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The “British Invasion” of the 1960s saw the rise to fame of countless British singers and bands, big and small, some highly successful and influential, some less so, into the limelight at home and across the world. Among the upper echelons of the music of this period were The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Yardbirds, the very late coming Led Zeppelin in a sense, but among these greats one of those that lives on in music history isn’t as widely discussed, The Kinks, for all they did could use some more highlighting when rock and roll music of this period and beyond comes up.
Raymond Douglas Davies (born June 21, 1944) and David Russell Davies (born February 3, 1947), were born and raised in North London, initially in East Finchley, then when both were still very young their family moved to 6 Denmark Terrace, Fortis Green, in the neighboring district of Muswell Hill. The two were the youngest and only sons out of 8 children of Frederick George Davies and Annie Florens Davies (nee. Willmore). Steeped in music from old music hall tunes to jazz and classical from an early age, the brothers took up a shared love of music. They took up playing guitar as kids in the 1950s, with Ray having received his first guitar as a 13th birthday gift from one of his older sisters, Irene, who actually died of a sudden heart attack the day before.
It was during this point that the two caught onto the rise of skiffle music before taking up the influence of rock n’ roll. Whilst attending William Grimshaw Secondary School, they started playing as a group for the first time, joined by Devon-born schoolmate Peter Alexander Quaife (b. December 31, 1943) on bass guitar. A few impromptu performances at the Davies family home and for a school function got a positive result so they started playing local gigs with various acquaintances sitting in on the drums, under various names, and auditioning several singers to no lasting impact, including a young Rod Stewart by one account, who was also a student at Grimshaw.
This base unit of the two Davies and Quaife was playing steadily by 1963 (generally considered the start of the group that would become The Kinks), having taken up more influence from American rock and R&B records. After various performances around London and a few regional tours, they caught the attention of record producer Sheldon Talmy (b.August 11, 1937), a Chicagoan taking a European who took a liking to the band at that point called The Ravens. He struck up a deal with the group’s minimal management and shopped around a self produced demo tape, eventually getting them a contract with Pye Records. It was at this point the group made its last two changes to finalize what it would become. First they recruited their first consistent drummer, fellow North London native Michael Charles “Mick” Avory (b. February 15, 1944), answering an ad for his services in Melody Maker magazine. Second, the band got its final, famous name: The Kinks. Exactly where the name came from has become a muddled point of contention in the following decades, with music historian John Savage and early Kinks manager Robert Wace recalling it being coined by the latter to be a simple but unique and provocative title which the band members initially hated. Ray Davies meanwhile recalls it being the result of another early mentor of theirs, pop singer and music industry man Larry Page, making an offhand comment about their choice of fashion, which he “never liked”, but went with regardless.
With a record deal and a new identity, The Kinks released their first single, a cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”, in February 1964; it didn’t chart. Their second release, a Ray Davies penned original tune called “You Still Want Me” also failed to sell, and right off the bat the band was in a tight spot, not selling records and in trouble of being dropped from the label. However, they had an ace up their sleeve. Ray Davies had written a song called “You Really Got Me”, which at his brother Dave’s suggestion had been reworked from a subdued jazzy blues tune into a rocker. The band recorded in 2 takes at a cheap recording studio, and released it as a single on August 4, 1964. Within days it was already getting attention , and its popularity quickly exploded, sending it to #1 on the UK charts, and into the Top 10 in the US later that year. With its simple, power chord riff using a distorted guitar tone achieved by hook a pair of amplifiers together and breaking the speaker on one, scrappy sound and energy, and gnarly spontaneous guitar solo, the song became a lasting staple of the soon to come harder side of the British Invasion. Although it wasn’t the first record to use power chord riffs or heavily distorted guitar, it was one of the first to combine them into a major hit, echoing styles far in the future like punk rock.
With a sudden smash hit the band followed this up with several more hit singles in both Britain and America, starting with the similarly hard rocking “All Day and All of the Night.” Their quick rise to attention in 1964 going into ‘65 saw them begin touring full scale outside their homeland and release several albums to follow their singles success, although like many British acts of the time these were often released at different times and in forms when compared the UK releases to the US ones. These were composed of the energetic, blue, beat and R&B influenced rock they had set for themselves. However, success was cut off for them, in America at least, when in mid-1965 they were effectively banned from touring stateside when the American Federation of Musicians refused to give the group concert permits following a spat with some of their officials, reportedly for fear of “reckless behavior”, but the reasons behind it all remain somewhat unclear to this day.
With this effectively cutting the band off from most of the US music market, Ray Davies, being the band’s main songwriter, and upset by the whole ordeal and its effects, began taking the band’s material in new directions with lyrics focusing more on specifically English themes and situations. One example of this is their 1966 single “Sunny Afternoon”, a music hall inspired tune criticizing the high taxes imposed by the British government at the time, in a similar way to The Beatles “Taxman”, or the sentimental “Waterloo Sunset” from 1967. With this change in themes came a change in sound, with their music shifting into a mix of various styles, incorporating elements of folk, baroque pop, art music and psychedelia, with some of their records in the late 60s and some incorporating storytelling themes, becoming very early rough examples of “concept albums”. Some of them sold in low numbers, but all received positive critical reception from press and public.
Sadly, things began to get rough as the 60s moved into the 70s. In 1969, Peter Quaife, frustrated by the lack of record sales, left the band for good (and ultimately died of kidney failure in 2010 at the age of 66), replaced by one John Dalton (b. May 21, 1943), the first of several bass players The Kinks would go through. The lift of the American touring ban brought some good fortune, along with them landing another hit single in 1970 with the provocative folk-rock romance “Lola”. The following year they secured a new record deal with RCA, and after a high selling compilation they spent a good chunk of the 70s releasing genre hopping concept albums and rock operas that flopped both critically and commercially, backed by increasing tensions between the Davies brothers as Ray suffered through divorce and increasing drug addiction, and Dave became increasingly frustrated and focused on his own solo projects.
However, as one decade rolled into another, fortunes began to change again. They gained new fans through cultural osmosis as several newer bands released covers of their songs. Their albums started gaining more traction, with 1979’s Low Budget and 1981’s Give the People What They Want both hitting the top 20 and becoming their best selling LPs in the United States. Both of these albums shifted sound again to a more of-the-time hard rock sound akin to what had initially brought them success, and included several songs, like the paranoid self-callback “Destroyer”, that became AOR radio hits. They followed these with 1983’s State of Confusion, which got extra promotion thanks to MTV and included the single “Come Dancing” which became their biggest American hit in over 15 years, going all the way to #6 on the Billboard Hot 100, tying for their most successful single stateside
Sadly, The Kinks couldn’t maintain this career boost for too much longer, and soon enough the wheels started coming off again. Their next album in 1984 underperformed, and a bigger blow came that year when, after over a decade of increasing tension and non-cooperation between him and Dave, Mick Avory was fired from the band. Subsequent recordings yielded disappointing to middling results, and Ray took time away to work on material of his own, namely co-writing and soundtracking musicals, including one of his own, Return to Waterloo.
The Kinks meanwhile got one last moment in the sun when the group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of fame in 1990, but declining success and persisting internal conflict between its two leading men pressed on, and after one last album in 1993 they were left with no major recording deal. They played their last concert in 1996 and have been effectively disbanded ever since, although the brothers have claimed reunions that never materialized and the band merely being on an indefinite hiatus at various points in the following 20+ years.
The Kinks are by no measure an obscure or unsuccessful group, not by a long shot, but they never quite reached the levels of commercial success reached by other big acts to come out of the British Invasion, and their leader’s attitudes and touring ban killed off a lot of potential they might’ve had in the U.S. market. That said, they still saw success and had many popular and memorable tunes, and kept things new with different styles, never getting stagnant even when it didn’t hit well for them. Their late 60s albums were highly acclaimed in spite of not selling particularly well, expanding musical boundaries and embodying feelings of the British public at the time. Their style of rock is often seen as an early forerunner of punk rock and other heavier genres. Their songs have been covered by other notable acts like The Pretenders and Van Halen, who had their first hit with a cover of “You Really Got me”. In the wake of their break up, they got another boost in the form of new star bands Blur and Oasis, both of whom cited The Kinks as direct influences, and they still release compilations and remasters of their old material up to the present day. Underrated pioneers, their contributions to rock and roll have not faded with time.