Trivia / The Kinks

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• Acting for Two: In the "Come Dancing" video, Ray Davies as the slicked-back guy who dates the sister in the flashback scenes, and later as himself (with a shot of the other character in the crowd watching The Kinks as they play).
• Banned in China:
  • The band were banned from performing in America from 1965 to 1969 because their concerts got too rowdy. Many, including the Kinks themselves, believe it actually stemmed from a dispute they were having with the American Federation of Musicians at the time.
  • "Lola", thanks to its Twist Ending, was also banned from airplay on some radio stations (or clumsily censored by fading before The Reveal in the final verse). Notably, The BBC banned it for a totally different reason - "Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca-Cola" counted as Product Placement, so Ray Davies had to overdub it with generic "cherry cola" instead.
• Breakthrough Hit: "You Really Got Me". Prior to this, they had two unsuccessful singles.
• Career Resurrection: The band's in-fighting led to a five-year ban from American stages, and, isolated from much of American culture, they subsequently channeled their energies to writing concept albums with very British themes. They started a comeback in 1970 with hits like "Lola" , "Apeman" and "Celluloid Heroes", but a series of very English, music-hall and pantomime-influenced rock opera/stage musicals such as the two-act Preservation series and A Soap Opera alienated audiences and were slow sellers. They bounced back after signing with Arista Records, on the condition that the Kinks would produce no concept albums or rock musicals. The late-1970s albums Sleepwalker, Misfits and Low Budget combined their hard-rock roots with New Wave Music and Arena Rock elements, catchy songs and polished productions, and became critically acclaimed and strong sellers, and they continued their success in The '80s with hits like "Destroyer" and "Come Dancing". Interestingly enough, a live version of "Lola" from 1980 became one of their biggest hits of the time.
• Colbert Bump: They became really popular in the 2000s onwards thanks to their soundtracks appearing in prominent movies and TV Shows, notably The Sopranos ("Living on a Thin Line"), the French film Les Amants reguliers ("This Time Tomorrow") and quite a few Wes Anderson films like Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited ("Nothing in the World Can Stop Me Worrying 'Bout That Girl", "Powerman", "Strangers", "This Time Tomorrow"), as well as Juno ("A Well Respected Man"), Supernatural (also "A Well Respected Man"), Hot Fuzz ("The Village Green Preservation Society" and "Village Green"), Mad Men ("You Really Got Me") and (of all things) Avengers: Endgame ("Supersonic Rocket Ship").
• Creative Differences: The conflicts between the Davies brothers are legendary. Original bassist Pete Quaife left the band in 1969 because he got sick of all their fighting.
• Creator Couple: Ray Davies's first wife Rasa Davies contributed backing vocals to several songs, including their widely-acclaimed "Waterloo Sunset", and generally served as a peacemaker during conflicts between Ray and the rest of the band.
• Denied Parody: Ray Davies denied that the "Terry" and "Julie" in "Waterloo Sunset" are Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, saying in 2008, "It was a fantasy about my sister going off with her boyfriend to a new world and they were going to emigrate and go to another country". He did have a nephew called Terry.
  • Ray Davies initially denied Weird Al Yankovic's request to parody "Lola" as "Yoda", claiming he was umcomfortable with the idea of the song being parodied. A couple of years went by, and he relented, figuring that the parody was funny and not disrespectful.
• Development Hell: Despite the band announcing a reunion in 2018, no new music was released and no live shows were performed. In 2023, Mick Avory confirmed that the reunion never got much beyond the discussion stage, and that long-standing differences between the brothers (in addition to personality conflicts, Ray wanted a narrative-focused theatrical show, Dave didn't) meant that it's extremely unlikely that any kind of reunion will actually occur in the future.
• Genre Popularizer: "You Really Got Me" is widely considered to have been the blueprint for kicking off everything from Garage Rock to Metal to Punk Rock. This was partly attributable to an early form of guitar distortion, which came about after Dave Davies took a razor blade and knitting needle to the amplifier's speaker cone.
• Hostility on the Set:
  • There were some tense periods when Ray and Dave Davies were squabbling. Sometimes, Dave would play badly on purpose to antagonize his I Am the Band brother.
  • During the '77/'78 winter tour, the band would play "Father Christmas" as the first encore, even though it had failed to chart, with Ray coming on in a full Santa outfit. One night, Dave decided to mess with him by starting "You Really Got Me" instead, forcing Ray to sing their biggest hit dressed as Santa. He was not pleased.
  Dave Davies: This was all my Christmases come at once. Afterwards he tore off his costume and chucked it at me. The vision of Santa charging around the room and screaming "You're a fucking cunt!"
  • Dave and Mick Avory were often at odds. In the most notorious (and widely mis-reported) incident, at the Capitol Theatre, Cardiff, South Wales, in 1965, Avory hit Davies with his drum pedal (not the cymbal stand, which, according to later interviews with Avory "would have decapitated him"), in reprisal for Davies kicking over his drum kit as revenge for a drunken fight the previous night in a Taunton hotel, apparently won by Mick. He then fled into hiding for days to avoid arrest for grievous bodily harm. On other occasions, fuming, he would hurl his drumsticks at Dave. According to Ray, their problems began during the time Mick and Dave shared a flat in London for a short period in early 1965. This resulted in Mick leaving the band. They eventually buried the hatchet.
  • Even the calm and thoughtful Peter Quaife got in on the act. Mick Avory said "Somehow, I played atrociously at a 1967 concert - not because I had the hump with anyone, just that it was a bad night at the office. I was bending over to pack away some of my kit, and Pete kicked me in the arse! I didn't retaliate - well, I swore a bit - because, frankly, I deserved a kick in the arse for my performance that night". Beware the Quiet Ones indeed!
• Missing Episode:
  • The band recorded an album in 1968 called Four More Respected Gentlemen, intended as a companion piece to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. The project was scrapped when Village Green tanked commercially and the band temporarily broke up. Reprise released several of the tracks on 1973's The Great Lost Kinks Album, but that album lived up to its title, ceasing printing when Davies - no longer with the label - sued Reprise. It's only with the 3-CD deluxe edition of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society that many of the tracks have seen wide release.
  • Based on the success of "Death of a Clown", Reprise wanted to produce a Dave Davies solo album, which was considered completed in 1969: Subsequent solo singles weren't as successful, and both the label and Davies himself lost interest in releasing it, so it remained in the vaults. Some of the unreleased songs were included as bonus tracks to reissues of Kinks albums, and different configurations of the album were released in 1987^note The Album That Never Was, compiling all the solo singles and b-sides of this period and 2011.^note Lost Treasures, more closely based on the tapes Davies submitted to the label Dave Davies wouldn't make a proper solo album until 1980.
• Older Than They Think: The moniker of the 'Big Four of the British Invasion' wasn't created when the band was re-discovered, but at the time they broke through into the US. It's just that their five-year ban led to a drop in popularity and people forgot about the name until they brought it back.
• The Pete Best: Believe it or not, Rod Stewart, who was the lead singer of a very early incarnation of the band (The Ray Davies Quartet) for a few gigs in 1961-62.
• Reality Subtext:
  • "Two Sisters" is about a young woman who is married with children - she starts off being jealous of the more glamorous life led by her single, freewheeling sister, then realizes she's better off because her children are important to her. Ray actually meant the song to be a gender flipped portrayal of the relationship at the time to his band-mate and younger brother Dave: He was married with children, while Dave was single and more free to live the rock star lifestyle.
  • Possibly unintentional, but "Waterloo Sunset" was released barely two months before the end of steam-hauled trains out of London Waterloo (and in the south in general). The year 1967 is, in fact, often referred to as "steam's Waterloo Sunset", and in July 2017, an excursion from Waterloo to mark 50 years since the end of steam in the south ran under the name "The Waterloo Sunset".
• What Could Have Been: A few examples:
  • They were asked to play at the Monterey Pop Festival, but they couldn't get a work visa to enter the US because of a dispute with the American Federation of Musicians.
  • They were also scheduled to be the headline act at the first-ever Glastonbury Festival ^note  or, as it was originally called, the "Pop, Blues & Folk Festival" in 1970, but pulled out at the last minute, apparently after Ray heard a radio interview with organiser Michael Eavis which downplayed the significance of the event; they were replaced by T. Rex although there were posters printed listing them as the headliners. Ray later played Glastonbury as a solo artist in 1997 and 2010.
  • Arthur was conceived as the soundtrack to a TV play which was written by Ray and the playwright/novelist Julian Mitchell. Leslie Woodhead, who'd filmed The Beatles when they were still playing at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, was brought in to direct. Alas, they never got around to shooting. As Ray later recalled:
    "It was originally meant to be a sort of rock opera, and we got as far as casting (excellent director and actors) and finding locations and were about to go when the producer went to a production meeting without a proper budget, tried to flannel his way through it, was immediately sussed and the production pulled. I have never been able to forgive the man."
• Write What You Know: Ray and Dave Davies regularly fought each other on-stage in The '60s. Therefore the American Musicians' Union banned the Kinks from touring in the U.S. from 1965–69. This led to Ray and Dave being isolated from and uninvolved with American politics and counterculture. They reverted to writing about British concerns, British culture and Britain, from a British perspective, language and humour separated from their Americanized peers. This may have hurt their sales in America, but it did give them an identity as Britpop innovators.

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