The Kinks’ Dave Davies: ‘My relationship with Ray has been a pain in the arse’

Dave Davies is trying to remember a particular Kinks song. It’s a track, he says, that somehow encapsulates his famously fractious sibling relationship with his brother Ray, chief songwriter and lead singer of The Kinks, one of the “big four” sixties British Invasion bands, along with The Who, the Stones, and The Beatles. But he can’t remember what it is. His PA, and girlfriend of 14 years Rebecca Wilson, enters the room at his request and reels off a list of suggestions that reminds me what an astonishing back catalogue The Kinks have. “’You Really Got Me?’ ‘Lola‘? ‘Days’? ‘Sunny Afternoon’? ‘All Day and All of the Night’? ‘Waterloo Sunset’?” Batting away all of these with an exasperated “No,” Davies is clearly frustrated at his level of recall – he suffered a stroke in 2004 aged 57, and though he has made a very good recovery, he still slurs his words and occasionally needs a nudge in the right direction from Wilson. Finally, it comes to him independently: “’I’m Not Like Everybody Else!’” he says, with great relief. He doesn’t have anything to hand to play it to me, so I pick up my phone and blast the song down my laptop mic, both of us sitting for 30 seconds listening to a song he recorded 60 years ago. He sinks back into his chair wearing a satisfied smile. “I’m singing for another person here; it has a different meaning.” He’s singing his brother’s words – unusual for a band where the song was usually sung by its writer. For the B-side to “Sunny Afternoon”, Davies took the lead vocal at the last minute when The Animals rejected the song. “It was me and Ray realising that we had to do something, and we had to do it quickly – that’s what the 60s was about – and then Ray’s just coming up with these ideas, and said I should take the lead… it was fabulously constructed,” he recalls. “[The relationship] has been a pain in the arse to be honest, but it’s been very beneficial in many ways – we’ve helped each other without realising it.” The Kinks – from left, Ray Davies, Pete Quaife, Mick Avory and Dave Davies – were one of the ‘big four’ sixties British Invasion bands, along with The Who, Stones, and Beatles (Photo: David Redfern/Redferns) The marked difference in the two brother’s personalities is deftly captured in their latest collaboration. Not a song or a reunion concert, but an artistic endeavour nevertheless, The Kinks: Brothers, a collaboration with portrait painter Christian Furr, reimagines a 1968 passport photobooth picture of the siblings through a series of mixed-media works. In the photo, older brother Ray appears more contemplative and posed, whilst Dave, half-smiling, looks as if he’s stuck his face in-frame at the last minute on a whim. The Kinks were not only fuelled by a sibling rivalry, but an early professional rivalry with The Beatles – perhaps more antagonistic than the one The Fabs had with the Stones. At the exhibition’s launch event, Davies said, “I loved George Harrison – he was the only Beatle that I liked,” and now he wants to clarify. “You’d be a fool if you didn’t like The Beatles, but I liked George so much because I could see something simmering underneath – very thoughtful. Paul said wonderful things about The Kinks… but Ray and John had a rivalry… John was difficult.” I suggest both John and Ray would have been quite spiky at the time, “Spiky – yes, that’s it.” Later, they became neighbours in Manhattan, Ray living moments from The Dakota, the apartment building that was the scene of Lennon’s murder in 1980. “I still get angry because it’s such a f**king waste… but yeah – The Beatles couldn’t write Ray’s songs and Ray couldn’t write Beatles songs.” I ask him to give me four adjectives that describe his brother, and four that describe him. First, Ray: “Studious, thoughtful… he’s a very deep person, very measured… pretty different from me.” Now for the more difficult question – what would he say about himself? “I don’t know… I’ll tell you, every decade, it changes, and it’s difficult to be objective about yourself.” So I ask Wilson. “You’ll be mean!” he jokes. “He’s serendipitous.” The Kinks: Brothers, a collaboration with portrait painter Christian Furr, reimagines a 1968 passport photo booth picture of the siblings through a series of mixed-media works “What?!” replies Davies. “Is that English?” “Like accidental magic,” Wilson clarifies. “He’s like Midas, and he’s not calculated. I always say he’s guileless. Creatively, I think he’s very pure. Just everything from him slashing the amp and all that.” The amp-slashing in question is when Davies, both through frustration and experimentation, slashed the speaker cone of a “crap” Elpico amp with a knife, wired it to a larger Vox amplifier, and birthed distorted guitar, giving The Kinks their first number one single with “You Really Got Me” in August 1964. Accidental magic indeed. “We didn’t really know what we were doing,” Dave tells me. “Ray had written this great riff, this great song, and we had to do something with it. It just came out there, really.” The youngest of eight siblings, Davies was born into a musical working class family in Muswell Hill, north London. It seems two events from his early life probably turned him into the troubled, impetuous young man he has written about in his two autobiographies (the most recent, Living on a Thin Line, was released in 2022): his eldest sister’s death when he was only 10, and a teenage pregnancy leading to a daughter he didn’t meet for 30 years. I ask him about a review of Living on a Thin Line from The Guardian at the time of its release, which accused him of a lack of contrition, and observed a “habit of ditching wives and small children willy-nilly when a better offer came along”. Davies looks a bit lost, Wilson stepping in to remind him: “I told you about that. That was so rude. That reviewer basically called you a womaniser.” Dave Davies and Christian Furr sign images at the exhibition (Photo: Nicola Hayes/Gibson Garage) Wilson addresses me now. “First of all… He was 15. His girlfriend was 16. They leave all these things out, you know? His girlfriend was put in a home for unwed teenage mothers. And so when I see [someone not] bothering to check the facts at all – the timeline… I feel defensive of him sometimes.” She leaves again, and Davies has had some time to gather his thoughts. “It’s difficult to be objective about someone else’s experience. My first relationship with a girl was a very beautiful, moving experience. It taught me how to live. I was lying in bed with her, I was loving her, and it was a gift. And I think people forget that… but I suffered all my early life from my first relationship. It turned me into a little bit of a ‘lad’ – if you like – because of the resentment that she’d been taken away from me.” This resentment manifested itself in many ways, including historic fallouts with his brother that have sometimes, maybe lazily, seen them compared to the Gallaghers. “I love the Gallagher brothers,” he tells me, “And I think it’s weird how different they are from each other. They’ve got a strange thing about them that’s very endearing.” I quote to him the lyric from “Acquiesce”, Oasis’s song of brotherly love: “Because we need each other, we believe in one another…” “Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s very much like me and Ray – they had to go through the hate thing, and it’s back on course now… It comes with maturity. You realise, ‘What’s the point?’ and then rethink things.” When the Gallaghers weren’t talking, he says, “I remember laughing, thinking, ‘You wait, you wait, you’ll go back!’” So might we see a Dave and Ray reunion on stage at some point? “Never say never. We talk every couple of months, but it’s usually about The Arsenal… just normal stuff, you know, to remind us that we’re just part of the human race.” Though one could argue of course that after such a tumultuous, extraordinary life, Dave Davies is not like anybody else. ‘The Kinks: Brothers‘ is at Gibson Garage London until 6 September