Article from Intro magazine: 11th November 1967
Ray Davies pop songs: By normal pop standards, Ray Davies works incredibly slowly. He’s a worrier, a compulsive changer and, even though most hits are churned out in a few hours, he might spend months on a single song.
Having had the original idea, he’ll reject and return to it and reject it again until the whole thing has been made completely unrecognizable and then, just when he’s showing signs of being satisfied, he’ll decide to start all over again.
Usually his songs only get turned into records because a new single has become long overdue and everyone around him is hysterical.
The reason for all this agonizing is that he refuses to freewheel. Where other writers will take one tiny phrase and make it stretch into a whole song, Ray works exactly the other way round.
He makes every line important, cutting out all irrelevancies and cramming as much as possible into every song.
MORE THAN A SINGLE
In this way, Autumn Almanac is really four or five separate songs squashed into one and it embraces enough ideas to make up a whole album. It reaches beyond being an ordinary single and becomes something like a miniature pop operetta.
“I’m working to the point where each recording would incorporate a whole show,’’ Rays says. “I hate the way that, even now, you have to put in an obvious hook phrase and then keep repeating it as many times as you can.
I’d like to do songs where you’d put across an idea once and then go on to something completely different, a bit in the same way as a symphony, progressing from movement to movement and not being tied to any one phrase.
“I think I might be able to do that kind of thing in a year, but now you have to keep playing it safe. If ever you do anything at all wild, it always falls flat.”
The best thing about his music is that no matter how much thought and hard work may go into it, it always comes out uncluttered and strictly unpretentious.
BASIC REACTIONS
Ray himself is a most childlike person with basic reactions and his songs come on like nursery rhymes, clean and crisp and shiny.
Being as childlike as he is, he has never really learned to cope with the business tussles and legal squabbles in which all groups inevitably get involved.
He has no ability to stand apart and just shrug it off, but lets himself get pushed into monster depressions. By his own admission he’s moody and nervous.
Basically, he’s simply not equipped to deal with the life that is flung at him.
For all these reasons, he likes to break out and go on the road. He says: “Gigging is a terrible bring-down in all kinds of ways, but, while you’re on stage, you’re involved in the one thing that pop is really about and everything suddenly seems simpler.
Ray Davies pop songs
You may hate the crummy places you have to play, but, just for that half hour when you’re actually working, it’s quite incredible, it gets rid of all the rubbish that has been cluttering your mind and you can start from nothing again.
“I have a lot of my ideas immediately after coming off stage. I usually don’t stop talking for a couple of hours afterwards and I’m excited because I’ve been dealing with a real audience instead of tussling and wasting time and getting hung up.
It stimulates my mind like nothing else does.”
Apart from simplicity, another of the great strengths in Ray’s writing is his awareness of the past.
He leans back on the history of popular music throughout this century, taking in music hall and twenties jazz and George Formby and the early rock ’n rollers.
Such a wide range of reference obviously adds a lot of richness and variety to his songs.
SOMETHING MORE
“I want to put something more into my records than just the latest fashion,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m really not interested in songs about discotheques and hippies and flower power.
Instead, my songs are about things that don’t change, about streets where people spend their whole lives, about football on Saturdays and Waterloo Station and holidays in Blackpool—lives that really exist.
I’m not interested in what anyone else is up to, I have my own things and I just stick to them.”
Ray Davies pop songs
This unconcern with trendiness is carried right through into his private life, which is almost completely cut off from the rest of the pop world.
He’s married and spends a lot of his time holed up at home working. He has no obvious interest in clothes or in his own appearance and has none of that narcissism that afflicts most pop stars.
He gets his biggest kicks out of playing football for the Showbiz XI: In pop terms all of this makes him freakish.
Surprisingly, considering how easily he gets depressed, he can also be very funny. He specializes in deadpan, slightly contemptuous lines that bite home because they’re so completely incongruous.
“Once we played a circus and we had to follow a load of polar bears. I looked at this polar bear and I kept thinking: ‘One of us shouldn’t have to do this.”
ENDLESS CONMAN
If anyone laughs, he’ll look modestly down at his feet and only crack an embarrassed smile. Really, he’s an endless conman.
Looking back through what I’ve written, I see that I haven’t mentioned the Kinks once. This is because Ray hardly ever talks about them.
He tells stories about them as individuals and he’s obviously pleased that his brother Dave has been getting solo hits, but he doesn’t talk about them as a group.
Of course, he does write all the songs and handle the vocals and collar most of the fan mail, but the rest of the group probably doesn’t affect him much.
THE NEXT MOVE
As to the future, the obvious next move is for Ray to progress into writing film scores. He has the range, flair and basic talent to make a success of it and he’d like to do it.
“I’d want to be really involved,” he says. “It’d have to be more than just a commission which I’d carry out at a distance.”
“I’m not sure yet how I’ll finish up but, whatever I do, I want it to be because I’ll enjoy it and not just because it’ll be good for my career.
If the job is a drag, I get incredibly brought down and I don’t make out. I only do good work if I’m happy.”
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