Ray Davies: part of Swinging Sixties London — and apart from it too

As Johnny Rogan notes in this new biography of Ray Davies and the Kinks, it is almost 50 years since the term ‘Swinging London’ was first used by a newspaper to describe ‘the most exciting city in the world … all vibrating with youth’. Those smashing times may not have lasted long but the vibrations carry on to the present day. Happily, many of the protagonists are still with us — David Bailey, Mary Quant — and so is Ray Davies CBE, part of the swinging city scene but apart from it too.

The Kinks were a superb proto-rock group but they were also, in the words of George Melly, ‘brilliant piss-takers’. And as the 1960s wore on, in songs like ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and his masterpiece ‘The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society’ Davies articulated a very English strain of melancholy in a manner quite unlike his contemporaries. He recently celebrated his 70th birthday and can still be found on the road, entertaining crowds with the songs he wrote when he was barely out of his teens – ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’ et al. To borrow the title of a later and lesser-known Kinks single, what must it be like to be One of the Survivors?

In his preface, Rogan calls this ‘both the curse and the triumph of the heritage act, forced by marketplace conditions and public expectation to confront their past at the expense of their present’. Of course, it is also the dilemma of the heritage-act biographer: if your subject is reckoned by both critics and public alike to have done his best work by the age of 30, how should you deal with the subsequent decades of perceived underachievement? Rogan chooses to delve deep into the period that will most interest potential readers of this book.