Royal Headache.

Given the modicum of worldwide attention they’ve accumulated, Sydney’s Royal Headache were already lurking somewhere on my ‘to listen’ list, but it was a welcome nudge from Ruan of Popical Island last month that pushed me into actually doing said listening, and I have subsequently listened to their self-titled album (released variously by XVIII Records, R.I.P. Society and What’s Yr Rupture?) a great deal.

As is the case with Melbourne compatriots Eddy Current.., Royal Headache are a great and refreshing band whose appeal is so straightforward, it’s difficult for writer-types to pen a description that doesn’t make them sound shitty. I mean, left to my own devices, I'd probably describe them as something like “no nonsense, high energy guitar pop with catchy tunes and a great singer”, but then that quote might get inadvertently picked up by someone looking for copy and printed on a sticker in a record shop (hey, don’t laugh, it’s happened), and then no one would want to listen to Royal Headache ever again, and they'd have no option but to split up in disgrace. And I wouldn’t want that to happen. With great power, etc. So, zeroing in a bit, let’s instead say that this is sort of a happy collision between yr lo-fi ozzie punk and yr Exploding Hearts/Big Star/GBV power-pop, and see where that gets us.

As is often the case with these “just the same old stuff done well” type deals, I find myself recalling Billy Childish’s watertight formula for making a good record – ‘good song, good sound, good performance’. As I get older, I find myself becoming increasingly strident in my demand that song-based rock bands fulfil these basic criteria, and increasingly quick to dismiss them when they don’t. So… hopefully it will carry some kind of weight if I simply state that Royal Headache hit their marks better than any example of this kinda music I’ve heard in a long while.

Aside from anything else, it’s great to hear a white, male vocalist who sounds like he’s really fucking committed to the idea of being the vocalist in a rock band, rather than just ‘the guy who happens to sing’, delivering these Motown and Big Star informed numbers the way they need to be delivered in punk scene context – big and bellowy, but without being a preening jerk about it or anything, like a detoxed Robert Pollard giving it his best Otis Redding moves.

And as to the band, well… given the style of music they’re aiming for, I could easily see Royal Headache turning into one of those groups who record a really disappointing, over-polished follow-up album with all their vital energy drained out into some gutter behind the studio, gathered up in plastic bags by some unscrupulous sound engineer, watered down and sold back piecemeal to lethargic teenage punk bands (because that’s the kind of thing they do in studios, kids). But for the moment, on this first record, Royal Headache are just fucking ON. Personally I might not have gone with that ultra-trebley Rickenbacker guitar sound, but that’s the dude’s choice and he does good work with it, high-end distortion spreading hither on yon across the to-my-ears-perfect 8-track tape level fidelity, all musicians audible even as everything bleeds everywhere for a big, warm, band-in-a-room sound, amp noise cleaving across into the cymbals on each chorus for authentically headache-y effect.

As I say, this kind of magic rarely lasts long these days, but to all intents and purposes this Royal Headache LP is some real ‘lightning in a bottle’ shit, capturing the rush of a great band just being a great band. And that’s something that’s hard to beat, regardless of where they head in future. As a yardstick of general good-ness, just consider the fact that they throw in about three instrumental cuts on this album, all purely of the “this is just like one of our regular songs, but we forgot to do the vocals” variety. Y’know - no solos or instro hooks or anything, just chords and bass and drums… and you won’t feel like skipping through any of them. How did they manage that?

If anything, the instrumentals just act as necessary buffers between the chest-beating rama-lama of the vocal songs, which are…. pretty damn good, on the whole. Maybe not quite world class song-writing prowess or anything, but the energy and soul of the performance gets them straight to the bullseye more often than not. There’s a few punk stompers (‘Psychotic Episode’ is a winner), and the joyously self-explanatory ‘Girls’ (destined to instigate 80 seconds of carnage at your next barbeque), but mainly they sing about love, like ye olde bands used to – being in it, not being in it, having it, not having it – y’know, the whole thing. Now I’ll admit that currently I might be more inclined toward the enjoyment of songs about, I dunno, bulldozers or ghosts or military history or something, but with the oomph of singer + band behind the material, the old “love, love, love” thing works out nicely for Royal Headache, and it’s a great time, right words hitting the right chord changes just like they need to.

So in conclusion, that’s Royal Headache folks. All round quality. If you need stuff like this in your life right now, you won’t find much better. Our vendors are waiting.

Labels: Australia, I like, Royal Headache

Well that’s enough of that. Let’s write about some new stuff…

#1
Dee Dee Ramone -
Poison Heart:
Surviving The Ramones

(Firefly Publishing, 1997)

“They say that the Chelsea Hotel is haunted. I agree. A dragon fly is flying around my room right now. A ‘she’ dragon. Like Connie, one of my demons from a long time ago.
[…]
It’s the beginning of the 90s now and I am fed up with it all. I am going to fight back. I give the dragon fly a look that could kill, but she shrugs it off. She’s in a frenzy now, flying at me from behind, then changing direction and flying straight at me. Trying to sucker me to look into the light. Fuck that. That ain’t gonna happen.
I am going to send every shitty memory I have of this hotel straight back to hell. I start a fire on the rug and come at her from behind. I set light to her head with another match, then watch her burn. Then I feel normal again. So I start to relax and stare at an unplugged fan, trying to will it to spin. Don’t fuck with me. If you’re experienced, I think you’ll understand.”

I remember once reading an interview with King Buzzo of The Melvins, in which he said something like, “all books about music are shit… except for DeeDee Ramone’s book, which is brilliant”. I think that says it all really.

I wasn’t expecting much from ‘Poison Heart’ when I first borrowed a copy from Leicester library a few years back. I was just bored and didn’t have much money, and I love The Ramones and like hoovering my way through pointless rock biographies, so… y’know, why not?

From the generic “sole audience = uncritical die-hard fans” cover design to the dread co-writing credit, nothing about this book exactly screams “raging outsider anti-literary masterpiece of some kind”, but…. well, that’s what I’m writing this list for, y’know. To let you know. For every hundred middle-aged rockin’ bozos who manage to make a few thousand bucks on a book deal, you only get one DeeDee Ramone. Hundred, did I say? Man, on this whole PLANET, you only get one DeeDee Ramone. That’s kinda the point.

The introduction quoted above was my first clue that this was gonna be something a bit different. (For the sake of brevity, I’ve left out a few additional paragraphs where DeeDee starts reminiscing about his ex-girlfriend Connie trying to kill him with a broken champagne bottle.)

Second clue comes when he opens chapter one, page one with “My mother was a drunken nutjob”, and by page two, when he starts threading his mother’s childhood memories into his own imagined account of what life must have been like for the people of Berlin during the war (“those were terrible times”), I knew this was going to be quite a read.

God only knows what the texts that comprise this book must have looked like before Veronica Kofman compiled/transcribed/edited/whatevered them into shape for publication, but she certainly deserves credit for turning in just about the most UN-ghost written co-authored autobiog ever to hit the shelves. I mean, seriously, it doesn’t read as if she’s done much more than just correct the spelling, as DeeDee poured out his unstoppable, stream of consciousness exegesis. No bland ‘scene-setting’ paragraphs, no fact-checking, no logical framework – this is 100% pure, unfiltered DeeDee experience.

Want to know about The Ramones? Who they were? What they did? How their personalities meshed and how/where/why they recorded their songs? Well, there’s some of that here, but only viewed through the lens of the extent to which DeeDee found the whole thing a continuous hassle. I think the first four albums whiz by in a couple of pages, because they were presumably kinda painless.

Want to know about the best ways to score GI-issue morphine vials in post-war Berlin though, or glam-rock knife-fights and feral drag queens on the streets of New York, or how a six year old feels going to see a double-bill of ‘The Mummy’ and ‘The Ten Commandments’? Step right up!

One of the best things about this book is that DeeDee is pretty ambivalent about The Ramones. He describes the things that struck him about the other members of the band when he met them (referring to them by their full Ramone names at all times, as in “Johnny Ramone always said..” or “the thing about Johnny Ramone was..”). But by the time they get to being a vaguely successful band, his attention drifts. He prefers thinking about other things. It kinda reads like he spent the next fifteen years being thrown on a bus and taken to places where he’d meet odd people and get into situations where it was hard for him to find drugs. Boy, did he ever hate singing “Warthog” though. Yeah, he didn’t like that at all. He makes that perfectly clear.

DeeDee writes plenty here about the ugly, dysfunctional relationships he seems to have kept getting mixed up in, and about the kind of squalor he tended to end up living in. But mainly he writes about taking drugs – that being pretty much what he did, besides being in The Ramones. All drugs, any drugs, it seems. He could never quite decide on a favourite, I guess. By the halfway point in the book, he reaches some kinda hilarious-although-it-really-shouldn’t-be state of mind wherein he seems to have decided that beginning the day with seven joints of his favourite weed and a case of beer is a basic human right, and that anyone asking him to do anything places an unbearable stress upon his fragile equilibrium. What do you mean you can’t get any cocaine in this stupid country? What the hell? But I need it now! And you’re making me sit in this room with just a bunch of alcohol while all these creepy journalists with suspicious eyes ask me questions, and now there are people phoning me in the middle of the DAY, hassling me about playing some bass part on some stupid song I wrote? Can you imagine? It was like living in hell! “And they made me play volleyball. It was a nightmare!”

We shouldn’t laugh really, but the way he writes this stuff just cracks me up – short, clipped sentences and weird non-sequiturs, demanding the reader’s full sympathy and understanding at all times as he basically describes his behaviour as an unmanageable, substance-abusing maniac as if it were the only rational course of action open to him, given the unbearable horrors he was faced with on a day to day basis. Ramones tours or periods of confinement in secure institutions – it all seems much the same to DeeDee, with about the same level of discomfort either way.

Sounds like it could degenerate into yr standard self-pitying rock star stuff, but there is a kind of wide-eyed, manic energy about DeeDee’s recollections of all this stuff that’s impossible to describe if you’ve not read it firsthand. Something about the way that he can barely remember which continent he was in half the time, but he seems to have perfect recall of precisely which clothes people were wearing at different points in time, where they bought their shoes, and which brand of beer he was drinking.

There are also numerous instances here where his writing just goes completely over the edge when you least expect it, opening up surreal vistas of what I can only describe as ‘cosmic horror’, filling late night readers’ heads with images of an apocalyptic swamp inferno / alligator attack that transpired when he and Marc Bell hitched a lift to a Florida gig with some mysterious character known only as ‘Zippy’ (“Yes, yes, yes, even Zippy needs a little vacation now and then”, DeeDee records him as saying, in a brilliant example of the kind of unlikely, garbled dialogue he attributes to other people throughout the book), or with shuddersome memories of tour manager Monte Melnick terrifying him into submission using hideous, inhuman ‘lamb noises’.

(Did you know that, shortly before his death, DeeDee published a ‘horror novel’ entitled “Chelsea Hotel Horror”, in which he himself was the central character, fighting his way through said hotel pursued by the undead spectres of all his dead punk rock comrades..? Sounds like some pretty grim business, but nonetheless, do any publishers out there KNOW how much I want to read this book..? Trying to find a copy from the original print run has proved a dead-end, so please, whoever holds the rights these days – make it happen. If you’re worried about sales, I’ll personally guarantee, say, 50% of the print-run.)

One of the things you’ve got to love about DeeDee is that although he essentially lived the life of an archetypal ‘self-destructive punk dude’, he never contrived to become that character, however much he might have traded off it in his later years. Throughout this book, he wishes he could walk away from the whole thing. All he wants to do is walk around on a sunny day with a smile on his face, looking at things, talking to people, being normal. He fantasises about the life he might have had as a guy who delivers bread to a supermarket, looking wistfully at these ‘regular’, everyday activities as if they were part of a glamorous, alien world that he’ll never be a part of. I guess they offer a glimpse of the order and safety that might have been his, if his life hadn’t been an ugly mess of chaos from day one.

The mantle of the ‘punk dude’, the ‘druggy outsider rock star guy’, has been picked up so many times over the years by so, so many healthy, well-adjusted people that it means nothing. What DeeDee spent his life clumsily trying to make us understand is that, for him, it was never a decision. When you’re a dumb, bullied kid living in poverty with a violent alcoholic mother, things like this are not really ‘decisions’, any more than the feeling you get when you listen to a Stooges record is a ‘decision’, or being driven to hang out with other misfits who like The Stooges because there’s nobody else who’ll talk to you, and trying to fit in by starting a band with them, is a ‘decision’.

If life had allowed him a shot at it, maybe DeeDee would have been a supermarket delivery guy, or a baker, or whatever. Would he have been a totally kick-ass, legendary baker? Probably not, he’s a bit too all-over-the-place and irresponsible for that, but he would’ve done ok. He probably wouldn’t have written amazing songs like ‘Poison Heart’ and ‘53rd & 3rd’, and he probably wouldn’t have written this astounding book. But then, he also probably wouldn’t have got stabbed or passed out in public places quite so much, probably wouldn’t have been committed to so many mental institutions, wouldn’t have sold his ass on the street for dope money*, and wouldn’t have died of an overdose at the age of 50.

So… I guess what I’m saying is, that’s something for all you ‘punks’ to think about before you put on the leather jacket and take the path of most resistance. At the heart of your record collection, there’re some guys like Douglas Colvin who didn’t select this from a list of options. Rejecting the kind of grounded normality that they never even had a chance to touch is… fine if you wanna, but just remember that you’re basically just doing a Live Action Role Play of the people who weren’t given a choice in the matter.

Jesus, what the hell am I talking about? How did I end up going off on that particular tangent? Anyway, I think we’ve temporarily lost sight of the fact that, above all, this book is A HOOT. It’s hilarious, it’s action-packed, it’s incredibly weird, you can read it again and again and still find new stuff to marvel at. Get it. Get all these books in fact. Learn from them, and stare contentedly at their spines on the shelf. They will make you better at liking music.

*Allegedly. Not something he chooses to tell us about in this book, which is fair enough. ‘Please Kill Me’ has the dirt if yr particularly interested.

Labels: books, Dee Dee Ramone, The Ramones

#2
John Fahey –
How Bluegrass Music Destroyed my Life
(Drag City Press, 2000)

Put simply: if John Fahey had never played a note of music in his life, then written this book, he’d still be a genius.

Writing these posts over the past few weeks, I’ve come to realise that I’m actually quite bad at communicating the spirit of these great books without lapsing into the same bunch of overblown clichés each time.

As this one is actually one of my favourite books – music-related or otherwise – and is furthermore one that conveys a perspective on the world that is anything but overblown or clichéd, I’ll try to spare Fahey that ignoble fate, and do my best to stick to the facts.

I first became aware of John Fahey’s writing via the voluminous sleevenotes that accompany most of his early Takoma albums. Sadly I no longer have copies of these, because I got the CDs out of the library or borrowed them off friends, but I remember them as being absolutely superb - an inspired mixture of fake blues scholarship, wild poetical imaginings and vicious satirical humour that I wish someone (Drag City? Whatever’s left of Takoma these days?) would issue in book form, because I’d love to read them again one day.

It was through these sleevenotes, and Fahey’s similarly inspired song titles, that I first learned of the worship of the Great Koonaklaster and his totem animal the turtle, of the ways of the Cat People of Sligo Creek, and of the other bedrocks of Fahey’s personal mythology, all of which attain a significance beyond the level of mere obtuse injokes during the course of ‘How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life’.

In classic style, this volume was apparently compiled from a box of “sticky and suspiciously stained papers, covered edge to edge with intense and feverish prose”, provided by Fahey after Jim O’Rourke and other Drag City associates persuaded him to hand over some of his writing. Rather than the rambling madness you might expect however, Fahey’s manuscripts feel very much like the carefully managed result of years of careful refinement. Still unhinged, meandering and grouchy enough to beat the band of course (he's got a reputation to keep up, after all), but also a clear summation of the most important things he has learned and perceived in the course of many years of thinking, feeling and doing.

As well as having a lot of extremely interesting things to say, Fahey also wrote excellent prose, with a rare feel for language and rhythm. If he’d made the effort to get a volume or two of this kind of writing published during his lifetime, in a format that wasn’t viewed merely as the memoirs of an obscure, cultish musician, I have little doubt that he could have become a significant literary figure – hailed as a natural heir to the legacy of Brautigan and Vonnegut and etc etc etc, but with a far darker, more isolationist undercurrent than either.

Thinking further though, the whole notion of Fahey playing any role whatsoever in the fatuous, self-important world of American ‘letters’ seems supremely unlikely. Had any prospective publishers or writerly colleagues come calling, it’s likely he would have greeted them with the same disdain and disgust he seemingly reserved for a good 90% of the adult world. Beyond the shining lights of the few individuals he considered friends and ‘genuine’ people, Fahey seems to have considered even most of the residents of his own strange, small backwater of the music world with supreme suspicion, and his book goes someway towards explaining why.

As I say, I’m not going to go into it all here - I’m simply going to try to convince you to read it. And if you’re at all fond of reading books written by American people in the 20th century then I think you SHOULD read it, regardless of whether or not you give a hoot about John Fahey, or even know who he was.

Contrary to the title, this isn’t really a music book. Certainly, there is a lot of talk about music in it, and a lot of appearances by notable musicians, but that’s simply because that was the world Fahey inhabited. It’s not really a book about music, so much as it a book about Fahey’s unique and humane, but sometimes frighteningly extreme, philosophy of life, and the experiences (‘real’ or otherwise) that helped form it.

Of course, there are anecdotes. Mighty, wonderful anecdotes, about how he punched Michael Antonioni in the face, and saw a desperate and drunken Hank Williams play a secret concert on a riverboat shortly before his death. About how he and his accomplices hunted down Skip James in the depths of Louisiana and learned the dark secrets of the ‘Sphinx Chords’. About how he unlocked a vault of repressed childhood memories whilst fighting a monstrous ‘alligator gar fish’ on a fishing expedition with Bukka White. About how he fell in love with a witch, and played his guitar all night at the dance of the cat people and… wait, hang on a minute.

Well, as Damian Rogers says in his introduction, Fahey “..travels between worlds with the same nonchalance most of us feel catching a bus to work”. Who are we to judge which of his worlds are more or less ‘valid’, as movie directors and rock stars prattle their obscene fancies across the shelves in every airport and train station in the world, whilst this beautiful and visionary volume languishes remotely in a few hundred record collector lairs, gathering dust behind armoured miles of shellac..?

Well, so much for ‘just the facts’. Best make this all I’m going to say on the matter. Just read this book, for Great K’s sake.

Labels: books, John Fahey

#3
Charles Mingus –
Beneath the Underdog
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1971 / Canongate Books, 1995)

“ ‘Don’t bullschitt me. You’re a good man Charles, but there’s a lot of fabrication and fantasy in what you say. For instance, no man could have as much intercourse in one night as you claim to have had.’
‘The hell he couldn’t! Maybe I did exaggerate some things like the weight-lifting and all that ‘cause I didn’t really know how much those bar bells weighted but only two other guys could pick ‘em up and their feet sank into the ground!’
‘You’re changing the subject, my friend. I was asking about the Mexican girls. Why is it you’re obsessed with proving you’re a man? Is it because you cry?’”


Most people will know Charles Mingus for his work as a composer, bandleader and bassist, and as the creator of some of the most consistently inspired, challenging and popular music to emerge from mid 20th century American jazz.

Anyone who’s read ‘Beneath the Underdog’ though will of course be aware that Charles Mingus was actually a champion bodybuilder, sexual athlete, psychic warrior, kung-fu master, black power revolutionary, millionaire pimp, doomed romantic, notorious lunatic and spiritual visionary, who occasionally found a spare moment to bang out some tunes.

An all-time classic of the “fuck the truth baby, this is ME” school of autobiography, ‘..Underdog’ is probably by far the best-known book on this list, having been an underground hit and perennial ‘oh man, you gotta read this’ volume ever since its first publication. Anyone who ever met him will wax lyrical about what a fiery and idiosyncratic personality Mingus was, but I’m guessing that few fans quite realised what a thoroughly twisted, king freak genius he actually was until this book appeared.

Somehow managing to be both grotesquely self-aggrandising and coruscatingly humble at all times, ‘..Underdog’ takes something of an out-of-control steamroller approach to recounting numerous obstacles Mingus faced up to in his life, and the very American methods in which he chose to overcome them, through excess, violence, chest-beating psychodrama, financial intimidation and all-purpose destructive psychosis. Seems to have worked ok, all things considered.

Beginning (after the above-quoted introduction which recounts Ming arguing with his therapist) with the decidedly unnerving conception of his birth, Mingus initially introduces himself as a kind of free-roaming, incorporeal intelligence that one day finds itself watching over the progress of a poor, mixed race LA family. When their two year old son smashes his head open on what’s described as “a Goodwill store old-fashioned second hand-me-down white folks’ bedroom-set dresser” and is rushed to the emergency room, this nameless intelligence enters the body of the dying toddler, instigating a miraculous last minute ‘recovery’, and thereafter assuming the identity of ‘Charles Mingus’, directing the activities and observing the emotions of the human body assigned that name from a kind of detached, third person point of view.

Proceeding to outline the childhood of ‘Charles Mingus’, this nameless observational spirit subsequently launches what is actually a very straightforward and affecting account of a troubled kid growing up in Watts in the ‘20s and ‘30s. The central obsessions that came to dominate his adult life are already strongly in evidence, but by and large it’s solid memoir type business. It’s only when we get to the grown up portion of the book that things start to get weird. And, communicated with Mingus’s breathless, almost violent need to unload and exaggerate, they get pretty weird pretty quickly.

In short, there’s no way to easily encapsulate what follows. As bilious and impossible to unpack as its author’s most confrontational music, and it’s too heavy for me to dive back into just for the sake of this post, but needless to say, it’s a hell of a read, full of hilarious anecdotes and wild gonzo imaginings that seem to frame his life as an ever-escalating landslide of decadence and turmoil.

I think the highlight of the book for me probably comes when Mingus reportedly finds himself chilling at the piano in his penthouse apartment, trying to compose an ode of deep spiritual love, but constantly finding himself interrupted by the three beautiful ladies who are violently competing for his attention – shrieking and tearing each others clothes, sprawling across his keyboard, pulling at his arms and the like. Tiring of this distraction, he immediately sets out to buy some easels and other art supplies, declaring that the women should all paint his portrait, and that the one whom he deems to have produced the most worthwhile work of art and captured his inner being most convincingly, he will put aside the time to sleep with.

You wouldn’t think a guy who rolls like that would find so much in life to complain about, but the tempestuous mixture of materialism, vanity and spirituality revealed in such stories seems to lie at the heart of Mingus’s view of the world, and any chuckles that may arise are undercut by a thorough ringing out of the racial identity crises, endless paranoia and deep-rooted sense of inadequacy that plagued Mingus throughout his life – issues that form the central pillar around which this ridiculous, psychotic, wonderful excuse for a memoir revolves, his basic plea for a post-racial, post-classist society in which individuals may be judged solely upon their achievements sounding out more reasonable and obvious than ever, for all the braggadocio and neurosis he surrounds it with.

Labels: books, Charles Mingus, jazz

#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