I was trying to set up a living base in Ireland in the early 1990’s after recovering from a serious illness, when I was asked to write an autobiography. At the time I thought, somewhat cynically, that the publisher involved must have been thinking that it would be a good idea to get me to put my story down because it was likely that I was not long for this world. While recovering from major surgery, I had written a short novel about the last days of a hit man, but the editor assigned to me by my publisher insisted that it was my story they really wanted. I did actually finish the novel as a film script but it never went anywhere further.
I then started to look through various clippings that had made some mention of me, in an attempt to research myself, the way I imagined a proper writer would. But I quickly abandoned this idea.
I did examine various diaries I had written over the years but the entries were sporadic and while I thought they might prove useful at later times for specific references, they didn’t seem to have either continuity or narrative flow. I tried talking to a few old acquaintances but their points of view varied so much from mine that the book would have ended up as a series of other people’s impressions of me.
In the end I decided to go to the most reliable source. The music. It seemed to be the only thing that accurately catalogued my progression as a person. Even the Sonics on a record brought back vivid memories about the way I had felt at that time.
The next issue I had to confront was my identity. I had read several other auto biogs but didn’t want mine to be a simple recollection of names, dates and places. My life has been full of “subtext” almost as though I had had no identity before I discovered song writing. I had been to art school, not especially successfully, but I discovered that nothing provided me with as much freedom as did song.
I am not qualified as a psychoanalyst so I won’t pretend to fully understand how I have evolved emotionally. My life, it seems to me, has been vague and unstructured. I have never been convinced that even fact is black and white. Facts are the domain of historians: although a sequence of facts put down in a time line can convey a certain type of journey, they tend to rush to a conclusion in order to wrap up the whole story in a neat package.
Maybe my real life has existed as a sub plot to my songs. All I will say is that the young 19-year-old me written about in the book is as true and accurate account of myself as anything you will read in a newspaper clipping. That 19-year-old boy is still inside me, insecure, living with a sense of foreboding about his world. All his insecurities are there. In a similar way, the 70-year-old RD has always been inside me. I’m not qualified to dissect this, and I wouldn’t even know where to start.
Finally, this book is really like a long song or series of songs. I switch persona and tense as often in this book as I do in my songs. It’s not an attempt to be literal but when I finished it I thought there was a good deal of heartfelt truth. I may have approached the writing process a little differently from most, but at the time I wrote X-Ray I could not have written it any other way. The voice drifts from first to third person, even in gender as in many of my songs. Even time and space are sometimes in doubt.
Written with a mixture of young man’s innocence and perhaps sometimes an older man’s cynicism, when I look back on X-Ray now, I wonder if I should have made the story shorter, but it too is history and I think it must stand for what it is. The style might strike some as naïve but then most of my songs that people enjoy best are like that too.
When I set out on this journey I had no idea how much writing X-Ray would affect my life or more to the point how much it would denote how much my life was in transition. The Kinks stopped touring shortly around the time X-Ray was first published, but in a way this went unnoticed due to the fact that in my one-man show I sang many old hits for two or three hours and talked about the band. Since the first publication of the book my life has changed drastically. X-Ray projected me into another phase of my life. The events that have taken place since would probably fill another book. What remains is an impression of a time in which I am glad and lucky to have lived.
X-Ray also served, albeit unexpectedly, as a foundation for my one-man show which evolved first as a book reading, then as a one-man show which I ended up performing all over the world, which inspired a VHI television series called Storyteller.
Though the cast of characters in my life seem to border on the fictitious, I hope I’ve accurately and lovingly recaptured these people as we came across each other.
If I were asked to write the book again I think I would have declined and instead pursued my novel about a hit man. It stands as an example of someone trying to stretch the medium to its extreme. I’ve never taken on simple projects, and a simple biography would have bored me. It probably would have ended up being more acceptable but less successful in my own sense of things. I wanted aspects of my journey to reflect something more than a simple dwelling on the past.
RD May 2007