I'M NEVER EATING RARE MEAT AGAIN! smoking volcano, indeed ;D
Ray Davies:
" I Don't Mean To Be Cruel To My Pals" Keith Altham, NME, 4 November 1967 THERE is something of the smoking volcano about Ray Davies. Six foot of suppressed quietly spoken, quietly smiling and quietly watching! It is what some people call "an artistic temperament" that seldom works along logical lines and often distinguished the talented from the mundane.
Ray is something of a musical cartoonist on contemporary English society and like all good writers he draws from personal experience and people he knows for his material. Many of his songs are regarded as pretty pictures by the critics, like the Kinks current hit ‘Autumn Almanac’, but there is a derisive message for the "box"-watches, the complacent and the conventional.
"I suppose I tend to be rather cruel to my friends," admitted Ray over lunch in a London restaurant, "but I’m really getting at myself as well. I seldom exaggerate the characters – like ‘David Watts’ on our new LP – I deliberately underplay them and that is why the lyric tends to sound sarcastic.
"People are seldom offended by what I do or write about them. Either they fail to recognize themselves or they have enough intelligence to laugh at it."
I have never seen Ray Davies lose his temper but like many other restrained people there is the impression that if he did let loose his real feelings, the top of his head might blow off. He looks behind the smiling faces and his anger is a s real as his humour.
University
"Last week we played a University up North," recounted Ray, "and because these faculties seldom organise things well, we were required to change in the library which served as a dressing room. One of the students kindly smuggled me in a drink. The Almoner arrived in the room and spotted the drink. He made a terrible scene and began chastising the students. I said: ‘Look man, it’s only one drink, that’s all,’ and he said: ‘I don’t talk to your kind of rubbish!’"
Then Dave said: "You..." and I had to clap my hand over his mouth. It’s amazing that people like that are still around, though.
Ray is ex-art student and he looks at the world with the eyes of an artist. His speciality was sketching people before he began sketching them with music and the observations are individual.
"Art school was a good thing for me," he said, "I had a master who said: ‘If you don’t feel like sketching – go home and do something else. I’m not going to teach you to be a carbon copy of me. You must learn to be yourself.’ He knew that the eye of the amateur produces more originality and expression than the product of technique.
"I’m going off meat," he continued distractedly, forking his scampi. "Look at the people in this restaurant. You can always tell the people who eat rare meat all their lives. As they get older they begin to look like pigs – fleshy jowls, large-ringed eyes like in the Hogarth painting, and little piggy eyes."
I was pleased that I had ordered fresh salmon. Ray is always looking behind the smiling faces.
"Look at the portrait of the Mona Lisa" he said, "and ask yourself why she is smiling like that Maybe she has a gap in her teeth like mine. Her whole life is altered by that one deviation. Picasso works like this – exaggerating one defect to illustrate the whole."
The bizarre or the unusual slant are a Ray Davies speciality and he recounted to me how ‘Autumn Almanac’’s tune came about.
"It was originally a song called ‘My Street,’" he said, "but I played the tape backwards, ‘Ym Teerst’ and it came out the tune for ‘Autumn Almanac.’"
Backward tapes are not a new idea for producing an interesting tune and it would be interesting to know how many Beatles’ numbers have been produced this way. Ray is very much in sympathy with current musical trends and often finds his ideas have been duplicated.
Overlap
"I wrote ‘There Is A Mountain’ which Donovan has written," said Ray, "but my tune was called ‘Jonahus Mountain’ and I wrote it for Dave. I’ve had to scrap it now because it would have sounded like a crib from Donovan."
The fresh fruit salad arrived on the table and Ray reviewed the large bowl of whipped cream.
"Wouldn’t it be great to have a false hand to stick in there?" he said grinning.
"Waterloo Sunset" might be described as a "love song," but Ray seldom seems to concern himself with this conventional formula of boy and girl.
"I missed my favourite film on TV the other night," he said. "The Ballad For A Russian Soldier. There is this marvelous bit where the soldier is returning home on leave to his wife. He discovers his wife has gone off with another man. He planned to give her two precious bars of soap, but instead he gives them to his father. The look on his father’s face, who does not know he is being thought of second, is incredible. That’s the kind of ‘love’ that interest me.
"Love is much more complicated than just two people. ‘Autumn Almanac’ is a love song. It’s possessive – Yes, yes, yes, yes, it’s MY Autumn Almanac!" he stressed.
Ray has recently been reading the works of Hans Christian Andersen. He felt they were too abrupt and the wicked witches got their heads cut off too quickly!
We rode from the restaurant by taxi to his manager’s office after our meal and he talked of how he planned to buy a Bentley, but decided against it as he cannot drive.
He talked of how he had written a film synopsis for the Kinks, "of three different ways of getting something," and how sorry he was for the BBC DJs who might get the sack. Suddenly he saw someone he recognized in another taxi go past. "Great," he cried, "it’s our masseur, Harry the Horse." And he waved his hands together like two pale butterflies.
© Keith Altham, 1967