‘I’ve got dementia in reverse’

‘I like your shirt today,’ Sir Ray Davies says to the waiter who brings his glass of water to the table outside a café in Highgate. ‘How’s your girlfriend?’ It turns out the girlfriend is no longer the girlfriend. ‘You broke up? You know, that happens. It’ll be OK. You’ll meet somebody else.’ He pauses and then says something that runs through my head for days after our interview. ‘She’ll meet somebody else.’

It’s true, of course; she will. And it’s a human thing to say: both parties to the relationship will move on. But it’s also delivered with a hint of claws. Who wants to be told, fresh from a break-up, that their ex will soon be hooking up with another partner? It seems like a very Ray Davies thing to say, given that so many of the songs he wrote for the Kinks seemed pretty and straightforward, but left scratches.

Davies speaks so softly that cats wouldn’t hear him coming. There are times I can’t make out what he’s saying, and when I play back the recording those passages are indistinct murmurs. Maybe they’re the bits where he says what he really thinks, because he’s adept at taking one question and answering another. You might think that he’s a slightly doddery, slightly forgetful old gentleman, but I don’t believe that for a second. Those kinds of chaps don’t release two albums in a little over a year (Our Country: Americana Act II, the second of a pair of records to accompany his 2013 autobiography, comes out on 29 June.) And as Davies himself observes when mentioning the old, unrecorded songs that are shunting unbidden across his mind as he prepares a box set of the 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society: ‘I’ve got dementia in reverse.