Ray Davies Interviewed: “Those English themes became a way of cocooning myself from everything.”

In 2012 The Kinks’ well-respected man of British song Ray Davies spoke to MOJO about battles with his brother, booze, bad luck and the art of songwriting. “Writing is like running a marathon,” Davies told Pat Gilbert. “The important part is finishing.”

In the stalls of a dimly lit upstairs theatre at The Gatehouse in leafy Hampstead Village. Once a music hall, it transpires that almost everything here that looks Victorian actually dates from a more modern makeover. A gnawing feeling of not-quite-rightness is emboldened when, just 15 minutes into our interview, Ray Davies – chief Kink, peerless musical chronicler of post-war, working-class England, ’60s survivor, arch ironist – becomes noticeably distracted. Then, after saying he needs to “sort something out that’s happening later”, he gets up and leaves.

It had all been going so well. Twenty minutes earlier, Davies had arrived in a genial and upbeat mood. Tall and slim, with keen, watchful eyes, his subtly rusty movements and sedate, posh-Cockney speech nevertheless underscore the fact that the gap-toothed dandy of those colourful ’60s EP sleeves will turn 68 in the week of our meeting. As we shake hands, it strikes MOJO that it’s the very same hand that first picked out the chords to Waterloo Sunset, Sunny Afternoon, Dead End Street, Autumn Almanac, plus once forgotten, now revered late-’60s concept albums The Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire), through the band’s difficult “theatrical” works of the ’70s, including Preservation Acts 1 & 2 and Soap Opera, to late-’70s power-rockers Sleepwalker and Low Budget and a low-key millennial solo career.

According to Ray’s younger brother and fellow Kink Dave Davies, it’s also a hand whose unusual softness was considered by their working-class father to be indicative of an over-sensitive soul. It was a prophecy borne out in Ray’s subsequent life: special schooling; a nervous breakdown in 1966; constant wars with his brother; an infamous overdose during and after a 1973 White City show (following his split with first wife Rasa); retreats from the music business; occasional submersions in booze; even being shot during a mugging in New Orleans in 2004. Much of this, it seems, essential nourishment for an extraordinary songwriting journey.

MOJO is fully conversant with Davies’ semi-fictitious autobiography, X-Ray, in which a young investigator from “The Corporation” interviews Ray, who, in the fiction, is 70 years old. Their first meeting finds Davies testing the ingenue with a game of “emotional chess”. And in the first quarter of our interview, Davies will, unsettlingly, ask me to repeat two lengthy questions, and then claim not to understand a third at all.

But returned from his walk-out, he warms into a wry, humorous interviewee even giving MOJO advice on songwriting. “If after two weeks you still can’t write your middle-eight,” he says, “the best course of action is to see a psychiatrist. That will sort you out.”

During your childhood in a working-class terraced house in Muswell Hill, when did it strike you, as you would sing in a Kinks song, “I’m not like everybody else”?

I always felt that way. But you also have to say to yourself that you’re not going to be like other people. My daughter, who’s 13, said to me, “I’m not going to be like that. When I’m 18, I’m free.” So maybe a lot of young people feel like that, but you have to search for the thing that will put you on a different journey. Which for me was music, which I was performing in the local pub from my early teens.

According to Ray’s younger brother and fellow Kink Dave Davies, it’s also a hand whose unusual softness was considered by their working-class father to be indicative of an over-sensitive soul. It was a prophecy borne out in Ray’s subsequent life: special schooling; a nervous breakdown in 1966; constant wars with his brother; an infamous overdose during and after a 1973 White City show (following his split with first wife Rasa); retreats from the music business; occasional submersions in booze; even being shot during a mugging in New Orleans in 2004. Much of this, it seems, essential nourishment for an extraordinary songwriting journey.

MOJO is fully conversant with Davies’ semi-fictitious autobiography, X-Ray, in which a young investigator from “The Corporation” interviews Ray, who, in the fiction, is 70 years old. Their first meeting finds Davies testing the ingenue with a game of “emotional chess”. And in the first quarter of our interview, Davies will, unsettlingly, ask me to repeat two lengthy questions, and then claim not to understand a third at all.

But returned from his walk-out, he warms into a wry, humorous interviewee even giving MOJO advice on songwriting. “If after two weeks you still can’t write your middle-eight,” he says, “the best course of action is to see a psychiatrist. That will sort you out.”

I always felt that way. But you also have to say to yourself that you’re not going to be like other people. My daughter, who’s 13, said to me, “I’m not going to be like that. When I’m 18, I’m free.” So maybe a lot of young people feel like that, but you have to search for the thing that will put you on a different journey. Which for me was music, which I was performing in the local pub from my early teens.

According to Ray’s younger brother and fellow Kink Dave Davies, it’s also a hand whose unusual softness was considered by their working-class father to be indicative of an over-sensitive soul. It was a prophecy borne out in Ray’s subsequent life: special schooling; a nervous breakdown in 1966; constant wars with his brother; an infamous overdose during and after a 1973 White City show (following his split with first wife Rasa); retreats from the music business; occasional submersions in booze; even being shot during a mugging in New Orleans in 2004. Much of this, it seems, essential nourishment for an extraordinary songwriting journey.

MOJO is fully conversant with Davies’ semi-fictitious autobiography, X-Ray, in which a young investigator from “The Corporation” interviews Ray, who, in the fiction, is 70 years old. Their first meeting finds Davies testing the ingenue with a game of “emotional chess”. And in the first quarter of our interview, Davies will, unsettlingly, ask me to repeat two lengthy questions, and then claim not to understand a third at all.

But returned from his walk-out, he warms into a wry, humorous interviewee even giving MOJO advice on songwriting. “If after two weeks you still can’t write your middle-eight,” he says, “the best course of action is to see a psychiatrist. That will sort you out.”

During your childhood in a working-class terraced house in Muswell Hill, when did it strike you, as you would sing in a Kinks song, “I’m not like everybody else”?

I always felt that way. But you also have to say to yourself that you’re not going to be like other people. My daughter, who’s 13, said to me, “I’m not going to be like that. When I’m 18, I’m free.” So maybe a lot of young people feel like that, but you have to search for the thing that will put you on a different journey. Which for me was music, which I was performing in the local pub from my early teens.

Well, it could have been destructive if I’d taken it. The backstory is that, because I was seen as a loner and had health issues, I’d missed a lot of conventional schooling and had to go to a special needs place [in Notting Hill] when I was about 10. It’s not that I wouldn’t have passed the 11-plus, but maybe if I had then I would have been like everybody else. I had heard that the local secondary school was really good for people like me and it was a new era when the divisions between the different kinds of schools was diminishing and being de-stigmatised. I think I had something else on my mind that day and thought, Why bother, it’s ridiculous.

Dave Davies, your little brother, once said that people assume it’s the older sibling’s responsibility to look after the younger one, but it often turns out to be the other way around. Is that true in your case?

I always felt Dave was more mature than I was, in a strange way, more worldly, more adventurous. When I was at art college [in 1962], I did my art. I went to the clubs, but I was not hanging out or involved with all the excess Dave was, getting out of his brain at Jimmy Deuchar concerts. Jimmy was a jazz trumpeter, completely off his head. People used to go to his shows not just to see his excellent playing but to score their drugs. Dave hung out at more edgy clubs, while I stayed in a more R&B circuit. He was more intelligent, his attitude was just “do it”. My attitude was: give me time to think about it first. Dave was always the catalyst for things.

When did the ’60s start for you?

Maybe art college. Working-class people had access to areas they hadn’t before, which was good. It wasn’t a decade, it was just a magical few years. 1964 to… it was over by the time they made Blow-Up [1966]. It’s easier to determine with hindsight what an era meant. It was a golden age of creativity. When the classes mingled, it was full of possibilities.

In 1966, before you wrote Face To Face, the first all-originals Kinks LP, you suffered “nervous exhaustion”… Do songwriters have to go somewhere dark to create something extraordinary?

If writer friends are going through a bad patch emotionally, I always think, They’re on to something! (laughs). When you get a really big idea, sometimes those ideas are bigger than your abilities to express them. Sometimes I’m searching for a way to say something, but I only have songs to express it. With Sunny Afternoon, I knew something was going to happen. Then England won the World Cup and I thought, That was quite important. I wrote the song in the middle of quite a bad illness. People call it “nervous exhaustion”, but that is just an expression. It was a number of things. I had an injured back as a kid, which is why I sit a bit weird. That was giving me terrible pain. We were touring a lot, and the people who had problems on the road in those days were drug addicts, which I wasn’t. I was a young parent with a family and all the things attendant with that. It was the first time I began to think that the band wasn’t enough for me. Hence a lost few weeks… Yes, it bore fruit. But sometimes you have to ask yourself, Was it worth it?