| October 5th, 2005 03:47 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
London calling
Back on his feet after being shot in New Orleans, Ray Davies has finally recorded his first solo album and is working on a musical. The ex-Kink tells Robin Denselow why he's come home
Monday October 3, 2005
The Guardian
'White guys don't play the blues too well': Ray Davies.
Ray Davies is worried. He may have recovered from a shooting incident in New Orleans early last year, he may have at last completed his first solo album since leaving the Kinks, and he may be embarking on his first major tour with a new band, but he fears he'll be misunderstood. His new solo single, like several of the new songs, is about New Orleans and has a sense of foreboding and danger. Yet, he insists, they were written long before Katrina laid waste to the city that was his home, and where a gunman shot him in the leg. "I don't want to be seen as an opportunist jumping on the bandwagon. And I don't want to make it seem too gloomy." But it is, it seems, a somewhat spooky example of life imitating art.
"It's like I had already written what would happen to me in a strange sub-plot. And that's another thing ... my life has always been a sub-plot to my work. The work is the most important thing. Right now I should be at home watching Match of the Day, but I'm here in the studio."
It's Saturday night in North London, and the workaholic is perched on a stool, holding a guitar, and telling stories about the Kinks, the problems of finding a new band, and the songs that he'll be playing on tour.
He is 61, and arguably the greatest English songwriter of his generation, but he makes it sound like a brand new start to his career. "I didn't know my range as a performer," he says, "because doing Kinks songs I felt I was part of the machinery. It was like being a typecast actor."
After deciding that "maybe I felt written out with England and wanted to get away", Davies set out to "discover America", ending up in New Orleans. "I was in a relationship with someone who was moving there, and the music that inspired me came from there - apart from Noel Coward and the English stuff." So had the Kinks, the champions of London rock, really been influenced by the Mississippi? "We had wanted to be a blues band. Our inspiration and heart was there. But I realised early on - and I'm going to be crucified for saying this - that white guys don't play the blues too well. I adapted what I knew about the blues into my music. You Really Got Me is my idea of a blues song, but it became very English because I discovered what lyrics are."
His new single, The Tourist, is certainly not a blues song, and has no echoes of jazz, but it's still something of an unlikely and timely New Orleans classic. "It's like the Sex Pistols song about making money off other people's misery," says Davies. "But this was in America, and people have only just realised how poor it was, and is, down there. I took the view in the song that I'd be the affluent tourist walking around eating cheaply while the impoverished people are around me. There's no mention of me being shot, but there's an atmosphere of foreboding. It's about a divided society and double standards."
He asks me to "imagine being in a hospital after being shot", and then sings After the Fall, a song with such lyrics as "After the fall is over, you will be on your own." It was written five years before the shooting, and he had recorded, but not yet mixed the track when the shooting happened. It was while he was having dinner with a friend in a restaurant, and a thief stole her handbag. "I ran after him ... he turned round, shot me, got into a car and was driven off." The driver has been caught, but the gunman "skipped to Atlanta. I know his name".
He was, he agrees, very lucky. Recovery was slow, and he was forced to cancel concerts for the first time in his career, while in the past he had "even played with a broken finger". Now, after extensive work-outs, he looks in remarkably good shape, and, as ever, is working on a whole batch of projects. Despite all that happened, he has good memories of the sense of community in the old New Orleans, where "I found I fitted in somewhere for the first time since I left Muswell Hill". He was working on a musical project involving local children, with the goal of setting up an exchange with children from a school in Hackney. It's something that he hopes to develop further.
But for the moment Davies is writing about London again. "I discovered," he says, "that you are writing songs about people, and people don't change, wherever you go. I can come back to London, and so long as I can still find good characters to write about, I'll still write here." There are more songs about London on the new EP. There's a remix of London Song, "a black tourist guide with macabre imagery and a bit of rap", while Yours Truly, Confused N10 ("which I actually wrote for my daughter's punk band, and they turned it down") chronicles the arrival of the get-rich-quick society in the area where he was brought up. There will be more London nostalgia in the musical based on his song Come Dancing, which is scheduled to open towards the end of next year.
So what, then, makes a good song for Ray Davies? "The songs I really like writing are small plays,"he says. "Even back to Waterloo Sunset. There's a plot with two people, and a bit of a sub-plot, this guy is on his own, something has happened, maybe his girlfriend has left him, and he sees two people together and says 'Wouldn't it be nice to be like them' ... that's what that song's about. And that's the good thing about songwriting - you're the composer, the artist, the film director, the publisher, everything." He goes on to complain that there are not enough English songwriters - "they are writing to sell records in America" - and claims that what he writes is folk songs. "I went to art school, went to theatre school, and neither route was right for me. I'm an outsider, a renegade artist not suited to the fine arts. I make my own art"
· Ray Davies is on tour until October 16. The Tourist EP is out now on V2 Records. Other People's Lives is released early next year.
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| October 5th, 2005 04:34 AM |
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| pdog |
I love that guy!
V2 is also a very cool label, IMO! |
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