Ray Davies

Ray Davies (born June 21, 1944, London, England) is an English musician and songwriter best known for his work with the rock band the Kinks.

Early life

Ray Davies was born into a working-class family in the Fortis Green area of the suburban Muswell Hill district of north London. His parents were Frederick Davies, who worked in a slaughterhouse, and Annie Davies (née Wilmore). He had six elder sisters and one younger brother, Dave. His sister Rene gave him his first guitar as a birthday gift on his 13th birthday. Davies and his brother both took up the instrument. They grew up listening to the music hall (vaudeville-like theatrical entertainment popular in Britain from the mid-19th to the early 20th century) music and jazz that their parents loved and were further influenced by the rock and roll records their sisters played.

The brothers attended the William Grimshaw Secondary Modern School, where they started a band called the Ray Davies Quartet with friend Pete Quaife and Quaife’s friend John Start. After a performance at a school dance went well, the band moved on to playing in local pubs. Their classmate Rod Stewart briefly sang lead vocals in their band before starting his own.

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Beginning in 1962, Davies studied painting and theatre at Hornsey College of Art in London, though his true passion was music. Meanwhile, he continued to play gigs with his brother, Quaife, and Start. The band went through a variety of names before settling on the Ravens. In time, jazz musician Mick Avory would take over the drums. As they began gaining a reputation in London’s emerging rock scene, they rebranded themselves the Kinks, a name that is said to have derived from the band’s fashion style at the time.

Life as a Kink

Ray Davies was the principal songwriter and lead singer for the band. In August 1964 the Kinks’ single “You Really Got Me” put them on the road to success. Written by Davies and influenced by rhythm and blues, the song was driven by Dave Davies’s distorted guitar riff (partly the result of the slashing of the cone in his amplifier with a razor) and power chords, along with its propulsive beat, all of which would become highly influential in garage rock, heavy metal, and punk rock. The single topped the U.K. pop chart and reached number seven on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in the United States. The hits “All Day and All of the Night” (1964) and “Tired of Waiting for You” (1965) followed.

Part of the British Invasion that included the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, and the Rolling Stones, the Kinks toured the United States in 1965. However, after that tour the American Federation of Musicians (the labour union representing musicians) denied the Kinks permits to perform in the U.S. for four years. No official reason was given, but it was believed that the ban stemmed from a backstage fight with a producer while the Kinks were taping a spot for Dick Clark’s television show Where the Action Is.

Nonetheless, Davies would establish himself as one of rock’s great storytellers with the Kinks, becoming an insightful and poetic observer of British life and culture. His “Sunny Afternoon,” a number one hit in the United Kingdom in 1966, centred on Davies’s disenchantment with the high level of the progressive income tax imposed by the Labour government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Among Davies’s other acclaimed songs with the Kinks in the 1960s were “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” (1966), which skewered blind obedience to the Carnaby Street-dictated fashion trends in “Swinging London,” and the melancholy view-from-a-window paean “Waterloo Sunset” (1967), which esteemed rock critic Robert Christgau called “the most beautiful song in the English language.” Veering from the group’s early garage rock, the Kinks’ mid-1960s songs featured a jangly folk-rock and orchestral pop sound that would be a huge influence on the Britpop music of bands of the 1990s such as Oasis, Blur, and Pulp.

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In 1969, just as their popularity in the U.K. was waning, the Kinks were allowed to return to the United States. In addition to their extensive touring, the Kinks used the Davies-penned hit “Lola” from the album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One (1970) to win over the U.S. audience. “Lola” has a catchy sing-along chorus, which propelled it into the top ten on the charts in the United States and United Kingdom. It also was ahead of its time in its depiction of a romantic encounter complicated by gender nonconformity.

The Kinks would continue to record and release music until the mid-1990s, including the popular songs “Destroyer” (1981) and “Come Dancing” (1983), the last written by Davies as a tribute to his sister Rene, who died while ballroom dancing in London. The Kinks played their last live performance in 1996. Ray and Dave Davies have had a famously tumultuous relationship, and, although there has been talk of an official Kinks reunion, it has not happened. However, the brothers did perform together live on December 18, 2015, doing a rendition of “You Really Got Me” at London’s Islington Assembly Hall.

Solo projects and later life

Although his greatest fame has come from leading the Kinks, Davies undertook several notable side projects while still a member of the band, and since its dissolution he has released a number of solo albums and has pursued a variety of other artistic endeavours. In 1981 he collaborated with playwright Barrie Keeffe on Chorus Girls, a stage musical that borrowed from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and concerned Prince Charles being taken hostage. Three years later, exploring an interest in filmmaking that dated from his time at Hornsey College of Art, Davies wrote and directed the short film Return to Waterloo, about the daydreams of a suburban commuter. In the late 1980s playwright Snoo Wilson aided Davies in writing another musical, 80 Days (1988), inspired by Jules Verne’s novel Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873; Around the World in Eighty Days).

In 2004 Davies moved to New Orleans. Although he enjoys a reputation as one of pop music’s most astute chroniclers of English life, Davies has had a lifelong fascination with the United States that dates from his childhood obsession with Hollywood westerns and his early interest in American musical forms such as jazz and blues and American performers such as Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters. In New Orleans Davies learned firsthand about the American criminal justice and health care systems when he was hospitalized after being shot in the leg by a mugger in 2004. That experience was reflected in his solo album Other People’s Lives (2006). Another solo album, Working Man’s Café, followed the next year. In 2008 Davies’s third musical, Come Dancing, was produced in London’s West End. On the album See My Friends (2010) Davies reinterpreted some of the Kinks’ best-known songs with help from prominent rockers such as Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, and Metallica.

In 2013 Davies published a memoir, Americana: The Kinks, the Riff, the Road: The Story. A pair of albums, Americana (2017) and Our Country: Americana, Act 2 (2018), followed. On both he was backed by the band the Jayhawks, popular practitioners of the Americana genre (which incorporates blues, folk, bluegrass, country, and rock and roll influences).

Personal life and honours

Davies has been married three times (to Rasa Didzpetris, Yvonne Gunner, and Patricia Crosbie). He also had a high-profile relationship with Chrissie Hynde, leader of the rock band the Pretenders. He has four daughters.

Davies was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Kinks in 1990 and was knighted in 2017 by Prince Charles (later King Charles III) for service to the arts.