Ray Davies

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Ray Davies
Ray Davies 2006
Ray Davies 2006
Background information
Birth name Raymond Douglas Davies
Born June 21, 1944 (age 62)
Origin England Muswell Hill, London England
Genre(s) Rock, Rock 'n' Roll
Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter
Years active 1964 - present
Associated
acts		 The Kinks
Website http://www.raydavies.net


Raymond Douglas Davies, CBE (born June 21, 1944 in Muswell Hill, London) is an influential English rock musician, best known as lead singer-songwriter for The Kinks - one of the most influential, prolific and long-lived British Invasion bands - which he led with his younger brother, Dave. He has also acted, directed and produced shows for theatre and television.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Davies was born and raised in the North London area of Muswell Hill. He is the seventh of eight children and has six older sisters - Renee, Rosie, Dolly, Joyce, Peggy, and Gwendolyn. He has been married twice, and has four daughters.

The musically inclined Davies was an art student at Hornsey College of Art in London in 1962–1963, when the Kinks developed into a professional performing band. Davies began writing songs at this time. After the Kinks obtained a recording contract in early 1964, Davies emerged as the chief songwriter and de facto leader of the band, especially after the band's breakthrough success of his composition You Really Got Me. Between 1966 and 1976, Davies led the Kinks through a period of musical experimentation, with notable artistic achievements and commercial success. Between 1977 and the group's informal dissolution in 1996, Davies and the Kinks reverted to a more mainstream rock format.

In 1990 Davies was inducted, with the Kinks, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, in 2005, into the UK Music Hall of Fame. He was also awarded a CBE by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004. Davies has intermittently performed solo since the late 1990s.

Davies has described himself as "openly manic-depressive". He has had a tempestuous, love-hate relationship with younger brother and Kinks guitarist Dave Davies that dominated the Kinks' 30-year career as a band. His compositions and talent as a performer are universally hailed within the music industry, but he has maintained a career-long reputation for being fiercely independent and iconoclastic, resulting in a decades-long pattern of conflict and alienation within the industry.

He was quoted in 1967: "If I had to do my life over, I would change every single thing I have done."

In 1983, Davies had a daughter, Natalie Rae, with then-girlfriend Chrissie Hynde (of The Pretenders).

On January 4 2004, Davies was wounded when he was shot in the leg while chasing thieves, who had snatched the purse of his companion as they walked in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana.

[edit] Work

Ray Davies' compositions over his forty-year career have been an astonishing study in contrasts, from the influential proto-heavy metal, powerchord rock and roll of the early Kinks hits in 1964–1966 (most prominently "You Really Got Me" and " All Day and All of the Night"); followed a few years later by more sensitive, compassionate songs ("Waterloo Sunset", "Shangri-La", "Big Sky"); and still later by anthems ("Lola", "Celluloid Heroes"); true musical theatre (the Preservation albums); and commercial rock which combined elements of all of these ("Come Dancing", "Do it Again").

Davies' songwriting has often been acclaimed as more mature, sophisticated, and subtle than that of many of his peers among American and British rock musicians and he has been called the "greatest humanist in rock". While his lyrics were often deceptively simple, focused on time-honoured rock themes such as love, sexual attraction and partying, they often contained elements of satire, examples including "A Well-Respected Man", which ridiculed conservative suburban values, and "Dandy", which mocked the superficiality of the mod subculture. In addition, his later work showed signs of social conscience, examples being "God's Children" and songs on the album Muswell Hillbillies, which denounced commercialism in favour of living simply, and "Dead End Street", which portrayed pockets of poverty in the thriving British economy of the late 1960s.

Davies' songs on the 1968 Kinks album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society embraced nostalgia and preservation as themes long before they became fashionable. Many of his best songs focus on the small-scale, poignant dramas of everyday people ("Waterloo Sunset", "Two Sisters", "Till Death Us Do Part"), commonly told as wistful mini-stories.

His work has an idiosyncratic quality that has appealed greatly to the Kinks' large cult following over the years. Throughout his career, he has also been considered the most singularly "English" of all major songwriters of his generation. He has consistently used an English (sometimes Cockney) accent, as opposed to the faux-American accent of some of his contemporaries.

Aside from the lengthy Kinks discography, Davies has released three solo albums, the 1985 release Return to Waterloo (which accompanied a television film he wrote and directed), and the 1998 release The Storyteller, followed by a full album Other People's Lives in early 2006. Since the Kinks ceased performing and recording in 1996, Davies has toured independently (such as the Storyteller tours), and more recently with a backing band. In 2005, Davies released a four-song EP in the UK called The Tourist, and a five-song EP in the U.S. entitled Thanksgiving Day. In the liner notes, Davies confesses he still doesn't know who he is and where his roots are. In the sing-along "Next Door Neighbours", he seems to be suggesting he's all three characters. The printed lyrics sheet contains some fascinating insights into the songwriting process.

Davies wrote a semi-fictional memoir called X-ray (see Xray (Book)), wittily subtitled 'the unauthorised autobiography', which is an ironic romp through the Swinging Sixties, and settles burning issues ranging from which band produced the first concept album (not The Who), to whether tour companion Gene Pitney had an affair with Marianne Faithfull or not. He also published a book of short stories entitled Waterloo Sunset, and has made two films, Return to Waterloo in 1985 and Weird Nightmare in 1991, a documentary about Charles Mingus.

A new album, as yet untitled is scheduled for release in 2007 according to Davies' website (working title "Songs from the Big Weird").

[edit] Awards

  • On June 22, 2004, Davies won the Mojo Songwriter Award, which recognises "an artist whose career has been defined by their ability to pen classic material on a consistent basis."
  • Davies and the Kinks were the third British band (along with The Who) to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, at which Davies was called "almost indisputably rock's most literate, witty and insightful songwriter." They were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005.
  • On October 3, 2006, Davies was awarded the BMI Icon Award

[edit] External links


The Kinks
Ray Davies – Dave Davies – Bob Henrit – Pete Quaife – Ian Gibbons – Mick Avory – Jim Rodford
John Gosling – John Dalton – Andy Pyle – Gordon Edwards
Discography
Albums: The Kinks (1964) - Kinda Kinks (1965) - The Kink Kontroversy (1966) - Face to Face (1966) - Something Else by the Kinks (1967) - The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968) - Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969) - Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One (1970) - Muswell Hillbillies (1971) - Everybody's in Show-Biz (1972) - Sleepwalker (1977) - Misfits (1978) - Low Budget (1979) - Give the People What They Want (1981) - State of Confusion (1983)
Songs: "You Really Got Me" – "Waterloo Sunset" – "Lola"
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