Sixty years. Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. 50 million records sold. Five US Top 10 singles and twenty Top 10 singles in the UK. The achievements go on and on. For a band out of Muswell Hill, England, that is quite the accomplishment. Today, over halfway to the century mark, The Kinks are considered among the most influential bands in rock & roll history. That Dave Davies guitar sound inspired generations of young kids to seek out the six-string and make some noise. Ray Davies wrote lyrics that were modern-thinking, very British in many instances, and could twist up phrases to surprise you in the end. Americans lapped it up in droves, as did their over-the-pond counterparts. And Mick Avory was the backbeat of it all. Along with Pete Quaife on bass, Avory helped propel The Kinks to superstardom with megahits “You Really Got Me,” “All Day & All Of The Night,” “Lola,” “Sunny Afternoon” and “Waterloo Sunset.” Hell, they even had a rollicking holiday hit with “Father Christmas.”
For their diamond jubilee, The Kinks have released The Journey – Part 1, a double CD featuring handpicked songs by the Davies brothers and Avory (Quaife died in 2010), mostly from the sixties with a few seventies tunes, seemingly revolving around themes. The first section is labeled “Songs about becoming a man, the search for adventure, finding an identity and a girl” and contains twelve songs, from “You Really Got Me” to “I’m Not Like Everybody Else.” It’s an eclectic compilation that reminds you how good these young guys were back in the beginning years.
Modern classic rock radio often neglects songs that weren’t super popular. Therefore when a Kinks song pops on it’s usually one of the ones mentioned in the first paragraph. But have you heard “Dead End Street,” which was a hit in the UK and featured a video of the band carrying a coffin around Little Green Street in North London? Or the country-ness of “Wait Till The Summer Comes Along”? Or the doo wop swing of “Just Can’t Go To Sleep”? These songs are instantly likable and worth more playings on the radio than they are given.
“Me and Ray grew up on those influences – Hank Williams and Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatts – so there are a lot of influences in our music generally,” Dave Davies told me during a 2017 interview about the band’s influences. “There’s also blues and country and a lot of other influences.” Avory, whom I spoke with last week, came from a Jazz background and up until the seventies, his drumming was more quiet, subtle, raring up when needed for the song. Having celebrated his 79th birthday in February, Avory is still playing drums locally in his English community, having fun on the weekends with his band, a prime example that the heart of rock & roll never stops beating.
With plans to keep The Kinks celebration going on for about two years, there will be a Journey – Part 2 dropping later this year. Until then, you have some great songs to re-familiarize yourself with, songs I spoke to Avory about. He told me his story while waiting for his wife to return from the grocery, knowing that as soon as our chat finished, “I’ll probably be sent around the corner to bring the rest of the stuff in,” he said with a laugh.
You guys have this big celebration happening this year, with a big album that’s just come out. Tell us your story with The Kinks.
Well, I went to work for four or five years, and I was playing all the time in my spare time. I came up through playing skiffle. Then I sort of did a bit of rock & roll, as it was then, in clubs, etc, then everyone dried up and there was no one to play with around my way. I had a brush with the Stones in 1962. I liked what they were playing, sort of rhythm & blues. I went to a teacher who was a Jazz drummer. I think most of the teachers were back then. So I got introduced more to Jazz and collected records and all that. I got a job in a hotel for two years playing in a lounge, so it really wasn’t rock & roll; it was quite different. I couldn’t make a noise so I used to play brushes a lot of the time and played George Shearing sort of Jazz stuff. It was quite lounge-y Jazz, really. I got tangled up with that because I got taught by a Jazz drummer (laughs). I liked the music and I liked the drummers and I got to know the more famous ones, more established ones.
Then from there, when I met the Stones and liked what they did, by 1963, I put an ad in to see if I could get playing with a band, you know, cause I don’t want to play Jazz all my life, and I liked what the Stones were doing so I sort of bore that in mind and I advertised myself as a, let’s see, king of blues, rhythm & blues band, and I got a reply from The Kinks manager, Robert Wace, and they asked me to come over to a club in Islington in London. It was like an audition but I didn’t see anyone else there. A day later they said they wanted to see me again and I went and there was more people there. They had a producer and had already signed a contract with Pye Records so that was it. I did a few little gigs and then about a month, two months afterward, we were on the Dave Clark Five tour with the Hollies, like a package tour, and that was it and it went on from there.
Music changed from what we were doing then. After “You Really Got Me” and Dave put that guitar sound to it, that changed our world. So it was quite different at that point. But the thing was, Ray used to write so many different types of songs, with different feel; he didn’t just stop with “You Really Got Me” and “All Day & All Of The Night.” He went on and did stuff that was more subtle, more leaning on the words and more poignant lyrics. I really suited that part really more than the more heavy stuff. Along the way we learned all styles but that brought me along quite a lot because of Ray’s writing. It expanded what I could do. I think that’s what really kept me in the band more than anything, because it was all there in one band, instead of mucking about in different bands, because Ray had most things covered throughout the years. So that’s my story (laughs).
I understand that Ray, Dave and yourself picked the songs for The Journey. Which one did you really want to see on here and why that one in particular?
There was a track called “No More Looking Back” and I’ve never seen it on an album or compilation; but there’s been so many of them I probably missed it anyway (laughs). It’s like something you didn’t play full-out. It had nice parts to it and Ray always went into a nice sort of middle part that changed the feel of it and the interesting parts suited my playing at the time. I enjoyed that one. Another one was “She’s Got Everything.” That was a great song and that was played quite differently. It was a bunch of styles and I loved the ones where the drumming wasn’t that strong. I really sort of picked the more obscure ones, I think, to mix in with what everyone else had picked.
What happened to “Beautiful Delilah”? That didn’t make it on there.
No (laughs). Ray’s got plenty of songs of his own, enough to not rely on Chuck Berry (laughs). But we used to play that one. It was one of the ones I started with the band, all those old Chuck Berry tunes that everyone played. He wrote some great songs and the Stones picked up on that too.
“Wait Till The Summer Comes Along” has a strong country music vibe. The brothers were influenced by country music but how did you like country music and did your style of drumming flow easily into that rhythm?
Country is more sort of easy playing for the rhythm, rather than the straight rock rhythms, which are a bit more rigid, so it’s a bit sort of looser and more akin to the skiffle and country that I used to play. So yeah, that was probably one of the first types of rhythm I learned, you know. Skiffle was country songs sort of reinvented and Lonnie Donegan was the king of skiffle and that’s the guy I used to listen to. When all these skiffle bands formed in the fifties, I got involved with a scout group I was in. The boys were a bit older than me and they used to rehearse on a Sunday and they used to have like a meeting and they’d play darts and snooker and all those things. I was only thirteen and I knew the singer, he lived down my road, so I got involved with that. I mean, I was too young to go to it, really, but they’d sneak me in and I enjoyed it cause they were all about three or four years older than me and I began to like the adult things more, you know, playing snooker and listening to these records. That was all great fun. And one day there was a drum on a chair and a scrubbing brush on a stick, which was a bit makeshift, and the drummer got fed up with it and said, “I don’t want to do that, I want to play mandolin.” So he got mandolin. At this point I wasn’t in the band so I said I’d give it a go and that was it (laughs).
“I’m Not Like Everybody Else” is quite a defiant song
When they wrote it, it knocked the nail on the head, I thought at the time when I heard the words, because I’m not like anybody else. Dave sang that one and I thought, well, they’ve really captured the mood of the band cause they weren’t like anyone else (laughs), especially Ray and Dave. As a band we weren’t like anyone else and I liked it because of the theme of it and it had a sort of an unusual beginning and I don’t know where we got that from (laughs). Anyway, I enjoyed it cause when you’ve got something different all the time, it’s nice to be able to put your take on it and if it actually fits and everyone’s happy with it, it’s good, you know. Sometimes I say no, think of something else (laughs) but that happened quite naturally. It wasn’t difficult cause you work with the bass player and we sort of get the foundation of the track down. It’s not rocket science really but you’ve got to get the feel right and that had a good feel.
Of all The Kinks songs that you’ve recorded, which one do you feel captures you as a drummer best, in your opinion?
The quiet ones like “Sunny Afternoon,” cause that was quite a different song for me, not really a drumming song, but I helped with the arrangement a bit with Ray on acoustic and these triplets, these things you play in Jazz a lot, even though it’s slow tempo. I put them in in the gaps between the vocals and that worked out quite well even though it wasn’t clever drumming. It’s one of my first attempts of trying that with them. “Waterloo Sunset,” I liked that one cause I was playing on the hi-hat at the beginning and sort of built it up. I just colored it with a few little fills that didn’t dominate the vocals and flowed with the music.
It was later on I really became a rock & roll drummer cause we were doing the gigs and in 1978, that sort of time – even before that we did some quite stronger stuff – but we went for what I called a traditional Jazz rock stage (laughs) and that was when Ray wrote all of the Carnegie Hall stuff, “Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues,” those type of songs. That album [Muswell Hillbillies] was full of different feeling songs. Then later on, we got more on the hard rock when Jim Rodford joined the band. I was never really a hard rock drummer but I did play louder when the style of the songs changed and I changed a bit with it. Some of that stuff I quite liked but there was one I really liked. We retuned it with Ray and Jim. We start off with something and it ends up quite different to what you first thought and when he put the words in it, “National Health” is quiet and then it comes in with some quite loud drums and gets into a repetitive beat and it’s really an unusual song. Those things are half-time and it’s one I really liked hearing.
What about “Dead End Street”
Yeah, “Dead End Street” got to about #4, I think, on the chart. That was a really good song for us. We had a really good run apart from the first couple that Ray introduced The Kinks to the world – “You Really Got Me” and “All Day & All Of The Night,” “Tired Of Waiting” and all those were a good run all the way through the seventies really. Even “Plastic Man” I liked doing but it was a bit of a jokey song (laughs). But again, different things you can put into that and that’s what I liked about it, not just staying in one thing all the time.
Could you share a favorite memory of Pete Quaife?
He was really easy to get along with but I think we were all a bit different on our own. It’s funny, apart from the music, we didn’t really relate to each other at all, cause Ray and Dave were like opposites. Musically, Dave was good at different things than Ray and it worked and it gave us a bigger expansion. Pete, I didn’t really know a lot about him but he lived near the Davies and they all went to school together so I was like the man from the outside, you know. Walking in, I don’t think I’d ever met anyone, any of them really, Pete included. Everything was local to Muswell Hill in those days, and I lived about thirteen miles away so it was quite a different environment from me. Ray and Dave had a good family. They were all a big family and close and I got to know everyone. I was like the long lost cousin (laughs).
But Pete, he never really mixed that much and when we were out drinking, it was usually Ray or Dave or me. But he was easy to get along with. His bass playing, he used to play some weird things. He used to like doing classical things to warm up and I think he actually sort of tried to work it into one of our songs. But he was a good bass player and he never had a problem with anything and he knew what to play. It just came to him, he didn’t struggle with technique or anything, which is saying something. I think we had some sort of chemistry, on some of the songs anyway, in the early days.
In regards to getting along, he used to come out with a few tall stories and invented this square tomato and was making molds for the growth of square tomatoes. “Why would you want to do that?” I asked him. “Well, they fit in the sandwich better.” (laughs) He used to come out with stuff like that. I think he lived in a bit of a fantasy world, a Walter Mitty they call them, where they dream up things and they think they’re true. It was quite interesting (laughs).
Looking back, what do you think made The Kinks stand out from all those other bands at the time and have endured to 2023?
Mainly Ray’s writing, of course, and certainly Dave’s guitar with Ray’s songs that set it off. “All Day & All Of The Night” and then it all sort of went into the more quieter stuff and then Ray sort of discovered writing about nostalgia and things around them and life as it was; he sort of covered everything on that. He sort of found things to write about and his words were really poignant. He’s like a poet, a musical poet, and that’s how I used to view him. It was so different, very English most of it, and he never stood still and it was interesting for everyone. For Kinks fans, that’s a lot of different songs to listen to. Ray’s music was more in depth, a bit deeper, and wasn’t obviously commercial. Obviously, people were ready for that, that type of stuff, you know, themes. That’s why it went on and the band had a sound and it all went together in a package and it worked.
How are you keeping yourself busy these days?
I’m in a sixties rock band that plays pubs and clubs. Did one last night and we’ve got one tomorrow night. I’ve been doing that for twenty-five or thirty years. John Dalton [former Kinks bass player], about thirty years ago, we did a Kinks convention in North London. John said we could have a band and we collected for this charity, cause his little boy died of leukemia, and it made an extra attraction at the convention. That was fun and we called ourselves the Kast Off Kinks. That went over well and we started doing a few gigs and we sort of took it on the road and Ian Gibbons [former Kinks keyboard player] was with us by then and we did that for eleven years with Ian. He died, unfortunately, in 2019, then had the pandemic a couple of years, and we just put it back together last year and it’s going pretty well. We advertise online and it seems to make a lot of difference. So we’re quite busy again, bearing in mind we’re a bit older, so we don’t do so many gigs now, about thirty a year. I’m quite happy, do it while I can (laughs).
Photos courtesy of BMG & Big Hassle
One Response
The Kinks were one of my all-time favorite British Invasion groups; they remain so today.
Ray, Dave, Mick … Keep On Rocking!