Published: 17 November, 2011
by RICHARD OSLEY

It might not quite be the village green that The Kinks adoringly sang about, but Pond Square in Highgate village is close enough.

There, beneath the canopy of elm trees, you sometimes see Ray Davies pottering around, lost in his own thoughts as if another slab of musical melancholy is just bursting to get out of his big head of everything. 

Sir Macca McCartney couldn’t do that: he generally lives his life behind closed doors, revered like a relic from the history of a different time, occasionally popping out beyond secure lines to marry someone or to suck in his cheeks for the cameras and make a V-sign.

Or whatever he does with his time now.

Jagger couldn’t do it, either.

He’d be mobbed in Pond Square.

And yet there’s Ray, as talented as them both, so often passing by unnoticed to the untrained eye.

The leader of The Kinks, loved and forgotten, left to do what he wants at the top of Highgate West Hill.

A new biography of the band is wistful in nature too. Riven by marvellous experiments, undermined by sibling rivalry, it missed opportunities to secure even greater fame, to obtain that Sir Macca level of recognition.

Yet you get the impression reading Nick Hasted’s meticulous history that Ray, and perhaps his brother, Dave, too, wouldn’t trade places with anybody who is constantly bothered in the street.

Ray, softly spoken and so considered whenever you see him interviewed, has always seemed like a reluctant hero.

Once you’ve made records as perfect as Waterloo Sunset, Days, You Really Got Me, and dozens more as good, you don’t really get a choice.

There is a wonderful grumpy streak through this biography too, and a wild side in the brothers, which brews spitting arguments, silly moments, and culminates in an incident you can’t help try to picture in your head.

At Dave Davies’s 50th birthday party in The Clissold Arms in Muswell Hill (in terms of folklore that pub, although gastrofied these days, is as important to The Kinks as, say, The Cavern Club was to The Beatles), Ray reportedly flattened the cake.

The book has Dave’s version: “Ray had the money and I didn’t so he offered to throw it [the party] for me. Just as I was about to cut the cake, Ray jumped on the table and made a speech about how wonderful he was. He then stamped on my cake.”

Have we all got that picture in our mind? I have, even if it didn’t happen just as Dave said it did.

The thing is, as this book reminds us many times, Ray was, is, pretty wonderful.

And so was the rest of the band, formed in Muzzy Hill, celebrated around the world, and heralded as chief storytellers of old London town.

The rise of the band, detailed here, is inspirational, heavily pock-marked with north London locations: Fortismere, their old school, the Konk studio they built in Hornsey, photoshoots on the Heath and Little Green Street in Kentish Town – where a video for Dead End Street was shot, a film blacklisted by the BBC for being tasteless.

There are low moments, too: too many bellies full of drugs and binges, some razored marriages, Ray having to watch Chrissie Hynde run off with Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr. Heavens, nobody should suffer that fate.

The failure to crack the popular American market also hurt, but they are still champs.

In recent years, Ray seems to have fallen back in love with their catalogue, re-recording them as duets and also with the Crouch End Festival Chorus.

He put the 1980s hit Come Dancing into a bittersweet musical staged in Stratford a few years back, in which he cha-cha’d in and out of the stage as a narrator.

Hasted’s book is a treasure chest of stories – like the suggestion Ray and Dave might have played The Krays in the film about the East End gangsters.

Lots of times he quotes from either Ray’s autobiography, X-Ray, or Dave’s, Kink. Both are worth a re-read in themselves.

That’s not to say Hasted has not put the hours in and done the work.

He seems to have had endless chats and interviews with the most important people.

It’s interesting those chats with Ray ended in 2008, while Dave was still talking to him in 2011.

Perhaps, the most important passages are the explanation behind their best record, which, perversely, hardly got any airtime on its release in 1968.

Tired with the shouty rock ’n’ roll and “love me yeah yeah yeah” music needed to sell big units in the US, they created a sublime album called The Kinks Are... The Village Green Preservation Society.

There is hardly a bum note on the album, the songs a manifesto warning about overdevelopment and destroying little links with the past.

“They made a last stand and no one noticed,” explains Hasted, in regard to the small sales.

Yet now first-release vinyl copies are sought after and do not come cheap.

The fate of an almost perfect record sums up The Kinks, Ray and Dave.

Only in reflection did the world properly appreciate what they had achieved.

If nothing else, Hasted’s book will make you want to revisit their village green.

• You Really Got Me: The Story of The Kinks. By Nick Hasted. Omnibus Press £19.95