was trying to grab all that it could from the world in a desperate attempt to replace what had been taken from him. Eddie Kassner’s eyes displayed no sign of pity, or even cruelty for that matter. It was a look that defied every emotion which could be felt on this planet. It was an expression I had never seen before, a look from hell, and it sent a chilling sensation of fear down my back. This aside, I almost pitied him as he repeated:
‘Forty pounds. It’s a lot of money, Raymond, my boy. Then your songs will be mine until fifty years after you are dead. And I understand that this girlfriend of yours, this Rasa, is a refugee like myself. Talk to her, she will understand what wonderful good fortune you have discovered.’
The very idea that someone like Kassner had any information about my private life made me feel a little paranoid. The fact that Kassner and Page were offering to buy my ideas for eternity was bad enough, but to know that my most intimate affairs were being discussed by these people made me feel sick in the stomach. I left the office, not commenting on the offer, and walked around Soho looking for Anita and the sense of freedom that she had represented to me. It was getting colder and it would only be a matter of time before some fan recognized me. Shel had been right when he had predicted that the success of ‘You Really Got Me’ ensured that I would no longer be able to walk around the streets. The cover of anonymity had been blown. Soon I went back to the comfort and warmth of Rasa’s sister’s flat in Willesden, to have tea and biscuits while waiting for the days to go by before announcing the news of her pregnancy to the world.
Back in the less mundane world of pop music, the Kinks were considered the hottest property of the year. We flew up to Glasgow to appear as special guests on the Billy J. Kramer package show. We performed before Kramer and as we sang the audience rioted, and ripped up the seats, causing the theatre management to call the police to restore order so that the rest of the show could proceed.
As we left the theatre, a confused Billy J. Kramer looked at the carnage that had been left behind. I had apologized, but Kramer was still speechless. He was a very successful artist in the true Billy Fury tradition, and although he had been part of the whole Merseybeat explosion, he had never been present at an exhibition of this type of mayhem. These were more than just adoring fans. There was an atmosphere of violence that had been stirred up by the Kinks. During the show Dave had been dragged from the stage by fans and sustained a cut on his hand. He had proudly displayed his bloodstained shirt and held his bloody fist aloft as he walked out of the theatre past Kramer, but Billy J. seemed too dumbfounded to comment. We had to fly straight back to London and more police were required to protect us at Glasgow airport, where we strutted through the terminal still dressed in our red hunting jackets. By the time the aeroplane took off, Billy J. must have been singing ‘Little Children’, knowing that the ‘little children’ he was performing to had just ripped the Glasgow Theatre to shreds.
Whenever I had a chance I travelled back to Bradford after each performance to stay at Rasa’s parents’ house. This often meant getting the night train after a concert, or cadging a lift from a programme-seller who lived in nearby Leeds.
We were star guests on the Gerry and the Pacemakers tour, along with Gene Pitney and Marianne Faithfull. The fact that we performed before the end of the concert gave me the chance to make a quick getaway before the majority of fans could assemble at the stage door.
One night Judith Simons, a columnist from the Daily Express, appeared after the show. Simons said that there had been a report in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus of marriage banns being read out in church giving notice of the upcoming wedding between me and Rasa in St Joseph’s Roman Catholic church in Bradford. The next day there were reports in most of the daily newspapers that ‘a Kink’ was to be married to a Bradford schoolgirl. Rasa’s parents had proudly announced the engagement of their daughter in the Telegraph and Argus and a date for the wedding had been set.
When I told the rest of the group that I was to be married, they just looked at me in a sympathetic way that suggested I had decided to commit suicide some time in the near future and had asked them to attend. They tried not to comment too much about it after that. The truth was that we were all too busy to think about the fact that was about to sign away yet another part of my freedom, but as long as it didn’t affect my flow of songwriting, they seemed not to mind too much. My parents on the other hand were obviously concerned that I was too young.
The management team called a crisis meeting and Brian Somerville appeared at the next concert with both Grenville and Robert in attendance. After a brief discussion Somerville expressed his irritation at not being consulted over the matter beforehand, it was decided that the damage had been done and that everyone should make the most of the publicity. I had always been a publicity-shy individual but was now trapped into having my most personal laundry aired in public. Fans in the front row at concerts started holding up banners with ‘Don’t Do It, Ray’ written in bold colours. The most vigorous opposition came from fans, particularly young women, who stopped me in the street to say that I was wasting my life. On the other hand, the older women who worked at the Blue Boar café on the M1 motorway put me in their protective care. They often interrupted me when I tried to strike up conversations with anyone from the opposite sex. Again I was confronted by the horrific realization that my personal life was under a microscope. Whenever a reporter asked about my upcoming marriage, I simply walked out of the room. This angered Brian Somerville, who was used to artists who cooperated with the press. He could not see why I should be any different.
In Bradford, the Telegraph and Argus reported that Rasa had been accused of theft by a jealous friend and was to be taken to court. As a result she was asked to leave the Catholic secondary school where she was a pupil. I went up to Bradford to see if I could be of some assistance and found Rasa’s mother on her knees praying for forgiveness in front of photographs of John F. Kennedy and the Pope. Rasa’s father said that soon Rasa would be my responsibility, and unless I provided the best possible legal counsel, it would not be the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants in the dock, but the future wife of Raymond Douglas Davies, the lead singer of the Kinks. In any case, that would be the story the newspapers would print, because the date of the trial was put back until after the wedding.
After a concert in Shrewsbury Robert Wace arrived with a telegram saying that Rasa had been taken to an emergency ward in Bradford suffering from an internal bleeding. Robert drove me through a blizzard to the hospital immediately after the concert so that I could visit Rasa.
Bradford Infirmary was nearly as cold inside as the freezing snow was outside, and I found Rasa propped up at the end of a large draughty ward. She had taken a job at Baird’s radio on the assembly line and had collapsed and nearly had a miscarriage. She started to cry as she told me that it had been necessary to tell her parents that she was pregnant. Robert took me to a hotel for breakfast and a stiff brandy and reprimanded me in a concerned but good-humoured way for making a complete mess of my private life. For the first time Robert seemed more of a friend than a manager. He concluded his lecture by saying that if he had been allowed to manage my personal as well as my professional life, he would have considered me much too immature to enter, let alone develop a personal relationship. According to Robert, marriage was for adults. ‘You should have listened to your mother, old boy. She would have set you right.’
He was right. I should have listened to my mother. But it’s easy to say that now, years after the event. Those were not the times for listening to advice from elders. We were very young and impulsive. Perhaps in my case it was more to do with my insecurity. None of the other guys in the group was listening to his parents’ advice. Even Robert and Grenville were involved in the pop business against the better judgement of their respective families. It was all right to manage a pop group as ‘a bit of a lark’, but to give up a career at the stock exchange because of it was going a little too far for someone from the professional classes. Once, in a bar somewhere in the City, Grenville had been snarled at by a former associate at the firm where he had previously worked, and the same indignant gentleman had even uttered the word ‘traitor’ as Grenville left the premises. Grenville was brave, bold and young like the rest of us, and didn’t give a hoot.
We were in Manchester rehearsing ‘All Day and All of the Night’ for Top of the Pops. I had just met my favourite Motown group, Martha and the Vandellas, who were on the show performing ‘Dancing in the Street’. I particularly liked Martha because she had a gap between her front teeth which was even larger than mine, and she wasn’t at all inhibited by it. As they mimed their song in rehearsal, I stood and watched their manager take a picture. I was astonished to see an image of Martha come out of the camera almost instantaneously – I had just seen my first Polaroid photo.
After the rehearsal I sat with Grenville and explained that people had been telling me I had a bad publishing deal, and that I had received no writing royalties yet and when the royalties did eventually arrive, it was not clear who would receive them. Grenville said it was because there was a clause in the contract that allowed the managers to take 30 per cent of my income. When I asked why, his only answer was ‘Because it’s in the contract.’ ‘Then why not take it out?’ I asked. Grenville looked pale and for once his eyebrows dropped. ‘We can certainly try,’ he admitted. Many people in the music business considered Robert and Grenville were upstarts whose lack of experience had resulted in us signing a contract with Pye Records that would haunt us for years to come. However they were also gentlemen, and had no intention of upsetting an artist who would obviously make them a considerable amount of money, and so they agreed not to commission my songwriting. To this day I prefer to think it was because they felt it was the gentlemanly thing to do.
Dave was certainly not listening to his parents’ advice. He was enjoying the life of a pop star to the hilt. All-night parties with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones; late nights at clubs in St James’s; an endless stream of girlfriends up and down the United Kingdom; plus countless run-ins with various representatives of local constabularies as anxious parents reported daughters missing for the night. Dave had taken up photography and developed his own negatives in a makeshift darkroom at our parents’ house in Fortis Green. While there was absolutely nothing wrong with this in itself, Mum had inadvertently come across some sordid black-and-white prints of young ladies in various stages of undress. This caused uproar, and after all sorts of ructions and threats of disciplinary action the darkroom reverted to being a pantry. Mick had frequented the same clubs as Dave, but he usually ended up in the early hours of the morning at bars that were hangouts for drag queens and various members of their entourages. This was far from the protected lifestyle of his parents’ home in Molesey, but perhaps Mick felt more at home in these establishments since his encounter with that Scout master. Mick was ‘straight’, but because he was so obviously male, old queens were attracted to him like bees to honey.
The recording of ‘All Day and All of the Night’ was a frantic affair, with the Kinks arriving in London late at night from a gig up north to record the song the following morning at Pye Studios, where the first album had been recorded. Only three hours of studio time had been booked, and the track had to be completed by one o’clock so that the group could drive straight back up north for another concert that night. We still attracted a large amount of curiosity when we worked in the studio. On this occasion a session singer called Johnny B. Goode asked if he could help out with the backing vocals. He was a friend of the group and Talmy had no objection to him joining the session to add to the slightly heavier sound we had in mind. He thought that the extra falsetto would compensate because Rasa was not there. Perry Ford played piano and Bobby Graham was again playing the drums, with Mick Avory playing tambourine. The back track was put down very quickly in the same manner as ‘You Really Got Me’, and the guitar solo was again played live by Dave.
When we went upstairs to hear the playback in the tiny control room, we found it crowded with onlookers and assorted musicians. Among then was Jimmy Page, who cringed as it came to Dave’s guitar solo. Perhaps Page was put out about not being asked to play on the track, and we were slightly embarrassed by the amount of jealousy shown by such an eminent guitarist. Perhaps it was because he thought Dave’s solo inferior to anything he could have played, but Dave had not only invented a sound, but also had every right to play whatever solo he felt fitted the track. Bobby Graham had also shown some displeasure because I had requested a certain drum fill to be played before the second and third verses.
It was a drum fill I had heard on an old Buddy Holly record called ‘It’s So Easy’ and it had always been my ambition to have it played on a Kinks recording. It was a simple enough request, but it had obviously annoyed the session drummer so much that he had played the fill with such splendid venom that it took on an entirely new sound of its own. But rumours started that the Kinks were getting big-headed and their egos needed clipping.
‘All Day and All of the Night’ had been released and was moving up the charts just as rapidly as our first single. Everyone assumed that it would end up in the Number 1 position, but there was talk that the Beatles were bringing out a new single, and it was obvious that the Beatles would go straight to Number 1.
The new tour with Gerry and the Pacemakers, Gene Pitney and Marianne Faithfull was becoming a series of what were referred to as nightly rave ups, particularly at the hotels afterwards. On one occasion a night porter refused to serve Dave and Gerry Marsden with another round of light ale and Dave grabbed an axe from the wall and proceeded to chop up the front desk of the hotel. Marsden tried to deter Dave but eventually was roped in as an accomplice. Another night Dave called Brian Longstaff to his room to help stop the blood flowing from his penis, which had been torn during an over-zealous sexual romp with a local girl. This was the era of Dave’s fascination with musketeers and cavaliers. On this occasion the unfortunate girl had been seen running down the corridors of the hotel dressed only in Dave’s thigh-length leather boots while Dave followed her brandishing a duelling sabre. By this time everyone in the tour party considered this a normal occurrence and nobody took any notice. But when Dave appeared with a towel wrapped around his bleeding groin, everybody started to panic. Dave was rushed to hospital where he was given a blood transfusion and the ripped foreskin was attended to. The girl insisted on staying behind at the hotel to receive her ‘groupie’ dues, and received her rights from a willing member of the stage crew.
There were also rumours of a relationship between Marianne Faithfull and a leading member of the touring company. These both intrigued and infuriated Gerry Marsden, and he sent the tour manager on night-time sorties over the rooftops of the hotel to peek through bedroom windows in order to verify his suspicions. One night the tour manager disappeared and we concluded that Marianne must have been alone on this particular night and invited the tour manager into her boudoir. Marianne flatly denied these allegations the next day. On another occasion the entire hotel was woken at three in the morning by the sound of crashing as somebody fell from a fire escape on to a pile of dustbins. In the morning Marianne denied that anyone had been in her room. Even the tour manager was reluctant to confirm his involvement in the affair. Gerry and I decided to hold our own investigation into the matter and questioned everybody on the tour. Gene Pitney was far too respectable to climb fire escapes, and so was eliminated from our inquiries. We were not in possession of sufficient evidence to actually confront any suspect, save for a pair of soiled ladies’ knickers which were found by the fire escape, but this alone was not conclusive. After several days we let the matter rest. The only members of the tour party who were not questioned about the matter were Gerry and me.
I sustained an ankle injury in a fall after climbing over the garden wall of Rasa’s parents’ house. I was taken to Bradford Infirmary for an X-ray on a suspected fractured shin, but was relieved to discover that it was only a sprain. Even this presented me with difficulties during the concerts. I would, sing ‘Girl, you really got me now’ while hobbling around the stage with a walking stick. No one in the tour party had the investigative powers to put any evidence together concerning the falling man except for Gerry, who for days afterwards would sing ‘All Day and All of the Night’ every time he passed me backstage. However we decided to put the case to rest and the identity of the man on the fire escape remains a mystery to this day.’