#4
Ray Davies – X-Ray
(Penguin, 1995)

“My name is of no importance. In fact it is of no concern to anyone except those who have loved and befriended me during my somewhat limited tenancy on this earth. It is a matter between me and my employers. Suffice to say that I am nineteen years of age and about to embark on my first major journalistic enterprise, for a Corporation that has paid for my education ever since I became an orphan and was taken into its care. I know nothing of my life before the Corporation took me in, and everything I am is a result of its care and protection.

I am a product of a century which started at the height of class-conscious imperialism and ended with a society so reduced to totalitarian commonness that in my final year at college the phrase ‘mediocrity rises’ proliferated. I am an example of a society which encourages ordinariness, a product of a vast empire of companies that has now splintered off into many separate corporations, each with its own autonomous control. I am one of the faceless thousands manufactured by this corporate society, with just enough education to serve my masters, and the right haircut and fashion conscious attire to fit in with my contemporaries. The only individualism in me lurks somewhere so deep inside my desolate soul that it may never emerge to my human exterior, which was bred with the sole purpose to conform.”

- thus Ray Davies begins what was sold as the long-awaited, tell-all memoir of his time in The Kinks.

For the first few pages, I assumed the authorial voice here was Ray himself, outlining some strange, paranoid schema within which his own life could be framed. It soon becomes clear though that this is in fact ‘the future’, and that what we’re reading is actually a kind of vague, Orwellian science fiction. Our first person narrator is not Ray Davies, but an anonymous young man who, according to some Byzantine whim of the totalitarian educational regime to which he is subject, has been charged with gathering information and eventually filing a report on the potentially subversive activities of a forgotten, aging musician, once rich and famous but now holed up in dusty seclusion in his heavily fortified North London studio.

When our protagonist eventually makes his way through the elaborate security mechanisms surrounding Konk studios, he finds Ray a broken man – a disgusting, senile old derelict, completely disconnected from the world around him, mumbling his disjointed memories over endless lukewarm cups of tea.

As the narrator begins to transcribe the old man’s mutterings, the book begrudgingly begins to assume the form of a more traditional rock memoir, if admittedly a pretty fascinating and twisted one, with Davies’s peculiar and distinctive tone – both acerbic and sentimental, woefully self-deprecating and bitterly accusatory – helping to expose an unsettling undercurrent lurking behind even the most seemingly flippant anecdotes and fact-checks.

From a casual listen to Ray’s best-known songs, one could get the impression he’s a pretty easy-going, good-humoured kinda guy, but as anyone who’s spent a significant amount of time delving in the darker recesses of The Kinks back catalogue will tell you, nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout his life, Ray Davies has been an anxious, obsessive, habitually paranoid individual with an inbuilt distrust of… just about everything really, and, as the paragraphs quoted above perhaps make clear, the issues of social control, conformity and class privilege lurking in the background of such jaunty numbers as ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, ‘Well-Respected Man’ or ‘Sunday Afternoon’ were very big issues indeed to him.

Although he seems to have mellowed out a bit and accepted his lot in recent years, ‘X-Ray’ catches him at the very height of his lifelong disgruntlement, and it’s a mighty thing to behold. He was ‘born to prove a point’ he claims, and to some extent the page upon page of unhinged, sordid, one-sided show-biz reminiscence presented here seem to have been a bit of a personal exorcism for him, an attempt to try and find that ‘point’.

As our narrator records these outpourings, he seems to realise that Davies is not in fact just a senile old goat but an important and dangerous individual, and an active threat to the Corporation who have sent him to spy on him. Indeed, he feels his own lifelong brainwashing starting to weaken in the face of these strange tales of beat group debauchery and Denmark Street disappointments, ending the book a changed man, ready to fight for… well, who knows what, but as a natural born refusenik, Ray certainly knows what he’s fighting *against* - namely, EVERY-BLOODY-THING except tea, beer, sex, seaside towns, electric guitars and the love of one’s family.

So… there ya go. Almost as rewarding/enlightening as listening to ‘Muswell Hillbillies’ whilst smashed out of yr head on brandy (and believe me, that’s pretty rewarding/enlightening), ‘X-Ray’ awaits a place on your bookshelf. Make it happen.

(I never did get around to doing that post about how much I love ‘Muswell Hillbillies’, did I..?)

Labels: books, Ray Davies, The Kinks