#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

A Brief Tribute to Billy Fury.

One of the best gigs I went to in the whole of 2008 (and boy did I ever go to some good ones), and one of my best memories of last summer overall, was Calvin Johnson, playing at a youth club in Finsbury Park.

I won’t talk about the show in great detail, cos that’s not the point of this post, (although if you go to the Upset The Rhythm website and refresh the banner at the top enough times, you’ll be rewarded with a shot of myself and various pals looking rapturous in the audience), but: go see him!

During one of his always entertaining digressions, Calvin started talking about how he’d always wanted to play in Liverpool when touring with the Beat Happening, but had never been able to, until now. “You see, one of my greatest musical heroes came from Liverpool”, he said. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the audience respond with psychic eye-rolling smileys. He kept going on about it though, talking about what a great, musical city Liverpool is, and how dubious UK promoters had always discouraged him from going there for one reason or another…. until finally he exploded; “I mean, BILLY FURY came from Liverpool!”

I think I was still laughing my ass of at this classic reversal-of-expectation, as Calvin – obvious a sincere and very big fan - explained that he’d gone to visit a statue of Billy Fury when in Liverpool a few days previous (and what a statue – see above), and proceeded to rhapsodise about the pure genius of the lyrical phrasing on one of Fury’s b-sides (sadly I forget which one).

If I was familiar with the name Billy Fury at all at this point, it was as one of the memorably nom-de-plumed stable of prefabricated late 50s/early 60s pre-Beatles British pop idols managed by archetypal gay Denmark St. impresario Larry Parnes (also see Johnny Gentle, Marty Wilde etc.). Runners up to Cliff Richard basically, playing watered down rock n’ roll and Tin Pin Alley standards in an ‘all round entertainer’ mould to square seaside theatre crowds.

Count the unfair assumptions in the preceding sentence and despair I guess, but nonetheless, that’s the way canonical rock history has judged these guys: look elsewhere punks, nothing to see here.

Reinforcing this impression, I next came across some references to Fury last month, whilst reading Ray Davies’ superb and bizarre autobiography/paranoid ego fantasy ‘X-Ray’ (read it, read it, read it). Early in their career, Ray relates, The Kinks were assigned a fastidious git of a tour manager, to drill the unruly teenage rockers into a shapely entertainment unit. This guy, it seems, was particularly keen on talking about how he used to work for Billy Fury, and what a consummate entertainer and gentleman Billy used to be, in contrast to the disobedient young thugs he was now forced to deal with.

Reprimanding Dave Davies for absent-mindedly pissing out of the window on one occasion, it seems this tour manager, when challenged, exclaimed that not only did the sainted Billy Fury restrict his pissing to designated toilets like a decent human being, but, IN FACT, Billy Fury was such a professional that he never remembered him going to the toilet AT ALL.

Cue hilarity from The Kinks, as the generation gap widens further, and Billy Fury’s professionalism becomes a running joke amongst them forever more as a procession of grown ups try to tell them how to behave.

But, as a slightly overenthusiastic contributor to Billy’s Wikipedia page puts it, “Fury's fans and contemporaries in music knew he was a rocker and the real thing musically”, and, curiosity suitably piqued by these contrasting references, I’ve recently been listening to ‘Billy Fury: The EP Collection’ on See For Miles records. And I’m afraid to say, I’m going to have to side with Calvin and the Wikipedia guy, because, genital-less anti-rock n’ roller or not, some of these Billy Fury tracks absolutely kick ass!

Ok, there are some lame songs (and a ‘Christmas Prayer’), but, especially compared to the morass of sloppily recorded MOR dreck that comprised much of pre-Beatles commercial British pop, most of these cuts are just extraordinary in their shining, slinky, fulsome awesomeness, comparable to the contemporary work of Sam Cooke, Buddy Holly, Phil Spector, Elvis… etc.

Check it out:

Wondrous Place
Saved
Play It Cool
Don’t Jump

If I don’t hear those gettin’ laid down at the next Upset The Rhythm noise scenester type happening I attend, something’s going wrong.

(Stereo Sanctity does not condone pissing out of windows by the way, even if you are Dave Davies.)

Labels: 1960s, Billy Fury, Calvin Johnson, pop, The Kinks