11	Me and my baby’s gonna get on a train that’s gonna take us away

R.D. got up from his chair and started pacing around the dark room, chewing on a cigar butt that must have been five years old. He was clearly excited by what he had told me and the memories it had brought back to him. I nearly threw up as R.D. actually lit up the old cigar while humming ‘All Day and All of the Night’. Then he did a little jig as he took the first puff, but he immediately started coughing and spluttering.

‘Fucking cigars’ he muttered. ‘Waste of money. Capitalism, communism – don’t mean nothing. You know what Fidel Castro and Winston Churchill had in common? They both smoked Montecristo cigars. Hypocrites. Left, right – don’t mean nothing.’

R.D. paused and he looked pale. His exertions had taken their toll. He began to speak fast and he started to hyperventilate. Now he could barely talk at all.

‘This is making me very uneasy. I think something bad is going to happen. I’ve got a pain in my chest. I’ve nearly died two or three times in my life. I don’t want to die now. Thinking about those times makes my gut roll over. Do you think it could be karma? Like maybe I made a pact with the devil or something? Like that day I drew myself on the street when I was at college. Have you ever been on the underground late at night when all of a sudden you see a drunk who’s just been beaten up, and you see another man who looks afraid, and then you go into an empty carriage and some evil dude comes and sits next to you and you’re the only two people in the carriage? And outside, as the train leaves the station, you hear a woman screaming. Isn’t that some kind of indication that something bad’s happening? That’s the way I feel now. I have to stop. Let’s have a cup of tea.’

It was also common knowledge that R.D. was known as a hypochondriac. I tried not to snigger as I went into the kitchen. I took great care to see that the tea was up to standard, so that he would be inspired and go on. I need not have worried. Raymond Douglas was in a talkative mood. He had obviously decided to confront issues which he had always managed to avoid in the past. He sipped the tea. He smiled. He liked it. He continued.

‘It was decided to have a Lithuanian wedding in Bradford, with all the trappings of traditional matrimonial etiquette. The Kinks were still on tour with Gene Pitney and Gerry and the Pacemakers, and I was to drive up to Bradford after the last concert of the tour, at the Oxford New Theatre, in time for the wedding the next day. During the final show fans were screaming at me ‘not to do it’. Wherever I turned there seemed to be somebody with advice of one sort or another. The only people who said nothing were the group themselves. For the most part, we never made comments about each other’s private lives, but had they commented, I’m sure they would have offered their best wishes and that would have been that.

I left the band in the dressing room after the show and drove up to Bradford with the tour manager and stayed overnight in a local hotel. There was a nagging thought in my head that something immensely important was going to happen, but it was only part of a series of events happening to me that were completely out of my control: life seemed to be in control of me. In the morning I switched on the radio in my hotel room to hear Brian Matthew, the friendly BBC DJ, offer me his congratulations on my big day. I went to the toilet and threw up. It was strange to think that Brian Matthew had announced most of the important events in my short life as a pop singer, and here he was again to remind me that I had an appointment to keep at St Joseph’s Church later that day. I looked at the bedside clock and realized that I had overslept and was already late for the big engagement.

Brian Somerville was waiting for me in the hotel bar. He clearly sensed a certain amount of nervousness, because he bought me a large brandy. He then stuck a carnation in the buttonhole of my newly made blue pin-striped suit and whispered in my ear that he had two one-way tickets to South America in his pocket, in case I changed my mind. While I am certain to this day that he was serious and did actually have the tickets in his pocket, I have never been completely certain as to who would have been travelling with me. If I had consented to leave my career and other obligations behind, would I have found myself flying to South America with Brian Somerville?

The outside of the church was surrounded by screaming fans and well-wishers, but eventually the police managed to drag me through the crowd. Miraculously every part of my brand-new suit was still intact. I burst into the foyer of the church straight into a row of surprised bridesmaids, all dressed in Lithuanian national costume.

If I had any doubts as to where I was, the stern-faced bridesmaids soon made me realize that I was in the right place, even though they glared at me as if I should not have been there. I was inclined to agree with them, but, before I could make my way to the nearest exit, I found myself being pushed up the aisle of the church by none other than Brian Somerville, smiling mischievously. ‘No running out now, old boy,’ he said. ‘Unless of course you’re ready to come over to the other side.’ I gave the beaming publicist a confused look: if I wanted to escape, which would be the worse fate? In any event, both sides of the church were full.

The wedding got under way and vanished into the echo of the vast Catholic interior. This cavernous place had married and buried better men than me, and as the priest spoke, words from his previous sentences returned from the back of the church and turned the event into a strange mixture of past and present. It was like birth, marriage and confession all in one. It was like an echo I had never heard before, and it turned this into an event of tremendous importance.

I turned to look at the pretty bride standing next to me and wished her all the luck in the world. I felt as if I was not a part of this ceremony. I was strangely detached. Back in the aisle of the church, I heard the sound of a scuffle and turned to see Brian extracting the film from a reporter’s camera and exposing it to a shaft of daylight. I was relieved to see that some conscientious professionals were still doing their jobs.

Later, back at the home of the Didzpetris family, the wedding breakfast was in full swing. For some strange reason the English-speaking people were in self-imposed segregation at a large table in one room and the Lithuanian-and Polish-speaking contingent were in another. In the world of politics, this would have created an international incident, but in the infinitely more perilous world of matrimony, it was put to one side so that the injured parties could bear grudges in the years to come. Totally frazzled, Mrs Didzpetris had made the mistake of seating the best man, my brother Dave, next to the Catholic priest. Dave continually called him ‘Holy Joe’, while the priest tried to retain an air of dignified, pious calm. His faith was surely tested during Dave’s speech, when he referred to the bridesmaids as ‘crumpet’, and Rasa’s sister as a ‘nice bit of stuff’.

The priest’s credibility disintegrated somewhat when he was discovered taking photographs during the soup course with a camera that looked as if it had been supplied by the KGB. Only the most traditional English upbringing prevented Brian from snatching the cleric’s camera and ejecting the holy man from the dining room. Mrs Didzpetris, upon hearing of this outrage, dropped a handful of plates on the floor. Fortunately, this helped break up the tense atmosphere caused by the seating arrangements. Londoners and Lithuanians alike scrambled on the floor to help the mother of the bride.

After a series of emotional farewells in both English and Lithuanian, Rasa and her new husband went to Bradford airport with Robert, Grenville and Brian where we all boarded a plane to London. The flight was turbulent, and while I was concerned for Rasa because of her ‘condition’, Wace threw up politely in the sick bag conveniently placed on his seat. From London Rasa and I were to catch a train down to the West Country for a few days’ honeymoon in Exeter. For what seemed the first time ever, Rasa and I were legally alone.

On the train I watched her sleep in the small compartment and wondered what life would have in store for us both. I thought about Brian’s offer to fly me to South America and considered whether I would have been any happier there. I stood at the window and watched the stations fly past in the night. I thought about what life would be like if I were continually on tour, travelling the length and breadth of Britain. I had got what I wanted, but now I was in a trap that demanded permanence.

It was a long cold journey to Exeter, and when we arrived at the hotel the night porter gave us both a cup of hot chocolate in the lobby before showing us to the bridal suite. We must have looked cold and confused. During the next few days, Rasa and I hardly spoke, let alone slept together. We just walked around the streets of Exeter killing time until we could go back to London.

It wasn’t until the taxi turned the corner of the street where I had grown up that the fact that I was going to have to become a responsible adult sent a shock wave through my body. An overwhelming surge of fear raced through my system as the realization that I, Raymond Douglas, the most insecure of the insecure, had now become sole protector and provider, responsible for the security and well-being of another soul. I looked at my wife sitting next to me in the taxi. She must have had the same fear inside her, but then she was a refugee and perhaps to her being in the situation she was in made her feel totally secure. On top of all of this, Rasa was carrying a child inside her and, unless I had been completely misled, this as yet unformed and anonymous entity was part of me.

After the initial shock I quickly found a bed-sit in Muswell Hill and, while I was emotionally unprepared for marriage, I did my best to make my wife as comfortable as possible. But our first LP was topping the charts and I was due to go back on tour. When I wasn’t riding up and down the country doing dates, my life revolved around writing songs to keep up with the demand. As my supply of material had already been exhausted by our first album, I used every spare moment to prepare ideas for new songs. The bed-sit was at the top of a large house and, while the open-plan conversion was at times a little draughty, the light came bursting into the living room early in the morning and made both of us feel optimistic about our situation.

Rasa was experiencing daily physiological changes that come with motherhood. Her underwear was stretching to the point where it would no longer fit her, her body starting to swell as her hormones began to reorganize and change. Both of us were confused, happy and afraid, all at once. We were both having to produce at the same time, but while I could put my guitar down whenever I chose, Rasa was always accompanied by this other creation, and it was getting bigger and more noticeable every day. I watched her as she slept, and wondered how it could all be happening. Then I went into the living room and wrote some song lyrics. I was not completely aware of what I was writing, and there was no poetic flow of any description, I was just using songs as a sort of therapy. I couldn’t very well write songs about being an expectant father, but the events in my life were linked in some way to my songs. Anyone who says that creativity comes from divine inspiration is certainly wrong, particularly in my case. I wasn’t writing songs for my wife, unborn child, God or country, I was writing to stay sane.

I had in the back of my mind that Arthur Howes had mentioned that there had been an offer for us to tour Australia early in the new year, and while I was overjoyed at the possibility of being reunited with my sister Rosie, I was concerned that Rasa would not be able to make the journey. But I knew that Rasa would have company: some of my sisters lived in the neighbourhood, and although my mother had been opposed to the wedding she promised to have a spare bed ready for Rasa whenever she needed it. And Rasa’a sister Dalia had moved to Hampstead, and was always visiting us.

In the last few weeks before Christmas, I started sketching Rasa asleep in bed. My insomnia was so bad that most of my work was being done at night, which was the time I always dreaded the most. A strange thing occurred: the image that I was creating on paper looked totally different to my sleeping wife, and more like the sad face of my friend Margie, last seen sitting in the gutter outside Grenville’s flat. I suddenly realized that there was a similarity between the two. The same delicate features, large eyes and shoulder-length hair. The horrible thought that I could have possibly married the wrong person struck me. Perhaps this was just a rebound romance. Perhaps I had needed to find somebody prepared to put up with me, and the only difference between the two of them was that Rasa told me what I wanted to hear. But I wanted to believe that this marriage was meant to be, so I tore up the drawings and tried to forget Margie as quickly as she had probably forgotten me. I even stopped drawing, because I realized that drawing was too truthful. I could tell lies in my little songs because in many ways my style had been my own invention and my subconscious was allowed to work through me and yet somehow bypass the listener: I could keep the secrets of my motivation completely to myself. The strange thing was that my songs were being heard all over the world by millions of people and yet nobody really knew what these songs were really about. On the other hand, my artwork had always been more specific and all my subliminal thoughts were displayed in my pictures. There seemed to be something more subversive about writing songs. The fact that they were part of popular culture, considered vulgar, appealed to me after the pretentious allusions of art school. There was something dishonest about the way we were being told to paint: it was an education in style rather than painting or craftmanship.

As I sat with my pregnant wife in our attic flat in Muswell Hill, I found it odd that I was supposed to be this rebellious pop singer, running away from hoards of screaming fans during the day, being thrown out of hotels by irate porters at night, causing dismay and havoc in hitherto happy suburban homes as rebellious teenagers turned ‘You Really Got Me’ full up on their Dansette record players, before disappearing to see the Kinks play in the local dance hall, leaving their parents sitting at home worrying whether their children would return the same as they had left: sane, ordinary, sober, with virginity still intact. Mr and Mrs Mum and Dad could relate to the Beatles because they had been on at the London Palladium and played in front of the Queen. Pop stars were meant to be good-looking and respectful to adults, in the style of Cliff Richard. Even the Rolling Stones had been sanctioned by the entertainment world and officially endorsed by the media as the acceptable face of revolution. The Stones talked about it, the Beatles wrote about it, but for two months at the end of 1964, many people thought that the Kinks might actually bring it about.

There was a hint of danger every time we went to play a venue. Police were outside waiting to be called in to stop the show, hoping to arrest one of us for inciting a riot or, better still, drink and drugs. Stories of punch-ups and backstage brawls were daily occurrences, and while groups such as the Animals got banned from hotels and P.J. Proby, the American singer, was barred from a chain of theatres for allegedly exposing himself on stage, the press somehow accepted this as part of the young being young. But every time the Kinks were involved in a scuffle, it was reported with a tinge of hatred attached to it. These Kinks were a danger to everyone, young and old. Journalists hinted that we had been lucky to get so far, but that luck would soon run out and we would find ourselves back in the gutter where we, in their opinion, belonged. This caused some concern, particularly to Somerville. He had brilliantly masterminded the Beatles’ publicity in the early days, and had made a reputation for himself as a career-builder. Although on the surface he seemed satisfied with the coverage we were getting, there was a hint of professional embarrassment attached to anything concerning the Kinks, Pop music was supposed to entertain the youngsters while the adult world continued to make the decisions that would screw up everybody’s lives. Pop was meant to reflect the culture, not to become the culture. The Kinks seemed to cross a danger-line. They invaded the very structure of a corrupt and yet self-satisfied and precious society. Other established stars such as the Beatles and the Stones moved to big houses and drove Rolls-Royces because that was the way the game was played. This was understood and accepted by the conventional world. The Kinks, on the other hand, didn’t seem to know what to do with their success; it looked as though we were not going to buy into that traditional concept of successful human existence.

While I was in my bed-sit attic, trying to come to terms with imminent parenthood, the world outside was waiting for the fuse attached to the Kinks’ career to run out and for everything to explode in our faces. I comforted my wife and discussed what to name our baby while outside the world said we were on course for annihilation. It was two weeks before Christmas and my world was both beautiful and frightening. It was the total living experience.

Christmas saw the Kinks at almost the peak of their initial success. We appeared on two television shows on New Year’s Eve. First, we did Beat Club for the BBC, and then we were rushed across London to perform on Ready Steady Go! for independent television. We went on just before midnight to perform. I remember miming to ‘All Day and All of the Night’ when suddenly I saw Mick Jagger standing in the front row of the audience. I had seen Jagger perform at Hornsey Art College with the Rolling Stones, then in the club where I had been playing with the Dave Hunt Band. Now the roles were reversed. Jagger stood in front of me, not glaring exactly, but looking into my eyes, trying to work out what I was doing right. This concerned me, because everybody else was dancing and Mick Jagger, one of the most incredibly natural movers, just stood there. I was disappointed that I didn’t see him dancing while I sang ‘All Day and All of the Night’. That would have made my year complete, but perhaps he suspected that and decided to stand bolt upright throughout the song. After the show Dave, Rasa and I went back to Mum and Dad’s house. They were still having the same old singsongs, but now they were singing ‘You Really Got Me’ in a pub-style version. I have a feeling that Mick Jagger wouldn’t have danced to that either. On the other hand, it may have been just his scene.

January 1965 heralded the year of the Kinks’ assault on the rest of the world. The UK was more or less ‘in the pocket’, and now there were other worlds to conquer. We went first to Paris, to play on a television show. Brian Longstaff came along as tour manager, along with Robert Wace, who had a smattering of French in his repertoire. This allowed Grenville to keep an eye on his rapidly expanding theatrical empire, as well as another watchful eye on Larry Page. Rasa went along wearing a fantastic white fur coat, which made her look like a princess from the Steppes of ancient Russia. According to some tabloid newspaper, Rasa’s mother had once been connected to Lithuanian aristocracy, and the way Rasa wore the fur coat, with her almost white flowing hair, added a touch of authenticity to this claim.

We were playing a television show in a studio that was totally unprepared for human habitation. It was a converted theatre and no provision had been made for us. I had not wanted to make the trip at all, and to outsiders I was gaining a reputation for being on a short fuse, partly due to the massive work load of songwriting and partly to my worries about Rasa’s impending addition. I had a row with a French technician because the group had been waiting for French bread and cheese for six hours while the technicians got their act together. In the circumstances, I felt the urge to protest in some way, particularly as my pregnant wife was in need of food. The only insult I could muster was a combination of English and French: ‘Le cunt!’ To my astonishment, English-style sandwiches arrived within minutes. I remembered one of the first rules I learned during my short tenure at theatre college: ‘Shout and thou shalt receive.’

Brian Longstaff was equally frustrated, because he could not get a cup of tea. In the end, he put two fingers together to form the letter T. He ended up with a cup of hot water and a tea-bag on the side. Like all British ex-servicemen, Brian felt that ‘Wogs begin at Calais’. He relieved his frustration by asking the waiter to stand to attention while he put the tea-bag in his mouth and then drank the water. The demonstration definitely tested his inner mouth, if not his stiff upper lip.

After the show, the Kinks played a concert at the Paris Olympia, scene of triumphs by singers like Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier and Yves Montand. The concert itself was a tremendous success with the public, even though Brian Longstaff had shouted at everybody to get decent equipment for us to play with. Also, his French shorthand for tea was not working as well as it had before; a fight broke out because the stage crew had provided him with a pot of boiled milk and cold water. The Beatles had been a tremendous hit at the Olympia the previous year, and people were saying that the Kinks concert was magnificent, although we felt it was the worst show we had ever done. Rasa, who watched from the wings, was won over by the sedate but warm response shown by the Paris audience.

But the real find of the trip was the promotion man from Barclay Records, who distributed Pye Records in France. Xavier, a well-dressed, debonair playboy, took us to some of the best restaurants and nightclubs in Paris. I thought that the whole trip was worthwhile just for a night out with Xavier. I also learned an important lesson about international promotion. ‘Assist them in their exploitation and thou shalt eat free.’ One of the numerous clubs we visited was the Carousel Club. The establishment was managed by a wonderful woman who would wait until five in the morning, when everybody was either too drugged or drunk to care, when she would release chickens and pigs from cages, putting them on people’s backs so that they could dance with live animals. It was not clear whether this was a publicity stunt or a comment on the club’s clientele. If animals were not to your taste, an assortment of beautiful Parisian Mesdamoiselles descended the staircase on to the dance floor and accompanied the guests for the remainder of the evening.

The following morning we flew to Marseilles to do another television show, which turned out to be on an American aircraft carrier, based somewhere out in the Mediterranean. Mick Avory and Terry McGrath, who was along to represent the Arthur Howes agency, immediately headed for the red-light district, where they found themselves two prostitutes for the night. Terry, still wearing his racecourse tout’s hat, was already too drunk and incapable to do anything but to put a complete damper on the proceedings, his whore became ill and threw up in the bath. McGrath now started throwing up himself. It must have been a complete turn-off for everybody, including Mick’s whore, who ran off in terror. At least Mick avoided the possibility of contracting Gallic clap. I took the opportunity of spending an evening watching my pregnant wife take a bath in first-class splendour in the deepest bathtub France could offer, in total contrast to the tiny tub in our bedsit in Muswell Hill.

Next morning we flew to the aircraft carrier by helicopter. Rasa was once again the centre of attention, drawing wolf-whistles and applause from the American sailors as she tottered across the deck in her high heels, miniskirt and white fur coat. This was the first time I felt any sort of jealousy. Sailors after my young wife; her five months pregnant; and me with only a guitar; two hits under my belt, and a bundle full of trouble in my trousers.

The French television crew continued making every conceivable event as difficult and complicated as possible. They were as disorganized on sea as they had been on land, only this time we had to perform in gale-force conditions. But after a while I started to think of Jacques Tati movies I had seen at art college, and my anger gave way to admiration of the bungling crew as they botched one set-up after another; we began to enjoy the splendour of French un-togetherness. Eventually, the American captain of the ship intervened to say, very politely, that they either had to complete the shoot immediately or stay on board for the rest of the trip around the stormy Mediterranean sea. Then, after the TV crew was dispatched to land, we were taken downstairs, where the service men were waiting for us to play an impromptu concert. Brian Longstaff tried to explain that we had inadequate equipment. The captain replied in a deep Texan drawl, ‘You either play a couple of songs for my boys, or you don’t get off this boat until we get to Egypt.’ We looked at each other, then at the cigar-chewing captain, and decided to play two or three songs with what equipment was available.

The following morning we flew back to London to continue work on our second album. Three backing tracks had already been recorded at IBC Studios, one of which was a song called ‘Don’t Ever Change’. I watched Rasa as she walked into the studio still swaddled in her now ever-present fur coat. The sad little refugee had indeed changed into a princess. Maybe I had married the right person after all.

I guess we were all changing, although we didn’t realize it at the time. We had been a bunch of kids out to prove something, and now we were caught on a treadmill which demanded success. And, being a competitive sort, I was not about to be a failure. On that same session we recorded ‘Come On Now’, which I had written for Dave to sing as the B-side of our next single ‘Tired of Waiting for You’. I had written the song while we were on tour in Scotland the previous November, just after Rasa had told me that she might be pregnant. Had the lyric been a hidden plea, a cry for help in the subconscious of a scared, immature young man? Perhaps the song should have been addressed to its author. ‘Come on now. Be a man.’

The single was due to come out the weekend before we went on our world tour, and so we had to tape Top of the Pops, in case the record went into the charts. We were to do Ready Steady Go! live on the Friday before leaving for Australia. All the best-laid plans were set. Then it was announced that Winston Churchill was seriously ill; if he died before the programme aired, there would be a black-out in mourning for the great man. Ironically we were to sing ‘Tired of Waiting for You’ when the world was waiting for Churchill to die. However, he didn’t die that night and the show went ahead as planned.

The so-called world tour beckoned. This was, in fact, only a tour of the Far East, starting in Australia. We were touring on a package with Manfred Mann and the Honeycombs (who had had a hit with a song called ‘Have I the Right?’). My mum insisted that the whole family came to the airport to see us off. This caused some amusement to Manfred Mann, a likeable but somewhat cynical South African musician. During the tour he became quite a close, if somewhat competitive, friend.

For financial reasons, none of our managers came on the tour, and even Brian Longstaff was left at home. Instead, we were accompanied by Johnny Clapson, who had been hired by Arthur Howes to oversee the whole tour. Clapson must have been an ex-entertainer. He had the elegance of Cary Grant combined with the ruthlessness of a drill sergeant in the French Foreign Legion.

I sat in the Air India 707 and waved goodbye to Rasa. I saw her standing near the runway as the aeroplane taxied out, still dressed in her new fur coat. Soon we were flying over the Steppes of Russia. Icebound. Frozen. A mean, hard place. No wonder Rasa’s family had left. This seemed from all superficial appearances to be a strange wilderness with no heart. We landed at Moscow Airport briefly, to refuel, and a Russian soldier, in full regalia complete with a fur hat with a red star in the middle and a gun at his side, boarded and took our passports before we left the plane. We did not argue with this stern-faced Ruskie who probably thought Dave was a girl. The inside of the airport was like one of these old black-and-white paintings that have been hand-coloured. The make-up on the ladies’ faces was too obvious; their lips too red to be believable. The airport was just a show for the outside world, to cover up what was really going on inside the country.

Next stop was one of the most unforgettable of my life: Bombay. We were checked into the hotel late at night. It was built on the beach and was supposed to be the best hotel in the city. I couldn’t sleep, partly from excitement at being in a mysterious continent, but mainly because of the cockroaches and ants crawling around, so I got up and watched the sun rise on the beach. It was there that I heard the chanting of native fishermen as they carried their nets to work. It was a sound that for some indescribable reason was immediately personal to me, and was to be very influential in my songwriting. It’s difficult to describe how a sound or a song gets into your soul. It just connects and stays there. This sound later formed the basis of a song called ‘See My Friends’. Dave’s sortie into the Indian continent was less poetic. He went for a walk on the beach, but was chased by a mad dog. It was typical of Dave’s life at this time that everything he did culminated in some sort of catastrophe or disaster.

Our morning adventures over, we ate breakfast on the patio of the hotel, alongside the rich British tourists who were also staying there. The under-nourished waiters brought us bread and jam to eat, along with our correctly prepared full English breakfast and pots of tea. Tea brewed with a subtle expertise that even Brian Longstaff would have been proud of. The food was so plentiful, the sun was so hot, the waiters so thin I could hardly bring myself to eat. Afterwards, we assembled outside the hotel and got on a bus to go to the airport, driving through rat-infested streets where scantily clad children played in holes in the ground. Whole families lived in these holes in the most extreme poverty, right next to the skyscraper hotels where the tourists stayed. Children were going to the toilet in the gutter and there was filth everywhere. We left Bombay behind, hot and stinking, and flew on to Madras, which was so hot that the people could hardly move. The flies swarmed around the natives’ faces but they hadn’t the energy to brush them aside. India was an education in two days. The world suffers. A lot of people in the world suffer, but pop groups can fly on to other continents. As we left India I realized that compared to this level of suffering, I had been given an easy route through life.

The next stop on the journey was Singapore, where the tour party was met by so many screaming fans that the local police lost control of the situation, and shots were fired in the air to subdue the rioting. I was quickly learning that in these poor parts of the world, human life was less precious than in the affluent and tolerant climates. I heard a scream as a body smashed against a pane of glass outside the airport. A young female fan was crushed against the window only feet away from me. I tried to reach out to her when somebody pushed me along and put a telegram in my hand. It was from Arthur Howes, and said that ‘Tired of Waiting for You’ had gone straight in the charts at Number 11. The telegram made me feel slighty more secure with all the turmoil around me, but at the same time the charts in far-away Britain seemed somewhat trivial after the deprivations I had witnessed in India. The tour was not scheduled to play Singapore until after Australia. In the circumstances surrounding me, I hoped it would be cancelled altogether.

Then we arrived at Perth, and were greeted by stares from the Australian customs men, but Johnny Clapson was as efficient as ever and got us through without too much inconvenience. After a brief stop-over we took an overnight flight to Adelaide. I couldn’t sleep in anticipation of being reunited with my sister Rosie, and with my nephew Terry in particular. I watched the daylight come up over the clouds as we flew across Australia.

We arrived in Adelaide and were driven straight to the Grand Hotel. I waited in my luxurious hotel suite to be reunited with Rosie. The last time I had seen her I was outside a semi in north London, waving goodbye as I drove off in the back of a van with Anita. I could barely stay awake because of jet-lag, so I ordered room service to bring sandwiches. Rosie was amazed that not only could I put the cost of the sandwiches on the bill, but that I could actually afford to pay for them all. The last time she had seen me, I hardly had two pennies to rub together. We sat and hardly spoke; this was becoming a frequent occurrence after not seeing friends or relatives for a long time. There’s nothing to say to them. They had seen me on television and heard me on the radio, and even though they knew me, they had been drawn into a little of the hype and thought that I was some sort of celebrity, which was ridiculous, because I was in fact the same insecure person they had known before. In any event, jet-lag prevents coherent communication. Then Terry and Arthur walked in, and after saying how wonderful it was to see them again, I passed out and did not wake until late that afternoon.

The Manfred Mann group were closing the show in Australia because ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ had been a hit long before ‘You Really Got Me’. But it was the Kinks who created all the fuss, more out of controversy than anything else. The rest of the performers took advantage of the Australian summer and wore shorts and T-shirts on stage, while we were still playing in our thick hunting jackets in temperatures of 110°; truly suffering for the sake of art and image.

Due to this we were completely exhausted and dehydrated at the end of each concert. The padding in the coats was quite sufficient for the English winter hunting season, but was totally inappropriate for the Australian summer. We also created some dubious publicity when, before our show in Adelaide, we were interviewed live by a local DJ who was a renowned pommy-basher. He was doing so much more talking than we were that Dave found it necessary to take a hamburger that he was eating and stuff it down the DJ’s throat while the over-verbose Antipodean was in full flow. This caused uproar with the Australian press, who did not like to be shown to be fools, or even being forcibly fed on live radio. There were headlines in the local press: ‘Pommy Kinks Go Home! We Don’t Need You!’ But to us the only thing that mattered was that our, record had gone into the UK charts at Number 11 and we were hot shit. The Aussie media continued their criticism, but quite frankly we didn’t give a toss. We carried on regardless, taking up the gauntlet by performing even better than before, by working even harder on stage. True Brits in battle! (Albeit dehydrated ones.)

A friendly rivalry was building up between Manfred Mann’s group and us, as we both had new singles out in the UK. I knew that ‘Tired of Waiting for You’ would be Number I, and, even though Manfred’s record had gone in somewhere like Number 12, I had heard it before I left England and somehow I knew that it would not go as high as ours. This sounds over-competitive and childish, but it was the atmosphere at the time.

After the Adelaide show Dave and I went back to Rosie and Art’s detached home in the suburbs of Adelaide, and were relieved to discover that they were living in some measure of comfort; that emigrating to Australia had been worthwhile for them.

Terry said that when he met me at the hotel in Adelaide, he didn’t know whether to shake hands with Dave and me or hug us. I said that if he had kissed me, I would have returned the compliment. It was Terry whom Dave and I had missed more than anybody else. He was always a caring friend; more than a nephew – a second brother to me. I told him that I secretly wished he had stayed in England to become our tour manager, but emigrating with his mother and father was more important. There had been terrible traumas before they went, but Terry had finally decided to go with his parents. We all stayed up to the early hours talking over old times. Rosie played old tapes of me rehearsing with my guitar when I had lived with her. She was shocked when I revealed that one of the little ‘plink-plonk’ country songs on her tape had turned out to be ‘Tired of Waiting for You’. We talked and talked but it was not long before the rigor mortis of jet-lag set in once again, and Dave and I slept in the back of Arthur’s car as he drove us back to our hotel.

Rosie, Terry and Arthur came to the airport to say goodbye, and as Rosie helped me with my luggage I saw Manfred sniggering. I asked Manfred why he was so cynical, and he said in his wonderfully morbid South African drawl, ‘I’m not sending you up, old boy, I’m just sending up the whole scene.’

It’s true, Manfred was a complete send-up. Even his music was a parody of jazz and rock ’n’ roll. He had some wonderful musicians in his band: Tom McGuinness on bass, a friendly, down-to-earth person; Mike Vickers, who went on to be a competent musical arranger for TV and films; and the ecstatic, multi-talented Paul Jones, with his slightly acne-scarred face and superb, and underrated, harmonica style. Because Paul sang in a lower key, it gave him the ability to make a blues song sound like a Perry Como ballad. A fascinating technique. Perhaps deep down Manfred Mann was a blues band, but Paul Jones was definitely a 1950s matinée idol even then. But the strange combination gave them a unique sound and they were responsible for some of the finest pop singles of the early 1960s, even though the playing on their records was below the competence of the musicians. I think it was Manfred’s fear of being unsuccessful that made him reduce everything he did to the lowest common denominator.

The remainder of the tour was not very eventful, except for the antics of some of the members of the tour. Without naming names, one person entertained two ladies in a Melbourne hotel room, one of whom insisted on performing with a large Alsatian dog in front of members of our crew. We were assured that both women were experienced dog-handlers. As I was unable to attend, I am unsure as to whether the Alsatian actually took part in the activities, but I find it hard to believe that the dog was there merely to watch. I also understand that chains and manacles were involved in the event.

Dave was pursued by a couple of Satanists from Brisbane who insisted on uttering strange chants as they wandered around the hotel half-naked. I’m sure Dave took all this in his stride, but as his older brother I was concerned about his welfare. I was particularly embarrassed when Rosie paid me a surprise visit, suddenly appearing at the door of my hotel room. She sat innocently across from me on my bed, eating cheese sandwiches and discussing old times, inquiring about the rest of the family back home. I, on the other hand, was more concerned about how my more imminent family, namely my rampaging brother, was performing along the corridor. Rosie had caught a plane overnight to stay with us for the day. I explained that I was in the middle of writing some songs (one of which was called ‘This Strange Effect’), but I was obviously unable to inform her of the Satanic rites that were being carried out down the corridor, or the Alsatian dogs performing in another bedroom.

But as tours went this tour was pretty dull really. There were more old queens in Australia than you would care to imagine. I remember after a gig in a small city – Newcastle I think it was called – there was such an absence of crumpet that a couple of members of our tour staff dressed up in drag and we had a party. I mean, these guys were on the surface very butch Aussies and a decade or two older than us, but one of them was dressed in a grass skirt and had lipstick on. He pinned me against the wall, put his lips right close to mine and asked if I wanted to do it with him ‘All Day and All of the Night’. I mean, Aussie woofters, forget it. Much too serious to get emotional about. The only thing that sustained me was the thought of those wonderfully masculine childhood cricket heroes. It was a sad night at the hotel all round, I seem to recall. Manfred came in and complained that Paul Jones had been the only person who was capable of attracting a chick who resembled something other than a kangaroo, and after a walk around the town, Manfred had gone back to his room and walked in on another member of his group and interrupted the poor chap’s wank.

These petty male preoccupations aside, my most enduring memory of Australia was as I looked through the window of the plane as we taxied down the runway at Adelaide airport. I saw Rosie, Terry and Arthur still standing and waving at us. They looked so complete together; such a devoted family unit. Terry was well qualified and could have had a fine career if he had stayed in Britain, but he had sacrificed these opportunities to be with them. I envied them so much as they stood there. For all Arthur’s strictness and stubbornness, Terry loved him. Several years later, while I was on another tour of Australia, I went to visit the three of them in Adelaide. It was a hurried visit, with just enough time to say hello before it was time to fly back to the tour on the other side of the continent. Arthur drove me to the airport but pulled up outside the airport perimeter at the end of a runway. The aeroplanes were taking off and arriving over our heads. The whole moment was for Arthur an uncharacteristically emotional one. He told me that he had enjoyed the LP Arthur, and said that he knew that it had been partly inspired by him. He surprised me by adding that he admired some of my songs and, although he didn’t care for loud rock music, he enjoyed singalong-type melodies, which reminded him of home and the family parties we used to have. I was amazed by this, as I always thought that the family was one of the reasons Arthur had emigrated in the first place. Perhaps his reason for leaving England really was because he loved the old country so much he didn’t want to stay around to watch it disintegrate. It probably wasn’t the sole reason, but even if it was only part, then the album title, Arthur, or The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, was even more appropriate. I told Arthur that I felt guilty for using him as a subject for a song, but he shrugged off my apology, saying that he was flattered. Perhaps he knew what I was trying to say in the lyrics, how I was attempting to make some sense of a life that seemed even more desperate and confused than my own. As another jet landed and taxied to the gate, Arthur told me he was going into hospital for an operation and, just in case, he had taken care of Rosie and Terry with a life insurance policy. I didn’t understand then, but now it seems obvious that Arthur was telling me that he was going to die. We drove on to the terminal and he even carried my bag, walked me to the gate and saw me on to the plane. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but that was the only occasion I was ever really alone with him. It seemed to me that when nobody else was around he felt relaxed enough to treat me as grown-up, equal to him. A short time later, I found myself breaking the news of Arthur’s death to my parents. When he died, in the early 1970s, that image of him standing with Rosie and Terry, waving goodbye on our first tour, was still with me.

Back on that tour of 1965, the Rolling Stones were in Oz at the same time as the Kinks and Manfred Mann. There was great rivalry between the tours at the box office, because the Kinks were considered to be the new rivals to the Stones and the Beatles. During a tropical storm in Brisbane, Mick Jagger appeared at my hotel bedroom doorway, shouting abuse about Pete Quaife, whom he described as the greatest liar alive. I never fully understood what it was all about but Jagger shouted that Pete was ‘a fucking liar’. I explained that all Pete’s friends knew that, and it was one of the reasons we liked him. He was a liar but an obvious one, which can often be entertaining. It was also clear to anybody who had read anything about us in the press that Pete was rather romantic and, to say the least, ‘over-descriptive’, but he was harmless. Jagger just took a beer from our fridge and walked down the hotel corridor mumbling, ‘Liar, liar.’

There was a rumour that after the tour the Kinks would go on to America to do a couple of TV appearances, but the work visas still hadn’t come through. Dave, being only seventeen, had to visit the British Consul every time we reached a new country to obtain a special work permit. Each day I prayed that the American visas wouldn’t come through so that we could finish the tour in Hong Kong. All the adulation the group was receiving could not detract from the fact that deep down I was missing my wife. I was turning into an over-affectionate married wimp who just wanted to get home. We left Australia and headed for Singapore, where we were due to play a concert at a gymnasium with the Manfreds. During our flight I sat next to Manfred, who told me that the Kinks had got to Number 2 in the British charts – his record had only reached Number 5 so far. He looked over at Quaife, who was sitting in the front seat boasting about our success, and in his inimitable style said that while the Kinks were Number 2 Pete Quaife was telling everybody that he was Number I.

Upon arrival we were greeted at the airport by the now customary hysterical crowds and bustled into the back of taxi-cabs and taken to the Goodwood Hotel, one of the great symbols of the old Empire. On the way I was astounded to see a gigantic rat, surely a foot long, crawl to a manhole and plop down into the sewers. The smell of the sewers as we crossed the bridge towards the imperialistic splendour of this grand hotel was the most putrid I have experienced in my life. Even the infamous Blue Flame Club in the prefects’ room at school had never harboured such appalling odours. On arrival at the hotel, each member of the Kinks group was given his own cottage in the grounds and there were enough helpers for each of us to have his own personal servant. It was rumoured that Noël Coward had stayed in my cottage, although I felt that Mick Avory’s room would have been more fitting. I felt quite honoured, especially while having a crap on the same toilet as Noël Coward – although if he was a star of the same magnitude as Billy Fury, he probably never went to the toilet at all. By contrast to the imperial splendour of the Goodwood Hotel, the concert we played at was in a poor part of the city in a converted basketball arena, the walls of which were dripping with condensation.

After the concert, I arrived back at the hotel and was given a telegram by a waiter, informing me that ‘Tired of Waiting for You’ had reached Number I in all the British charts. I ordered a bottle of champagne and drank it with the waiter as the rest of the Kinks were out celebrating somewhere, and Manfred was nowhere to be found. The waiter couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Malay, or whatever they speak, but I tried my best to convey the mighty significance of the event. The following morning I saw Manfred and the others at the pool, and they were very sporting and good natured in defeat. Their record had only hovered around the Top 5. I couldn’t help but consider this to be a small personal victory over Manfred, although I have always felt slightly ashamed about this. But I would have been devastated if the situations had been reversed.

Next, it was on to Hong Kong, where the Kinks and Manfred were to play, this time in a large soccer stadium. It was still unclear whether we would be going on to America. Then Johnny Clapson arrived at my room with the bad news: the visas had arrived, and the Kinks would be going on to America while everybody else went home. I collapsed in a huddle in my room and ordered a crate of lagers, which I immediately proceeded to drink. As a result I never discovered Hong Kong’s night-life. I just remember the whole event in a hungover haze. Even at the concert I had supported myself onstage by leaning against my amplifier. It was the first concert where I wore sunglasses – even though we performed at night.

The despair really set in when I heard the length of the flight to America. I was becoming terrified of everything, flying in particular, and when we took off I watched Dave, who was also not a good flyer, tense up and remain rigid for the rest of the trip. The fact that we were not accompanied by the other bands didn’t help us very much either. I missed the comradeship and Manfred’s continual niggling. A kind lady who was travelling with us gave me a Valium. This didn’t help much, but instead made me more depressed. Further horrors appeared on the horizon. We were told we were flying into Vietnam, where at this time the war was escalating. As we flew into Saigon airport accompanied by four American jet-fighters, we could see fires from what must have been skirmishes in the forests below. At the airport, we were ushered into a little waiting area cordoned off from the rest of the airport, and were told to wait. For the next four or five hours we were guarded by American troops with machine guns. The whole thing had an air of disaster about it and I could not wait to get out of that doomed place, even though it meant another long flight, this time to Hawaii and then on to the west coast of America.

When the 707 eventually taxied out on to the runway of Saigon airport, my nerve was almost gone. All I needed was the not-so-reassuring voice of the pilot drawling that he was ‘not completely sure which end of the runway to take the son of a bitch out on to, but guessed that he was headed in the right direction’. Some passengers laughed nervously. I for one did not appreciate the John Wayne impersonation, and anxiously looked around the aircraft for the kind lady who had supplied me with Valium. I tried not to look at Dave. I didn’t want him to see how scared I was. A couple of US fighter jets screamed overhead. ‘Now let’s see if we can get this mother off the ground,’ the pilot drawled. The John Wayne imitation added the final touch of machismo to our departure from the war zone. We took off at an angle so that the tip of the left wing scraped along the runway. John Wayne was possibly wearing a large Stetson as he whooped and hollered down the radio back to airport control, proving that he was still one of the boys: if they needed him back in the armed forces, I’m sure he’d be ready and waiting. I sat back in my seat and thought how proud I was not to be like him. How wonderful to be a cringing coward in the face of such manufactured heroism. And how stupid the John Wayne impersonator in the cockpit was; if he had truly been John Wayne, he would have had a stand-in to perform that particular stunt. How ignorant some ‘real’ men are.’