Waterloo Sunset ~ The Kinks ~ Live 1973

Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that June 21 is the anniversary of the birth of English musician, singer, and songwriter Ray Davies who has a wonder wit. His songwriting is simply amazing IMHO.

Waterloo Sunset is a masterpiece

Waterloo Sunset written by Ray Daivies
Lyrics
Dirty old river, must you keep rolling
Flowing into the night?
People so busy, make me feel dizzy
Taxi light shines so bright

And I don't need no friends
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world
From my window
But chilly, chilly is the evening time
Waterloo sunset's fine

Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station
Every Friday night
I am so lazy, don't want to wander
I stay at home at night

But I don't feel afraid
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world
From my window
Chilly, chilly is the evening time
Waterloo sunset's fine

Millions of people swarming like flies 'round
Waterloo underground
But Terry and Julie cross over the river
Where they feel safe and sound

And they don't need no friends
As long as they gaze on Waterloo sunset
They are in paradise

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling
Flowing into the night?
People so busy, make me feel dizzy
Taxi light shines so bright

But Terry and Julie cross over the river
Where they feel safe and sound
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise
Waterloo sunset's fine"


Ray Davies "Imaginary Man"
One of "the greatest song writers in Rock 'N' Roll history, Mr Raymond Douglas Davies. Many thanks to director and KinKs fan, Julien Temple who beautifully captures Ray Davies' wistfulness in his excellent documentary on the former-KinK, Ray Davies. Davies is allowed to gently meander around his past life, talking about his childhood, his family of 7 sisters and 1 brother, his early days with The KinKs, the development of his writing skill (the quality and consistency of which now makes him seem at times better than, if not on par with Lennon & McCartney, Jagger & Richard), and onto his life of fame, of parenthood, of growing-up, all of which seemed to happen so fast..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e1_6ILM2gY

Images:
1. Ray Davies has long been a grand elder statesman of British popular music, an iconoclast at a time of immense social and cultural change, and famed for creating songs such as Waterloo Sunset and Days
2. Ray as a schoolboy. He grew up in the working-class north London suburb of Muswell Hill
3. brothers Ray Davies and Dave Davies dressed as schoolboys in 1976
4. On The Kinks - ‘I don’t think we were taken very seriously from the start,’ says Ray, whose first hit for the band was their powerful and original third single, You Really Got Me (pictured in 1968)

Biographies:
1. imdb.com/name/nm0203919/bio
2.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2960390/Ray-Davies-punch-ups-pills-Kinks-nearly-killed-him.html]

1. Background from {[https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0203919/bio]}
"Ray Davies Biography
Overview
Born June 21, 1944 in London, England, UK
Birth Name Raymond Douglas Davies
Nickname The Godfather of Britpop
Height 5' 11¾" (1.82 m)
Mini Bio (1)
Ray Davies was born on June 21, 1944 in Fortis Green, which is located in Muswell Hill, north of London, England. He was the seventh of eighth children, and with his younger brother Dave, he was one of the only two boys in his family. In 1963, he joined Dave's band The Ravens on rhythm guitar and vocals. He later rose to the position of chief songwriter and singer. Between 1964 and 1965, The Kinks released other hits such as "All Day and All of the Night", "Til the End of the Day", "Tired of Waiting for You", and others. Unfortunately, like most brothers, Ray and Dave Davies often were prone to sibling rivalry, and could act violent towards each other and the rest of the band. This behavior may have contributed to the American Musicians Union issuing a four-year touring ban against them. Since this would prevent them from enjoying, the prosperity of the British Invasion that their contemporaries enjoyed, Ray decided to seek a new direction in songwriting.

His songs would reflect on his childhood and the days of the British Empire, when the class system was going strong, and poverty was great. This style was evident on The Kinks' next four albums, "Face to Face" (1966), "Something Else by The Kinks" (1967), "The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society" (1968), and "Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)" (1969). In 1970, they released perhaps their most famous LP, "Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One". This record spawned their trademark "Lola", along with other great songs such as "Apeman", "Get Back in Line", "Powerman", and others. "Muswell Hillbillies" followed the next year, which was perhaps their last commercially successful album. From the 1970s in the early 1990s, the Kinks' career proved to be a roller coaster of commercial success, and failure. Perhaps part of the reason for this was the bitter rivalry between Dave and Ray Davies which could never be fully resolved.

The band went through a revolving door of backing musicians, and in the mid-1990s, the Kinks separated. Today, Ray Davies performs solo. He has four solo albums to date and is also involved in theater and television. In early 2004, he gallantly chased after a thief who stole his girlfriend's purse, and was shot in the leg. A week before that, he was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to music. He has since recovered and continues to perform. His influence has been significant. He has gained a considerable following in his own native Britain, and Pete Townshend from The Who has credited him as his favorite songwriter. In 2017, he was awarded Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to the Arts.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Eli Rosen
Spouse (3)
Patricia Crosbie (1985 - 1998) (divorced) (1 child)
Yvonne Gunner (1 November 1974 - 1981) (divorced)
Rasa Dicpetris (12 November 1964 - 1973) (divorced) (2 children)

Trade Mark (5)
1. His introspective songwriting method.
2. Songs often deal with the changing values of his native England and the decline of the British Empire.
3. Often wrote songs about the music business.
4. Sizeable gap in between his front teeth.
5. Distinctive English accent

Trivia (31)
1. Rock musician (The Kinks).
2. Older brother of Dave Davies.
3. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (as a member of The Kinks) (1990).
4. Fathered a child, Natalie Rae Hynde, with Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders while still married to his second wife.
5. His song "Apeman" was covered by former Marillion singer Fish on his album "Songs From the Mirror" (1993).
6. Sadly, he has barely been on speaking terms with his brother and musical collaborator Dave since they recorded their last album as The Kinks in the early 1990s.
7. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2003 Queen's New Year's Eve Honours List for his services to music.
8. In 2003, when a mugger stole his girlfriend's purse, he valiantly chased the man but was then shot in the leg by the thief.
9. Has another daughter with dancer, Patricia Crosby: Eva Davies.
10. Uncle of writer/producer, Lawrence Kane, who helped Ray recover from his gunshot wound in New Orleans.
11. Davies was in many ways unique among the frontmen in British rock bands from the 1960s. He never got into drugs or affiliated himself with "hippie" culture (nor did his band), although The Kinks did present themselves as hard-drinking. Davies was also never a Lothario in the ranks with his contemporaries, and he married at a very young age. By all accounts a quiet, unapproachable type off stage, Davies had a series of nervous breakdowns as a young man, which led to him being hospitalized twice.
12. Director Wes Anderson originally intended to have the whole of Rushmore (1998) set to songs by The Kinks. Anderson changed his mind when he wanted to use a series of songs by other bands from the "British Invasion", although he kept the Davies/Kinks song, "Nothin' In This World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl".
13. His British rock contemporary Pete Townshend has said that Ray Davies is probably his favorite songwriter of all time.
14. The Kinks' single, "See My Friends", was the first British songs (and possibly Western) to integrate a Indian, sitar-like sound. This song and, shortly thereafter, the similarly sitar-based "Fancy" preceded the first Beatles song with an Indian feel, "Norwegian Wood", by a year.
15. One of the most admired British songwriters, his songs have been covered by hundreds of artists. Well known versions of his songs include The Jam's "David Watts", The Pretenders' "Stop Your Sobbing", The Stranglers' "All Day and All of the Night", David Bowie's "Where Have All the Good Times Gone" and Van Halen's "You Really Got Me".
16. When The Kinks opened a show on the same bill as The Beatles, The Beatles (in particularly John Lennon) behaved rudely and dismissively towards them. However, when The Kinks released their more introspective album "Face to Face", Lennon was said to have listened to it obsessively.
17. The original name of The Kinks was The Ravens.
18. The Kinks were voted the 64th Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Artists of all time by Rolling Stone.
19. With four to five band members at one time, there have been 11 members of The Kinks, with only Ray and his brother Dave Davies having belonged since the founding of the group. They have gone through two drummers (Mick Avory and Bob Henrit), three keyboardists (John Gosling, Gordon Edwards and Ian Gibbins), and four bass-guitarists (Peter Quaife, John Dalton, Andy Pyle and Jim Rodford).
20. In an early stage of The Kinks, before Davies was willing to be the lead singer, they recruited Rod Stewart (who grew up in the same area as the Davies brothers, Muswell Hill) as a singer. After a couple of weeks of trying to be a band, Stewart and the future Kinks found that they did not get along that well, with their musical tastes being too different, and parted ways.
21. "Very Gothic, creepy and silent. Uptight and fearful of everyone." - Marianne Faithfull's description of Davies and The Kinks.
22. Winner of the 2006 Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music.
23. His song "Waterloo Sunset" won the 2005 Q Classic Song Award.
24. The Kinks were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame for their outstanding contribution to British music and integral part of British music culture (November 16, 2005).
25. Is a huge fan of and considers himself in the tradition of William Blake.
26. Despite its heavy guitar sound, he actually wrote "You Really Got Me" on his parent's piano.
27. In 1973, Davies attempted suicide by overdose following the breakup of his first marriage. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
28. He was born in Muswell Hill, London, England. He and his brother Dave Davies have six older sisters. They resided on Denmark Terrace in Fortis Green, London, England.
29. He was awarded the Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire in the 2017 Queen's New Years Honours List for his services to the Arts. He is a musician in London, England.
30. Has never been comfortable with fanfare in general and resented being approached for autographs when the Kinks were having initial success on the charts.
31. Was living like a hermit in some abandoned building during the 1990s.

Personal Quotes (12)
1. If I had to my life to do over, I would change every single thing I have done.
2. We had a singing family. If we had been in Appalachia, we would have been a Country and Western family. We had all that inbreeding, too - the Second World War was quite a time.
3. When in doubt, trust your paranoia.
4. The Kaiser Chiefs are funny, "Employment" was good, though I'm not quite sure whether they're supposed to be The Pretty Things or The Rolling Stones.
5. Keep you nose clean and your chin up, even if it requires surgery.
6. Obviously, the person who shot me, I think he was a career criminal, he knew what he was doing it was premeditated, he knew what he was doing. It made me really sort of think about the issue of gun control. I'm not a violent person. I'm an athletic person, I'm a competitive person. That kind of violence is abhorrent to me. I get passionate, I get angry but I wouldn't think of doing that to anybody. I went through a phase in the hospital, I nearly died at one point because of complications with my heart. But I actually felt sorry for him to have actually reached that point. He wasn't a desperate guy but he kind of looked scared. We had eyeball contact. It made me think, not so much about gun control but what actually drives humans to actually do that, to get in that spectrum. It's a bigger, bigger bigger spectrum than this. It leads to warfare, why people fight, why people have wars, all these horrors going on in the world, it just opened up all these questions that are still unanswered and I still haven't come to terms with it yet. I was very lucky to escape.
7. Every song has its own voodoo attached to it.
8. I think the inspiration for a lot of those early songs, I didn't realize it so much until I finished the book and read the proofs back, was a big family influence on me. Obviously, when you are starting out you don't really see that, it's only when you look back and you appraise things, I guess you see where the real inspiration came form.
9. [on British rock music in the mid-1960s] I think because it was the first time that music had been done on such a scale with lots of bands coming from, basically working class origins and making music and not being particularly pretty. You know the pretty boy image really wasn't the thing. The Hollies were great to us, they helped me a lot and very supportive and in a way I suppose The Beatles were as well.
10. Well, it's good. I think the similarity is that I think they're writing songs. Music goes in phases and in England it goes around fairly quickly. The fashions come in and out and I think what they are doing is writing songs about things they know about, which is where they come from and the local stories. I think that's where the similarities with the Kinks is because I think our early records were like that. For a long time, particularly in the 1980s, I think English bands were trying to sound like, writing about American experiences or drawing on things out of their own experience and knowledge and that tends to make the music sound different. I think lyrically Blur and Oasis, they're are very similar in that respect.
11. [on writing his unconventional biography] I didn't want to write an ordinary autobiography because it just didn't interest me, recounting things that I remember that happened. I thought if I had this device of using a young journalist, who basically is me anyway, meeting myself when I'm seventy years old, that would be a nice way to get the young and the old approach. So the older guy is looking back and the young kid really is experiencing everything for the first time and rock music does that. Every time you go out and play stuff, every show has got to feel as though it's the first time you're doing it. So that made it entertaining for me to write and also let me stand back and let me observe myself and look at myself more objectively, I think.
12. I think Dave [brother Dave Davies], as a guitarist, he doesn't get the credit he deserves. He's an erratic player but he gets inspired and he plays some great things. Dave invented that sound and it was really great, that's why the part of the book I like and the part I do on stage is recounting when we did that song, when we recorded that because it was a pivotal moment to our band."


2. Background from {[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2960390/Ray-Davies-punch-ups-pills-Kinks-nearly-killed-him.html]}
'I was a zombie. I was completely out of my mind': Ray Davies on punch-ups, pills and how The Kinks nearly killed him
By JOHNNY ROGAN
PUBLISHED: 17:01 EDT, 21 February 2015 | UPDATED: 17:01 EDT, 21 February 2015

Punch-ups with his brother. Hitting his wife with a phone. Running six miles across London to thump his agent. And the day he tried to kill himself on stage. With unprecedented access to his family, friends and rivals, Johnny Rogan delves deep into the dark psyche of Ray Davies, the very controlling king of The Kinks
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The events of Sunday 15 July, 1973, are enshrined in the Ray Davies story.
This was the day of destiny – the end of The Kinks, the end of his career, and possibly the end of his life.
It was a day of cemetery weather, befitting Ray’s mood. The Great Western Express Festival at London’s White City offered an eclectic line-up, though The Kinks, national favourites just a few years before, were no longer hip enough to secure top billing.
Ray’s immediate concern was that, less than three weeks before, his wife Rasa had left him, taking their two daughters.
‘The White City gig was terrible,’ recalls Ray’s guitarist brother, Dave. ‘I didn’t want to play anyway and Ray was acting really oddly. I didn’t know he’d been popping lots of pills all day long.’
Onstage, Davies looked drained and haggard. Four songs in, he was heard to swear into the microphone and announce, ‘I’m sick up to here with it.’
A few songs later, Ray gently kissed his brother Dave on the cheek and informed the crowd: ‘I just want to say goodbye and thank you for all you’ve done.’
‘Ray Quits Kinks’ were the words blazoned across newsstands the next day. But there was more than that.
A few hours after the show, Ray’s American girlfriend noticed he was acting oddly. He then hesitantly produced an empty bottle of pills.
Road manager Ken Jones rushed Davies to London’s Whittington Hospital, where the singer declared: ‘I’m Ray Davies… and I’m dying.’
A nurse responded by asking for an autograph. After collapsing in the hospital hallway, he was rushed to a nearby room to have his stomach pumped.
Years later, he offered an endearingly absurd explanation.
‘The doctor gave me pills and said, “Take one of these when you feel a bit down.”
'I was doing what I thought was my last show and I felt down every ten seconds, so I just kept taking them.’
On another occasion, Davies admitted it had been a suicide attempt – the gesture of a brilliant but temperamental man who had struggled for a decade with success, money and family life, even as he was giving the Sixties some of its most legendary songs.
As it transpired, that gig wasn’t the end of The Kinks either. Rasa never returned to Ray, but he came back to the band.
A holiday in Denmark with his brother, with whom he took to playing Chuck Berry tunes like the old days, restored his spirits.
Ray would even claim the White City watershed gave The Kinks a new life. They would continue in various guises until 1996. Even today, the brothers don’t discount a reunion.
Davies has long been a grand elder statesman of British popular music, an iconoclast at a time of immense social and cultural change, and famed for creating songs such as Waterloo Sunset, You Really Got Me, Sunny Afternoon and Days. He mined a strain of Englishness like no other songwriter of his generation.
But his has been a career fraught with drama, from his famously fiery relationship with his brother, to his three marriages, to his turbulent relationship in the early Eighties with Chrissie Hynde.
A contradictory figure, Davies has, at times, perplexed and infuriated ex-band members, managers, business associates and family members.
Even as a group, The Kinks – neurotic, complicated Ray, wild guitarist Dave and the long-suffering rhythm section of Pete Quaife and Mick Avory – were perhaps the most dysfunctional band to emerge from the Sixties.
‘Ray and Dave were very volatile,’ Quaife, who died in 2010, once said.
‘They could start a fight over absolutely nothing.’
Dave Davies remembers a formative incident from the brothers’ childhood in the working-class north London suburb of Muswell Hill, when he and Ray, three years his senior, decided to have a mock fight with a pair of boxing gloves left around by one of their uncles.
Swinging wildly, Dave hit Ray, knocking him off balance. As Ray stumbled to the floor he grazed his head against the family piano and lay still, seemingly unconscious.
Hovering close to his face, Dave whispered, ‘Are you OK?’ Ray bolted upright and punched his brother hard in the face.
‘It’s symbolic of our whole relationship, really,’ Dave maintains. ‘I felt the pleasure that I’d knocked him over, then concern that I’d hurt him. But all he really wanted was to get back at me.’
For Dave, the confrontation was a harbinger of worse to come.
‘I was quite a happy kid and Ray was a real miserable one.
'He was probably happy for three years until I was born and realised there was another boy in the family. “What’s that little b****** doing here?’’’
Ray, Dave and their six elder sisters were raised in a chaotic, overcrowded three-bedroom terrace, where their father Fred’s Saturday nights in the pub would be followed by raucous sing-alongs around the family piano.
Ray was delighted by these family extravaganzas, but as he grew older he became a gloomy, introverted child. And as early as 1957, family tragedy threatened to unravel his already fragile psyche.
On June 20, the day before Ray’s 13th birthday, the boy was thrilled to receive the perfect present from his 30-year-old sister Rene – a Spanish guitar.
Rene had a serious heart condition, but nothing could quell her love of dance halls, and the prospect of an evening at the Lyceum Ballroom off the Strand proved irresistible.
That evening, Ray watched her from the window as she sashayed down the road.
‘We’d played a few songs together. Then she got a bus down to the West End.’
He would never see her again. At the Lyceum, Rene suffered heart failure. She was rushed to Charing Cross Hospital but nothing could be done to save her.
‘She died in the arms of a stranger on the dance floor,’ Ray remembered.
Rene’s death shocked Ray into silence. He returned to school, seemingly broken by the tragedy.
‘Clearly, I couldn’t cope,’ he acknowledges. How long the great silence lasted is a matter of conjecture. Ray has variously described it as months, an entire year, or even longer.
Gradually, Ray emerged from his shell. At school his athletic abilities on the sports field ensured he was neither bullied nor ostracised.
And as the Sixties dawned, a mutual interest in music unexpectedly brought the two Davies boys together, first as a duo and then in a band, the Ray Davies Quartet, whose singer was briefly Rod Stewart, a schoolmate whose father owned a newspaper shop on Archway Road.
Reportedly, Rod played only once with the Quartet, though Ray has no recollection.
‘I don’t think those two liked each other, or maybe that was just Ray,’ Quaife recalled.
‘He was very competitive, even then. I could see Ray thinking, “This guy’s gonna take over if he stays” and I don’t think he liked that at all.’
From their early days in London’s blues and R&B scene, The Kinks, as the Davies brothers’ band gradually became, were misfits.
‘I don’t think we were taken very seriously from the start,’ says Ray, whose first hit for the band was their powerful and original third single, You Really Got Me.
‘I remember Mick Jagger’s jaw dropping the first time he saw us. He couldn’t believe that four such uncool people could have a bigger hit than he did.’
While the momentum was building, The Kinks opened for The Beatles in Bournemouth, where a sarcastic John Lennon suggested The Kinks were little more than copycats.
‘Can I borrow your song list, lads?’ he quipped. ‘We’ve lost ours.’
As Ray recalls: ‘I feel I could have been a friend of John, but we were destined not to talk.
'We did not get on. He was very cynical. John made a few cruel remarks to me.’
While Ray responded to fame by marrying young and settled down with his pregnant 18-year-old wife in a rented attic flat in Muswell Hill, his 17-year-old brother lost himself in a social whirl of clubbing, shopping expeditions, bleary-eyed revelries and one-night stands, seemingly fuelled by an endless supply of purple hearts washed down by Scotch and Coke.
At Ray and Rasa’s 1964 wedding, Dave disgraced himself, announcing that he was ‘too p****d’ to make his best man’s speech, then being discovered in an upstairs bedroom by his sister Peggy having sex with the leading bridesmaid.
Initially, the aggressive interaction between the two brothers gave The Kinks part of their drive. Quaife remembered the rivalry and animosity onstage as each brother would goad the other.
‘With Ray and Dave there was that feeling that they weren’t really mates. There was tension there but it was because they were so different.’
The two subsidiary Kinks valiantly attempted to avoid the psychological conflict between the brothers and kept their own counsel.
But the good-natured Avory in particular was frequently pushed to the precipice of fury by the heartless baiting of the brothers.
One night in Taunton, on their first tour as headliners in May 1965, a drunken Dave threw a suitcase at Avory, who finally snapped, pounding his large fists into Dave’s head and body. Dave came off worst, with two black eyes.
The following night, in Cardiff, the brothers and the rhythm section arrived in separate cars and made their entrances independently from different sides of the theatre.
One song in, Dave, wearing sunglasses to disguise his black eyes, wandered over to Avory and demolished the drum kit with a kick. Avory lashed out in retaliation.
‘Mick picked up his hi-hat cymbal, came over and, whack!’ says road manager Sam Curtis.
‘Fortunately, Dave stepped out of the way slightly, because if he had not moved that thing would have gone through his head down to his neck. Those cymbals are sharp.’
The instrument grazed his head, knocking him to the floor.
As the drummer ran off stage and out of the theatre, Ray was heard to shriek: ‘My brother! My brother! He’s killed my little brother!’
The band scattered, the younger Davies declined to press charges, and manager Larry Page tricked them all back into one room for a meeting in London a few days later.
‘As you can imagine, when they all sat down, it was dynamite,’ says Page.
‘I didn’t mess around. I just said, “OK, there’s an American tour starting soon” and I didn’t give them time to ask anything. At the end of it, I just said, “Any questions?” And Mick Avory said he needed new cymbals.’
At around this time, Ray spent £9,000 on a large property on Fortis Green. The fancy house was a rare extravagance, out of keeping with his legendarily frugal everyday spending.
Indeed, Kinks co-manager Robert Wace characterises Ray as ‘the tightest guy with money I’d ever met’.
Back in London after the American tour, Davies may not have made many friends among his fellow Sixties pop stars, but, increasingly, he had their respect.
Indian-influenced 1965 single See My Friends was only a fleeting Top 20 success, but Pete Townshend testified to its influence on The Who, while Dave Davies recalls a similar accolade from Mick Jagger.
Scenester Barry Fantoni tells of ‘being in Marianne Faithfull’s flat and Paul McCartney was eating a Dover sole that she’d cooked.
'They were looking at this little record player and it had Ray’s See My Friends on it and they just played it over and over.’
Ray seldom listened to his bandmates’ musical suggestions, yet he trusted his young wife’s commercial instincts.
Driven and neurotic, Ray has conceded that he married too young and wasn’t cut out for marriage, but in the studio Rasa exerted a welcome influence.
She regularly attended sessions to add beautiful high harmonies to some of their most enduring songs.
While writing on the piano at home, it was always a good sign when he could hear her humming one of his new tunes.
On Sunny Afternoon, Rasa sang the high harmony, and provided the three-word ‘in the summertime’ refrain that closed the song.
‘That was the only one where I wrote some words,’ Rasa admits.
‘To this day, my gripe is that he didn’t ever give me a credit.’
Even Ray’s comic songs could easily have troubled beginnings.
Dedicated Follower Of Fashion, a satirical thrust at Carnaby Street couture, was born of a violent incident during a party at Ray’s house, after a fashion designer made the mistake of suggesting that Davies was wearing flared trousers.
‘I had a slight flare, not amazingly so,’ Ray protests.
Somehow, this innocuous exchange ended in bloodshed.
‘We had a punch-up and his girlfriend beat me up as well with her handbag – or was it his handbag? Anyway, I threw them out of my semi. And I got angry and started writing this song.’
Dedicated Follower Of Fashion became an instant national anthem in 1966, although its author felt haunted by the song, and was disconcerted when passers-by walked up to him in the street and shouted the line, ‘Oh yes he is!’ In fact, while The Kinks were close to the peak of their fame and popularity, problems at work and at home were reaching a crisis point.
‘He was being very difficult,’ says Rasa. ‘I think he was ill. He was quite threatening and I said to him that I was going to call the police or I was going to leave him.’
Ray was never physically abusive towards Rasa, either before or since, but in March 1966, stricken by flu and nervous and physical exhaustion, and haunted by creative, recording, personal and business pressures, he snapped.
‘I said something like: “You need to see a psychiatrist, you’ll have to go somewhere and get sorted. I’ve had enough, I can’t stand it,”’ says Rasa.
'And then: Boom! We had a big black phone. He picked it up and hit me in the face, so I had a black eye. Then I had to call our doctor.’
Ray’s breakdown wasn’t over yet. His family staged an intervention, after which he took to his bed.
When a performance of The Kinks’ current hit was aired on Top Of The Pops, he tried to put the television in the gas oven.
Then, on St Patrick’s Day, he unexpectedly rose from his bed in a state of agitation.
‘I was a zombie,’ says Davies. ‘I’d been on the go all the time from when we first made it till then, and I was completely out of my mind.’
From his home in Fortis Green, he ran six miles to Tin Pan Alley in central London, where he confronted and attempted to punch his publicist Brian Sommerville.
His next encounter, after he was chased from the premises, was with his music publisher, in whose office he caused further chaos.
‘I don’t know what happened to me,’ says Ray.
‘I’d run into the West End with my money stuffed in my socks; I’d tried to punch my press agent; I was chased down Denmark Street by the police, hustled into a taxi by a psychiatrist and driven off somewhere.’
Page reacted to Ray’s appearance that day with a jaundiced shrug.
‘There was nothing unusual about that. It was like having afternoon tea with Ray.
'When Page informed Curtis of Ray’s ‘breakdown’, he offered the withering response: ‘How would anyone know the difference?’
Davies’ physician prescribed plenty of rest, supplemented by a salad diet and the suggestion, never taken up, that he should join a golf club.
A musical diet of Frank Sinatra, Bach, Bob Dylan and classical guitar also helped restore his momentum.
‘It sort of cleaned my mind out and started fresh ideas.’
Ironically, it led into possibly his greatest songwriting period. Waterloo Sunset, one of the most evocative songs in the Davies canon, climbed to number two in the charts in summer 1967.
But in America, the single did not even reach the Billboard Hot 100, signalling the dawn of a period in which Davies would release some of his greatest work, to negligible acclaim.
After the near-collapse of the band in 1973, The Kinks marched on, diversifying into theatrical projects before finding U.S. success in the Eighties as a hard rock act and splitting 19 years ago, seemingly for good.
Davies married twice more after Rasa.
His 1974 marriage to Yvonne Gunner, a 22-year-old domestic science teacher, lasted until he began an affair in 1981 with The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, who gave him a third daughter.
A third marriage, to ballerina Patricia Crosbie, a scion of one of Ireland’s most famous families, produced yet another daughter, and ended in around 2000.
Davies remains active as a solo artist. He collaborated with Bruce Springsteen, Metallica and other famous acolytes on an album of Kinks songs in 2010, and continues to tease journalists about the likelihood or otherwise of a Kinks reunion.
Their reputation as a great English band was cemented by their influence on Britpop in the Nineties, and Ray, for all his eccentricities, has emerged as a rock icon and national treasure whose life is overshadowed by the impact of his greatest songs.
‘My work is better than I am,’ he admits. ‘I just don’t live up to it. I’d love to be as good as Waterloo Sunset.’

‘Ray Davies: A Complicated Life’ is published by Bodley Head on March 5 at £25.
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The Kink and the great Pretender
The Pretenders helped to introduce The Kinks to the punk generation in 1979 with their cover of Stop Your Sobbing.
A devotee of The Kinks since her teens, lead singer Chrissie Hynde was keen to meet Ray, and she finally tracked down her quarry in 1980 at a New York nightclub.
‘She couldn’t take the sudden fame that had come to her,’ says Ray, ‘and I think she saw me as someone who had done all that rock ’n’ roll stuff and understood it.
'It was a good friendship for a few weeks, but that should have been it.’
Hynde accompanied Davies on a trip to France that summer, and when Ray’s second wife Yvonne filed for divorce, she named the Pretenders singer as co-respondent.
The legal proceedings would culminate in the autumn when the ‘secret’ romance became a tabloid sensation.
The press were soon demanding quotes, and Hynde obliged.
‘Obviously, I’m besotted with him,’ she cooed.
On January 22, 1983, Chrissie presented Ray with a daughter, Natalie Rae, but a wedding planned for the previous year had never happened.
There had been an argument at Guildford register office, a change of heart.
By 1984, to paraphrase Davies, their romance had turned from a fairytale into a Hitchcock horror movie.
Broken furniture and trashed rooms testified to the intensity of their passions.
‘We had nasty fights and if there was alcohol involved, things got broken,’ Hynde later said. ‘Let’s leave it at that.’
Their partnership reached an impasse when Hynde embarked on a tour with The Pretenders in 1984 and, while away, married Simple Minds’s Jim Kerr.
Davies seemed overwhelmed by the news, but his wrath soon dissipated, only to be replaced by a lazy petulance, summed up in the spiteful aside, ‘I’d like to do something to p*** her off, but I never want to see her again. Why bother?’

The night they shot old Davis down
On the evening of Sunday January 4, 2004 Ray and his girlfriend at the time were in New Orleans’ French Quarter, having just enjoyed a meal at a Japanese restaurant.
Rather than hailing a cab, the pair decided to walk home.
But they were tailed by a white Pontiac Grand Am.
A passenger got out and, with deliberate clumsiness, bumped into Ray, then punched and pushed him to the ground.
The assailant then turned on Suzanne, pulled out a gun and fired into the pavement to prove the firearm was loaded. He demanded her bag, which she surrendered.
But earlier that evening, Davies had placed his cash and credit cards in Suzanne’s bag and now the thief was getting away.
Instinctively, Ray gave chase, desperate to retrieve his money.
By now the robber had reached the getaway car, but before speeding away he turned and shot his pursuer in the right leg.
A medical team arrived on the scene and started cutting Davies’ trousers in order to examine the wound.
‘But they’re new trousers!’ he exclaimed, as the medics ignored his complaints.
Davies was taken to the nearby Charity Hospital, where it rapidly became clear that he would not be leaving New Orleans anytime soon.
It later transpired from X-rays that Davies had broken his thighbone – the strongest bone in the human body.
Now he required a titanium rod to be inserted in his leg. His rehabilitation would take months.
‘It’s not like in the westerns where you get up and carry on,’ he said. ‘Bullets really hurt.’

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Another great music share brother David

Hard to imagine Ray Davies' hair like that!