The Kinks
Released: August 1964
The Kinks in 1965, clockwise from top left—Ray Davies, Mick Avory, Dave Davies, and Pete Quaife at London’s Wembley Studios.
GAB Archive/Getty Images
The predictability of pop rock—with its formulaic structure, three-minute length, and labels’ demands for a polished sound—didn’t sit well with all bands in 1964. Many British working-class groups weaned on gritty American blues recordings were particularly resistant to conformity. Eclipsed by British pop bands that had already made the leap to the U.S., U.K. groups such as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Animals, and the Kinks pushed to create a sound that would set them apart. In 1964, the popularity of the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five left little room for another cheery boy band. In fact, prior to their first American tour in June 1964, the Stones positioned themselves as the anti-Beatles—with their manager starting a British media frenzy by encouraging the headline, “Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?”
Competitive, impatient, and aggravated by the upbeat tidiness of pop music, the Kinks decided to leverage the rawness of their live club performances to the recording studio. When the band recorded “You Really Got Me” in July 1964, they wanted the song to have an edge, complete with power guitar chords and fuzzy distortion. They wanted the record to have the same coarse sound they projected while performing at London clubs that had poor sound systems. Though their label, Pye Records, tried to clean up their first attempt, the Kinks demanded to go back into the studio to “dirty” up the sound by rerecording it.
After “You Really Got Me” was released in August 1964, the single went to No. 1 in Britain and No. 7 in the U.S. The band’s fondness for distortion would influence the Rolling Stones (“Satisfaction”), the Beatles (“Think for Yourself”), the Yardbirds (“Heart Full of Soul”), and other groups in 1965 and beyond. The song, with its fuzzy power chords, also became an inspiration for hard-rock and garage bands later in the decade. “You Really Got Me” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.
Interviews with RAY DAVIES (Kinks lead singer and songwriter), DAVE DAVIES (lead guitarist and Ray’s brother), and SHEL TALMY (producer)
Ray Davies: Shortly after I formed the Ravens in 1963 with my brother Dave and bassist Pete Quaife, we began wearing colorful outfits we had bought in boutiques on London’s Carnaby Street. Dressed in these flamboyant clothes at a pub with our manager, Larry Page, I loudly insisted we needed an edgier name than the Ravens. A drunk who had been watching us remarked that we looked more like kinks to him—short for “kinky,” or “weird.” Larry picked up on that and said, “The Kinks! That’s perfect!”
Before the Ravens, while I was still at college, I played in the Dave Hunt Blues Band, a gritty R&B-jazz crossover group. Around this time I wrote “You Really Got Me” on my guitar at my sister’s house in North London. My influences were country and blues—something that [American blues guitarist] Big Bill Broonzy might play.
The inspiration for the lyrics and title came to me one night while playing with Dave Hunt at the Scene Club in Soho. During our set, I looked out in the darkness about ten feet from the stage and saw what appeared to be a seventeen-year-old girl moving better than anyone else on the dance floor. She had ash-colored hair set in a beehive style that was popular then. When we finished, I went off to find her, but she was gone and never returned to the club. She really got me going.
When I first played the song for Pete, our bassist, he didn’t care for it. It didn’t sound commercial enough for him—not pop enough. He thought it was too basic to grab teens. Then I played it for the rest of the band in the front room of my family’s house in London. Everyone liked it. I deliberately wanted it to sound coarse, the way we came across through club speakers that couldn’t handle the volume. Then I set the song aside.
In 1964, after we changed our name to the Kinks, we were under a lot of pressure to come up with a hit for Pye Records, our label. Our first two singles—“Long Tall Sally” and “You Still Want Me”—hadn’t charted. So I pulled out “You Really Got Me” and went to work on it. I played the riff on the piano at my parents’ house. Dave learned the song and played the chords on his guitar. I wanted the song to sound like a repetitive Gregorian chant over a blues, so I pushed for a dirtied-up guitar sound.
I also wanted a distorted bass sound with an echo effect, the way Ray Charles’s electric piano sounded on “What I’d Say” coming through the bad speaker of my parents’ record player. To try to emulate that sound, I punched a few holes in Pete’s preamp speaker with my mother’s knitting needle.
Dave Davies: I always liked how our band sounded at clubs—coarse and sort of stripped down. Months earlier, I had passed a radio shop a few doors up from my parents’ house on Denmark Terrace. In the window I saw a small teal space-age Elpico amp for 10 quid. I bought it, but when I got home, I was alone and had a moment of teenage inspiration or rage. I had just learned to shave, so I took one of my razor blades and slashed up the amp’s speaker cone. I had no idea whether what I had done would work, but when I plugged in the guitar, I was blown away by the raucous sound that came out. It was gritty. Up until then, rock guitars in London had sounded very clean and polished, except for blues players. But the blues sound wasn’t what I had in my head then. It was just rage.
Ray Davies: Our first recording of “You Really Got Me” was a demo we made at Regent Sounds on London’s Denmark Street. Shel Talmy, an American independent record producer who was working in London at the time, liked what he heard.
Shel Talmy: When I arrived in London in 1962, I expected to stay only a few weeks. But after I met with A&R chief Dick Rowe at Decca, he hired me to bring in new artists and record them. A year later, I was visiting some friends at a music publisher on Denmark Street when Robert Wace, the manager of some band called the Kinks, came into reception and asked if anyone wanted to hear a demo. I volunteered. After we listened in my friend’s office, I thought the demo had a number of potential hits. By then, I was ticked at Decca for turning down two bands I had brought in to be signed—Manfred Mann and Georgie Fame. So after I met the Kinks, we went into Pye in ’64 to record their first two singles. When those didn’t chart, we recorded “You Really Got Me.” Pye executives loved the playback, but two days later, Ray said he didn’t like it and wanted to record the song again.
Ray Davies: It was too slow, and the engineers had cleaned up our distortion, adding echo and made it sound perfect, which was exactly what I didn’t want. I wanted the single to sound live and raw, the way we sounded at clubs. After some back-and-forth, the label agreed to let us rerecord—provided we paid for it. So I borrowed 200 pounds from our managers, Grenville Collins and Robert Wace. A few weeks later, we rerecorded “You Really Got Me” at London’s IBC Studios. I thought about adding a specific girl’s name to the lyric but decided against it. I had sung “Girl, you really got me goin’” at most of our gigs and stuck with that.
Dave Davies: I was quite an angry kid and got my aggression out through my music. For the opening chords at IBC, I used bar chords—holding down three strings and strumming hard and then shifting my fingers to a different place on the neck. I picked that up from listening to the Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run.” Their rhythm guitarist, Don Wilson, wasn’t playing the full chords—he was just hitting the bottom three notes. I thought that was great—I could do that and not worry about fifths and sixths and things I didn’t know yet.
Talmy: At IBC, I placed Ray in an isolation booth so the instruments wouldn’t bleed into his vocal. For the drums, instead of using four mikes, which was standard then, I used twelve, to isolate all of the various percussive sounds. I used three mikes for Dave—one in front of his amp, another on a boom at a distance, and one pointed at his guitar strings. Each mike picked up different parts of what he was playing, and I combined them later to get the sound you hear on the single. The mike on Dave’s strings picked up the tinny sound that, when mixed with the other two, gave his guitar a nice top. The Kinks didn’t have a drummer yet, so I hired Bobby Graham, the best English session drummer at the time for rock. I played the tambourine. I also overdubbed background vocals to enhance Dave’s riff. Dave, Pete, Ray, and Rasa—Ray’s wife at the time—sang the background track at one mike. Then I had everyone switch positions and I double-tracked the vocals so there would be more dimension.
Ray Davies: To me, the sheer power of Dave’s hands combined with the anger and aggression with which he played the riff of my song counted more than any distorting speaker. After we recorded at IBC, we went on Britain’s Ready Steady Go! TV show in July ’64, just before the single’s release. Once teens saw us and heard our metallic sound, the excitement built and the single took off after its release the following week.
Part of what the audience was responding to was the song’s key shift from G to A. The more natural and melodic place for the song to go was from G to C or D. But I wanted it to go to A, which was quite revolutionary then. There’s something about that full step up that feels like acceleration and raises the excitement level. The progression actually made me shudder when I originally came up with it.
It’s funny, the song began as a way for me to reach out to that girl at the Scene Club, to let her know how I felt. I never found her or met her later, but I sort of like to imagine that she knows “You Really Got Me” was written for her and that she’s out there still, an age-old diamond.