Watch the Kinks' Ray and Dave Davies Reunite Onstage - Rolling Stone Dave Davies on the Kinks: 'Where There's Life, There's Hope' The Kinks guitarist on his new live album, an upcoming biopic and those never-ending reunion questions "We had a great night - it was a fun show - had a blast with Ray," Dave Davies tweeted after the gig. The Kinks hadn't performed together in any capacity since the conclusion of their 1996 summer tour, and it had been 20 years since the Davies brothers were on a London stage together. For Kinks fans, the surprise "You Really Got Me" ignited renewed hope that the Davies brothers would put aside their years of bickering and animosity and finally solidify a reunion. In September, Dave Davies spoke to Rolling Stone about whether the Kinks would reunite after disbanding in 1996. " I'd say there's an outside shot ," Davies said. "But where there's life, there's hope. I know Ray has a lot coming up, and I do as well, so we'll see how things span out in the next few months.

A lot of it depends on how Ray and I feel by the end of the year, physically, emotionally and psychologically. I wish I could give you a more definitive answer, but I don't want to jump the gun." "If we do a Kinks show, we're the Kinks," Ray Davies told Rolling Stone in November 2014. "Ray stands on the right of the stage and Dave stands on the left. Look, my brother is very intelligent. He's a good writer." Two years ago, when asked about a Kinks' 50th anniversary tour, Dave Davies similarly responded, "I'd say the odds of that happening are 50/50 . The ball is very much in Ray's court." While the 50th anniversary trek didn't materialize, the Kinks do have a good reason to reunite in 2016: You Really Got Me, a Julien Temple-directed biopic about the Kinks, is set to begin shooting in March. Dave Davies told Rolling Stone in September that meetings for You Really Got Me had opened up a dialogue between the brothers. "I saw him just a week ago," Davies said at the time of Ray.

"The last thing he said to me was, 'I'll call you soon and we'll have a cup of tea.' But he hasn't called yet. I'm sure he's really busy." Dave Davies added that he keeps in e-mail contact with drummer Mick Avory, but they haven't spoken face-to-face in years. Don’t Miss a Story Sign up for our newsletter to receive breaking news directly in your inbox. We may use your e-mail address to send you the newsletter and offers that may interest you, on behalf of Rolling Stone and its partners. For more information please read our Privacy Policy How we use your email address Trending Ranked on a scale from 1 to 10, the trending score reflects the number of users reading a story in real time. What is this? The Members | The Kinks Official Website STORE The Members As both cofounder of the Kinks and an iconoclastic solo artist Dave Davies is one of rocks most influential and identifiable figures. His innovative guitar work has been a seminal influence upon multiple generations of musicians, and his uncompromising persona has established himself as an enduring icon of rock and roll attitude.

Ray Davies CBE, one of the most successful and influential songwriters to emerge from the British Invasion of the 1960s, founded the rock band The Kinks with his brother Dave and Pete Quaife in London in 1963. Davies was born in Muswell Hill London, the seventh of eight children, including six older sisters and younger brother Dave. Mick Avory, born 15 February 1944, in East Molesey, Surrey, drummed with The Kinks from January 1964 to 1984, making him the longest-serving member of the band, beside the Davies brothers. Pete Quaife, born New Year's Eve 1943 in Tavistock, Devon, was a founding member and the original bassist for The Kinks from 1963 to 1969. Quaife and the Davies brothers founded a group known as The Ravens in 1962, as they all attended William Grimshaw secondary school in Muswell Hill.

Ray Davies Says Kinks Probably Won’t Reunite Due to Dave Davies-Mick Avory Rivalry « Radio.com Related: 8 Best Dave Davies Moments with The Kinks A few months ago, Davies hinted at a Kinks reunion when he told England’s Sunday Times that the band’s members have resolved their many differences. Many may have interpreted that statement to mean that Davies and his brother/bandmate Dave Davies are now getting along. But now, it seems like it’s another conflict that is preventing the reunion from happening. Ray cites the bad blood between Dave and drummer Mick Avory as the reason why the band may not get back together. Related: The Kinks Announce Massive Reissue Campaign “I really can’t play with my brother as that name, the Kinks, and not have Mick in,” Ray Davies told England’s Telegraph . “Mick will work with him but Dave doesn’t want to work with Mick. Sibling rivalry is nothing on their rivalry. I have no idea what’s wrong with them.” The Telegraph then asked whether this conflict is insuperable. “Yeah.

This week it is.” Related: Q&A: Dave Davies Talks Documentary, Oasis as The Kinks 2.0 Dave Davies and Mick Avory have had a famously rough relationship , and last year, Dave Davies told Radio.com that he would rather that Avory not be involved in a potential reunion, simply saying that he wants “to move forward.” Avory was with the Kinks from 1964 through 1984; the band continued on after he left, finally splitting up in the mid-’90s. The other founding member of the Kinks is bass player Pete Quaife, who passed away in 2010. Dave Davies - Biography - IMDb Dave Davies Biography Showing all 21 items Jump to: Overview (3) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (1) | Trade Mark (3) | Trivia (10) | Personal Quotes (3) Overview (3) 5' 10½" (1.79 m) Mini Bio (1) Dave Davies is the brother of Ray Davies, the lead singer and songwriter of the Kinks, of which he was the leader singer up to 1964, when Ray joined.

Dave was the lead guitarist and backup singer for the Kinks. He created the distorted riff for "You Really Got Me" by taking a sharp object (either a razor or a knitting needle) and slashing the speaker cone of his Elpico amp, and driving it into a VOX AC30. He continued to use this sound for much of their early material (notably on "All Day and All of the Night" and "Till the End of the Day"). Compared to his brother, Dave lived a rather lavish lifestyle. He would spend a lot of money on fancy outfits on Carnaby Streets, and top of the line guitars, such as his Gibson Flying V. It is clear that Ray wrote songs like "Dedicated Follower of Fashion", "Dandy", and maybe even "Starstruck" with him in mind. He had his share of feuds with Ray, and other band members often found it hard to get along with him, particularly the drummer, Mick Avory. Nevertheless, he was a brilliant musician, and a decent songwriter.

He had a solo single with "Death of a Clown" in 1967, and contributed other songs such as "Strangers", "Rats", "Living on a Thin Line", "Wait Til the Summer Comes Along", "Mindless Child of Motherhood", and "This Man He Weeps Tonight". The latter few were influenced by a high school relationship which ended in an unwanted pregnancy, something that deeply haunted Davies. Today he continues to tour on his own. Unfortunately, he is not on good terms with his brother, Ray, and both have dismissed the possibility of a Kinks reunion. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Eli Rosen Spouse (1) Goofy mannerisms and fancy clothes such as tophat in music videos 1958 Gibson Flying V Younger brother of Ray Davies . Elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (as a member of The Kinks ) in 1990. He had a daughter, Tracy, at the age of 15. He married Lisbet in 1967 and they had 4 sons; Martin, Simon, Christian and Russell. He has three children, Daniel Davies , Lana Davies and Eddie, from his relationship with Nancy.

Both Daniel and Lana are musicians. Lana has released her music through the Internet. Daniel is lead guitarist in "Year Long Disaster". The band's name stems from the events of 2004 affecting Ray and Dave Davies. In 2004, the same year his estranged brother Ray Davies was shot in the leg by a thief, he suffered a stroke while in an elevator. His recovery has gone well, but has not yet returned to the stage as of winter 2008. In their original stage, The Kinks (or as they were then known, The Ravens) were originally gathered and led by a 15-year-old Dave, who also wrote the few original songs that they performed at the time. His older brother Ray Davies joined the group merely as a rhythm guitarist and backing singer. It was only when they changed to The Kinks that Ray took over as front-man and the main songwriter. A revolving door of bassists and, eventually, keyboard-players and drummers went through The Kinks as the two Davies brothers gained infamy among musicians for Dave's allegedly abusive, irresponsible behavior and Ray's controlling, superior attitude.

Although a great majority of the better-known Kinks songs were Ray Davies compositions, Dave wrote and sang lead on several Kinks classics as well, including "Death of a Clown", "Susannah's Still Alive", and "Rats". Finishing work on a film, Dave Davies Kronikles: Mystical Journey, said to be released before Christmas 2008. [November 2008] Personal Quotes (3) "It wasn't called 'heavy metal' when I invented it." - when asked in the 80s if The Kinks were trying to play "heavy metal". I've always thought there was a conspiracy at work to prevent The Kinks being the top band in the world. Whenever we were doing well, something shit would happen and we'd fall flat on our asses. It's been like that throughout our career. I suppose it's an inborn thing that I don't like to be made to do anything.

See also Dave Davies - Out Of the Ordinary - Guitar Magazine Dave Davies - Out Of the Ordinary By Danny McCue Guitar Magazine - February 1990 Dave "The Rave" Davies, lead guitarist and founding member of the Kinks, sits in a straight-backed chair next to a simple table, in the lobby of the Parker-Meridian Hotel in New York City. Perhaps indicative of the Meridian's reputation as a musician's hotel - as I waited for Davies, a band checked out; during the interview, Gene Simmons walked by, flipping down his shades - no one interrupts us for an autograph. Davies apologizes for being slightly sleepy. "You've caught me first thing in the morning," he chuckles, before sitting down. Soon he begins to peel off the years, as he talks about his earliest guitar experi ences. Prior to the Kinks, Dave was a big fan of the Ventures. "I think the Ventures were a fantastic band. I used to like their B-sides. I remember one they had out called 'No Trespassing.' It's fabulous.

It's quite heavy for the time, and the rhythm guitar player was actually the first I ever heard who played just the three strings that comprised the bass notes, rather than the whole chord. That was a good excuse not to play the whole thing. Pete Quaife, who was one of the original members of the Kinks, and I, had a band at school and we used to do instrumental things." Thus, the genesis of the sound of the most famous band to come out of Muswell Hill, North London. The band at this point was called the Ravens, and Dave's brother Ray, soon to be the architect of international hits, was still at college and exploiting his connections with the local jazz scene, earning extra money as a rhythm guitarist and harmonica player with the Dave Hunt Blues Band. Dave Davies, in the meantime, worked on his image, patterned after Eddie Cochran. His mother gave him the down payment for his first guitar, a Harmony Meteor; the hire/purchase card, which he still has, bears the marks of a series of 30 shilling payments.

"The trouble is, I haven't got the guitar, which is a bit sad." In 1963, Ray Davies left Dave Hunt and became a permanent member of brother Dave's band; shortly thereafter, they became the Kinks. "Until Ray decided to make it with our band, the people he played with were coming out of the jazz-influenced side of music, and I think what we were doing was more unique, purely rock and blues influenced, and something the musicians he had been working with looked down on. There's this great film, 'Jazz on a Summer's Day' (a documentary of the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival), It was one of Chuck Berry's first appearances at a major festival, and he was the only real rock n' roller on it. His back-up band was a jazz band, and he was playing out of tune and yet he was great, and you could see in that film that those musicians sitting behind him really didn't like him. They were looking down on him. But he knew he had something.

I found that a really big influence." The film had another influence on the band, which was signed to Pye Records by producer Shel Talmy, in January 1964. It inspired the record which, after two flops - a cover of "Long Tall Sally" and an obscure original, "You Still Want Me" - became the first record by a native combo other than the Beatles to sell a million copies in Britain alone. "Ray was a great fan of Gerry Mulligan, who was in that film, and as he sat at the piano at home, he sort of messed around in a vein similar to Mulligan and came up with this figure based on a 12 bar blues - if you were in G, you'd go to C - from that we wanted to do a varia tion on the blues, so we decided we'd go from G to A and A to D. [When we recorded] "You Really Got Me," it was like we were running out of time in the studio, because we re-recorded it after deciding we didn't like the original version, which was slower.

It was like, whatever I did was what we used, and if you hear it, it's got that anxiety about it (laughs), 'They're going to throw us out of the studio any minute!'" Talmy offers another reason, besides re-recording, for the Kinks' early rushed sessions: "One of the problems, which I tried to keep from them, was the guy who ran Pye at the time was one of the worst people I ever had the displeasure of meeting," he says, a day after the interview with Davies. "He was really a bastard, even as inexpensive as things were in comparison to now, in terms of, 'You can't spend more than this, and if you do, it's coming out of your (meaning my) bread, as opposed to the band's.' I tried not to rush them, but in many ways, I had a gun to my head." Talmy used three different microphones to capture the sound of Davies' guitar; one to capture the sound of the strings, up near the fretboard, one near Dave's amp, a Marshall, and another, more distant from the amp.

"I'm sure he told you he used a razorblade on the cone and that he kicked the amplifier to get that fuzz," says Talmy. "That's true, and it was my job to then translate that onto tape." Recalls Davies: "I didn't like any of the guitar amps we had at the time, and I got ahold of this little amplifier from a radio shop that was just up the road. It was only a little 10 or 12 watt amplifier, and one day, in a fit of frustration, I cut up the speakers with a razorblade. That's how I started to get the distorted sound [that carried over to the records]." By early 1965, after the monstrous success of "You Really Got Me" and its follow-up, the equally power-chord heavy "All Day and All of the Night," the Kinks, despite charting better than such good natured rivals as the Rolling Stones - who leaked a story to a Fleet Street daily that one of the Kinks had six toes on each foot - felt a need to switch gears or else be trapped in one groove.

The result was "Tired of Waiting for You." "It's a ballad, isn't it?" asks Davies. "That was the first hit ballad - 'hit ballad,' that sounds really weird - that we ever had. That song had been around quite some years. It was an instrumental that Ray and I used to play together 'cause Ray's a good guitar picker, really - and then he wrote a lyric to it and we recorded it, but it didn't sound right. The guitar parts weren't strong enough. So I went in and put the heavier rhythm guitar part on last, after it was finished." The Live Kinks, recorded a full three years before the Stone's Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out and released a decade before The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl, provides a Pandora's Box-top look into an era when screeching girls were louder than the band onstage and the Kinks were loose enough to interpolate the Batman television show theme into their set. A few nights after it was recorded, Dave Davies was knocked unconscious during a concert in London, resulting in the rest of the tour being canceled.

"It was a weird period, because you'd get up onstage and you'd play for like ten minutes, and they'd be screaming at you - there was no point in actually playing - we used to have a little private bet before some gigs; we'd say, Well, are we going to be onstage 10 minutes to night, or 12, or 20?' And some nights you might have a little bit more to drink, thinking you'd only be onstage for 15 minutes. I'm sure that happened." Asked if he found the situation frustrating as a guitarist, Davies replied, "It was dreadful, but I liked it.

That period was a lark, and it was only after a few years, when things started to settle down a little, that we realized that we were doing this for a living, and that we'd better relearn our instruments." With that new sense of dedication to their craft also came an emerging devotion on the part of the principle writer, Ray, to the habits, quirks, and small pleasure taken by a typically middle-class Englishman - as witnessed by the string of singles that followed: "A Well Respected Man," "Dedicated Follower of Fashion," and "Sunny Afternoon." The songs also showed off another side of Dave Davies' guitar playing, the perfect accompanist for an evening in an old fashioned English music hail. "The blues influence is always there, but you can't help but be influenced by what's going on around you. At that time, Ray was probably the only writer doing what they used to call 'social commentary.' Later things we did, people didn't like, especially when we touched on the period of Arthur (an LP originally commissioned as a teleplay by UK Granada TV; its subject is an ordinary man reflecting on his life), which I got great satisfaction out of.

When we started to do that, I really thought, 'This is what the Kinks really mean. This is what we're going for.' And it was not accepted in England at all. People got the wrong end of the stick." It should be noted that the Kinks took the pastoral route at precisely the same time that the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and Clapton was "God." Davies addresses the divergence in style: "I suppose we always felt like misfits in a way. Whenever there was a trend, we always stood out of the way to let it pass." And then, with a little instigation, he takes on the idea of the holy guitar triumverate - Clapton, Beck, and Page. "Maybe I'm a bit obstinate, but I didn't really feel they affected me. I thought it was strange at the time when Jimmy Page thought that he invented the guitar at one point. Really, I think [the concept] was just another side effect of the drugs, and the ego and the glamour of the time. I think it got a bit carried away.

Page actually played tambourine on one of our records, and all of a sudden he's got these great delusions that he's partly responsible for some of the Kink's mu sic, which he wasn't." "Lola," which was a big chart hit in 1970, heralded the Kinks' return to mainstream success. "'Lola' was written in a similar way to 'You Really Got Me.' We got together in Ray's front room, and Ray had the basic idea of the song, the skeleton idea for this song, and I just started playing E in the bottom position, moved it up to A, leaving the E string open and in the chord. Ray said, 'Ah, that's great. Let's put that in as well.' [As a songwriter] Ray has a very firm idea about what he wants to do, and I try to accommodate him as best I can, but I think in certain areas, on certain songs, there's a lot more collaboration than people realize. Although Ray and I don't get on particularly well, there's a lot of empathy and unspoken energy that goes toward the finished product.

"I think a rock 'n' roll record should start off being a song and should end up being a song. I think that everything around it should be complementary to it, or help it to evolve, rather than get in its way. I've always tried to keep that in mind as a guitar player. Rather than say, 'Let's start with the guitar and a 16 bar solo.' It's the song that's important, and the individual parts add to it." The band, ever volatile internally, went through another of its episodic down periods in the mid-70s, finding its way again after a label change, at this juncture from RCA to Arista, and the release of Sleepwalker, their finest over all effort of the decade. They also got an unexpected career boost from bands copying their old hits, something Davies considers a compliment; but in the case of one of the most famous, he harbors a slight twinge of misgiving. On Van Halen's version of "You Really Got Me," Dave says, 'It's flattering, but it was sort of techno-flashy, which I think is not how the whole force behind the song came about.

The song came out of a working class environment, people fighting for something, whereas Van Halen's ver sion sounds like people who've got everything they need. It's not the same feeling, but it's flattering nonetheless." In 1979, the Kinks released Low Budget, and the single off the album, "I Wish I Could Fly Like Superman" - a disco flavored tune - became their biggest hit in years. On its heels, they began three years of constant touring. "I think that one was, not the biggest mistake, but it could've been one of the biggest mistakes we made. I remember I had quite a difficult time with Ray while we were making the record, because I didn't like the direction it was going. It was a strange time for music in general, anyway. The fact that it's funny, that it was a humorous song, saved it.

I don't feel bad about that song at all, but it could have been a big mistake." After peaking commercially with One for the Road, one of the great live al bums of any era, the Kinks have gone through a peculiar time in the 80s, the most obvious symptom being a tenden cy on the part of Ray Davies to recycle the songs of their own past, like "Destroyer," a rift-by-rift recreation of "All Day and All of the Night," and "Sleazy-town" a recasting of their late 70's ode to Arab oil interests, "Gallon of Gas." It's something that has led to a series of Dave Davies solo albums: PL 1 3603, Glamour, and Chosen People, but as the Kinks are his reputation, one has to wonder if he's felt more limited of late. "Yeah, sometimes," he says. "It got to a point that whenever we were going to play something in G, I'd say, 'I don't want to do it in G. Let's try another key.' You canï¿½t just sit down and play "You Really Got Me" rifts the rest of your life.

That's why a lot of heavy metal tends to tall down for me, because it starts to sound like you can take the members of one band and put them in other bands and itï¿½ll sound similar to how it sounded before. Youï¿½ve got to try and develop individual clarities and uniqueness." Today, touring behind U.K. Jive, the Kinks first album since disbanding temporarily at the conclusion of their '88 tour, Dave Davies finds peace of mind in the tact that three of his own compositions, "Bright Lights," "Perfect Strangers", and "Dear Margaret," wound up on the new album. Previously, he'd been allowed only a single song per LP (about the same as George Harrison's quota on Beatles' records). And although something of an elder states man, he still gets a guitar out in his hotel room when on tour, "Playing for enjoy ment. I practice, but then I start writing songs; trying to play something I never played before." Onstage, he prefers a Fender Elite, a limited edition, which he likes because the feel, he says, is like that of a Telecaster, while the pickups are a little ballsier than the standard Tele's.

"They suit my playing, because I don't like to fiddle around too much with different sounds onstage. I like to keep things simple and I find I can play light things with a clean sound, and do heavier things without too much messing around. They're a good workhorse." Summing up his place in the guitar scheme of things, Davies is unabashedly frank. "Without sounding too modest," he says, "I think that guitar sound circa 'You Really Got Me,' and 'All Day and All of the Night,' has influenced more guitarists than any other. To think that people are still doing that rift, or that sound based on that sort of rift; it's quite good really. It makes me sort of feel like I invented the Dam Buster - a bomb they invented in England that would bounce on the water until it came to a Dam, then blow up." He shrugs.

"Not that that's a particularly good thing to invent, a bomb." By Danny McCue - Guitar Magazine, February 1990 The Kinks' Dave Davies on Reuniting with Brother Ray: "I Hope We Do Something Before We Die" - Music News - ABC News Radio The Kinks' Dave Davies on Reuniting with Brother Ray: "I Hope We Do Something Before We Die" Share Article Credit: Rebecca G. WilsonThis past year marked the 50th anniversary of The Kinks, but the much-hoped-for reunion of the band's surviving members in celebration of the milestone has yet to materialize. The group's founding lead guitarist Dave Davies says he hasn't given up hope, but admits that he and his brother, Kinks frontman Ray Davies, still need to iron things out before a reunion project can move forward. "It'd be a shame if me and Ray didn't try and do something, but I don't know what we're gonna do," he recently told ABC News Radio.

"I hope we do something before we die anyway." He pointed out that if he and Ray did agree to organize a reunion, it likely would happen "closer to the [band's] 51st anniversary." Asked if he thought The Kinks might consider doing a series of shows, Dave said, "That would be nice, but I think to do just one event somewhere would be good enough for me." Meanwhile, 2014 was a busy year for the 68-year-old Rock and Hall of Famer. He released a new album titled Rippin' Up Time -- his second studio effort in just over a year -- and supported it with plenty of solo shows. Looking ahead, Dave told ABC News Radio that he and his son Martin are "doing the finishing touches" on a documentary called Rock 'n Roll Journey that he began in 2013, when he returned to the stage for the first time since suffering a debilitating stroke in 2004. The movie originally was slated to be released last year, but now likely will see light of day sometime in 2015. "It's basically a tour movie but with some interviews, like with me and fans," he explained. "A journey.

Dave Davies's rock 'n' roll journey, which incorporates a lot of Kinks stuff and…historical places that we talked about and interviewed about and showed in London. You know, so I'd be very excited to get that out." (AUDIO IS ABC 1-ON-1) A preview trailer for the film that premiered online in October 2013 shows Dave walking around the Muswell Hill area of London, where he and Ray grew up, and reminiscing about his younger days. Davies also revealed over the weekend in a message on his Twitter account that he's working on a live album that will feature performances from his most recent concerts. Dave currently has no upcoming tour dates scheduled, but you can find out the latest about his upcoming plans by visiting DaveDavies.com .

Ray Davies - Biography - IMDb Ray Davies Biography Showing all 53 items Jump to: Overview (3) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (3) | Trade Mark (5) | Trivia (29) | Personal Quotes (12) Overview (3) 6' (1.83 m) Mini Bio (1) Ray Davies was born on June 21, 1944 in Fortis Green, which is located in Muswell Hill, north of London, England. He was the seventh of eighth children, and with his younger brother Dave, he was one of the only two boys in his family. In 1963, he joined Dave's band The Ravens on rhythm guitar and vocals. He later rose to the position of chief songwriter and singer. Between 1964 and 1965, The Kinks released other hits such as "All Day and All of the Night", "Til the End of the Day", "Tired of Waiting for You", and others. Unfortunately, like most brothers, Ray and Dave Davies often were prone to sibling rivalry, and could act violent towards each other and the rest of the band.

This behavior may have contributed to the American Musicians Union issuing a four-year touring ban against them. Since this would prevent them from enjoying the prosperity of the British Invasion that their contemporaries enjoyed, Ray decided to seek a new direction in songwriting. His songs would reflect on his childhood and the days of the British empire, when the class system was going strong, and poverty was great. This style was evident on The Kinks' next four albums, Face To Face (1966), Something Else by The Kinks (1967), The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968), and Arthur, or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1969). In 1970, they released perhaps their most famous LP, Lola Vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part 1. This record spawned their trademark "Lola", along with other great songs such as "Apeman", "Get Back in Line", "Powerman", and others. Muswell Hillbillies followed the next year, which was perhaps their last commercially successful album.

From the 1970s in the early 1990s, the Kinks' career proved to be a roller coaster of commercial success, and failure. Perhaps part of the reason for this was the bitter rivalry between Dave and Ray Davies which could never be fully resolved. The band went through a revolving door of backing musicians, and in the mid-1990s, the Kinks split up. Today Ray Davies performs solo. He has four solo albums to date and is also involved in theater and television. In early 2004, he gallantly chased after a thief who stole his girlfriend's purse, and was shot in the leg. A week before that, he was awarded a CBE by Queen Elizabeth for his services to music. He has since recovered and continues to perform. His influence has been significant. He has gained a considerable following in his own native Britain, and Pete Townshend from The Who has credited him as his favorite songwriter. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Eli Rosen Spouse (3) ( 12 November 1964 - 1973) (divorced) (2 children) Pat Crosby Trade Mark (5) His introspective songwriting method.

Songs often deal with the changing values of his native England and the decline of the British Empire. Often wrote songs about the music business Distinctive English Accent Sizeable gap in between his front teeth. Trivia (29) Older brother of Dave Davies . Elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (as a member of The Kinks ) in 1990. Fathered a child, Natalie Rae Hynde, with Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders while still married to his second wife. His song "Apeman" was covered by former Marillion singer Fish on his album "Songs From the Mirror" (released 1993). Sadly, he has barely been on speaking terms with his brother and musical collaborator Dave since they recorded their last album as The Kinks in the early 1990s. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2003 Queen's New Year's Eve Honours List for his services to music. In 2003, when a mugger stole his girlfriend's purse, he valiantly chased the man but was then shot in the leg by the thief.

He has another daughter with dancer, Pat Crosby. He is the uncle of writer/producer, Lawrence Kane , who helped Ray recover from his gunshot wound in New Orleans. Davies was in many ways unique among the frontmen in British rock bands from the 1960s. He never got into drugs or affiliated himself with "hippie" culture (nor did his band), although The Kinks did present themselves as hard-drinking. Davies was also never a Lothario in the ranks with his contemporaries, and he married at a very young age. By all accounts a quiet, unapproachable type off stage, Davies had a series of nervous breakdowns as a young man, which led to him being hospitalized twice. Director Wes Anderson originally intended to have the whole of Rushmore (1998) set to songs by The Kinks . Anderson changed his mind when he wanted to use a series of songs by other bands from the "British Invasion", although he kept the Davies/Kinks song, "Nothin' In This World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl". His British rock contemporary Pete Townshend has said that Ray Davies is probably his favorite songwriter of all time.

The Kinks ' single, "See My Friends", was the first British songs (and possibly Western) to integrate a Indian, sitar-like sound. This song and, shortly thereafter, the similarly sitar-based "Fancy" preceded the first Beatles song with an Indian feel, "Norwegian Wood", by a year. One of the most admired British songwriters, his songs have been covered by hundreds of artists. Well known versions of his songs include The Jam 's "David Watts", The Pretenders ' "Stop Your Sobbing", The Stranglers ' "All Day and All of the Night", David Bowie 's "Where Have All the Good Times Gone" and Van Halen 's "You Really Got Me". When The Kinks opened a show on the same bill as The Beatles, The Beatles (in particularly John Lennon ) behaved rudely and dismissively towards them. However, when The Kinks released their more introspective album "Face to Face", Lennon was said to have listened to it obsessively. The original name of The Kinks was The Ravens. The Kinks were voted the 64th Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Artists of all time by Rolling Stone.

With four to five band members at one time, there have been 11 members of The Kinks , with only Ray and his brother Dave Davies having belonged since the founding of the group. They have gone through two drummers ( Mick Avory and Bob Henrit), three keyboardists (John Gosling, Gordon Edwards, and Ian Gibbins ), and four bass-guitarists ( Peter Quaife , John Dalton, Andy Pyle, and Jim Rodford ). In an early stage of The Kinks , before Davies was willing to be the lead singer, they recruited Rod Stewart (who grew up in the same area as the Davies brothers, Muswell Hill) as a singer. After a couple of weeks of trying to be a band, Stewart and the future Kinks found that they did not get along that well, with their musical tastes being too different, and parted ways. "Very Gothic, creepy and silent. Uptight and fearful of everyone." - Marianne Faithfull 's description of Davies and The Kinks . Winner of the 2006 Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. His song "Waterloo Sunset" won the 2005 Q Classic Song Award.

The Kinks were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame for their outstanding contribution to British music and integral part of British music culture. (16 November 2005). He is a big fan of and considers himself in the tradition of William Blake . Despite its heavy guitar sound, he actually wrote "You Really Got Me" on his parent's piano. He was born in Muswell Hill, London, England. He and his brother Dave Davies have six older sisters. They lived on Denmark Terrace, Fortis Green, London, England. Crouch End, London, England [May 2009] He was awarded the Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire in the 2017 Queen's New Years Honours List for his services to the Arts. He is a musician in London, England. Personal Quotes (12) If I had to my life to do over, I would change every single thing I have done. We had a singing family. If we'd been in Appalachia, we would have been a Country & Western family. We had all that inbreeding, too - the Second World War was quite a time. When in doubt, trust your paranoia.

The Kaiser Chiefs are funny, "Employment" was good, though I'm not quite sure whether they're supposed to be The Pretty Things or The Rolling Stones . Keep you nose clean and your chin up, even if it requires surgery. Obviously the person who shot me, I think he was a career criminal, he knew what he was doing it was premeditated, he knew what he was doing. It made me really sort of think about the issue of gun control. I'm not a violent person. I'm an athletic person, I'm a competitive person. That kind of violence is abhorrent to me. I get passionate, I get angry but I wouldn't think of doing that to anybody. I went through a phase in the hospital, I nearly died at one point because of complications with my heart. But I actually felt sorry for him to have actually reached that point. He wasn't a desperate guy but he kind of looked scared. We had eyeball contact. It made me think, not so much about gun control but what actually drives humans to actually do that, to get in that spectrum. It's a bigger, bigger bigger spectrum than this.

It leads to warfare, why people fight, why people have wars, all these horrors going on in the world, it just opened up all these questions that are still unanswered and I still haven't come to terms with it yet. I was very lucky to escape. Every song has its own voodoo attached to it. I think the inspiration for a lot of those early songs, I didn't realize it so much until I finished the book and read the proofs back, was a big family influence on me. Obviously when you are starting out you don't really see that, it's only when you look back and you appraise things, I guess you see where the real inspiration came form. I think because it was the first time that music had been done on such a scale with lots of bands coming from, basically working class origins and making music and not being particularly pretty. You know the pretty boy image really wasn't the thing. The Hollies were great to us, they helped me a lot and very supportive and in a way I suppose The Beatles were as well. -on British rock music in the mid-1960s Well it's good. I think the similarity is that I think they're writing songs.....

Music goes in phases and in England it goes around fairly quickly. The fashions come in and out and I think what they are doing is writing songs about things they know about, which is where they come from and the local stories. I think that's where the similarities with the Kinks is because I think our early records were like that. For a long time, particularly in the 1980's, I think English bands were trying to sound like, writing about American experiences or drawing on things out of their own experience and knowledge and that tends to make the music sound different. I think lyrically Blur and Oasis, they're are very similar in that respect. I didn't want to write an ordinary autobiography because it just didn't interest me, recounting things that I remember that happened. I thought if I had this device of using a young journalist, who basically is me anyway, meeting myself when I'm seventy years old, that would be a nice way to get the young and the old approach. So the older guy is looking back and the young kid really is experiencing everything for the first time and rock music does that.

Every time you go out and play stuff every show has got to feel as though it's the first time you're doing it. So that made it entertaining for me to write and also let me stand back and let me observe myself and look at myself more objectively, I think. -on writing his unconventional autobiography I think Dave [brother Dave Davies ], as a guitarist, he doesn't get the credit he deserves. He's an erratic player but he gets inspired and he plays some great things. Dave invented that sound and it was really great, that's why the part of the book I like and the part I do on stage is recounting when we did that song, when we recorded that because it was a pivotal moment to our band. See also Dave Davies - Kink - Q Magazine - April 1996 Dave Davies : Kink This month Dave Davies replies to brother Ray's autobiography, X-Ray, with Kink, his own account of 30 years of sibling squabbles. Mark Cooper orders "seconds out!" and attempts to arbitrate ...

By Mark Cooper Q Magazine - April 1996 Back in March 1993, when Blur were more Baggy than Britpop, Pulp were an obscure and suspiciously long-serving indie band and Noel Gallagher had yet to take over his brother's group and christen them Oasis, The Kinks released their first and only album on Columbia. Yet another semi-concept album, Phobia did little to revive the bands flagging 30-year career despite the presence of a song called Hatred. This self-mocking little ditty took a caustic look at rock's most famous and long-running fraternal feud with the brothers Davies harmonising on a line like "I hate you and you hate me, now I guess we understand each other". The pair even toured American media spots performing Hatred, but the album refused to sell. It was if Ray and Dave had sold the last scrap of their birthright, only to find that there was no longer anyone listening. Three years later, grunge is dead, the Gallagher brothers' relationship is monitored on a daily basis and the Kinks have been restored to their rightful position as founding fathers of British rock.

Are they touring a flower-strewn nation and enjoying their latest moment in the sun? Are they heck. No, the brothers have found a new way to conduct their private warfare, this time through the very public medium of autobiography. Currently, The Kinks appear to be on hold while Ray tours his solo show, based on the layered, guarded reminiscences of his "unauthorised autobiography", X-Ray. Naturally, Dave isn't about to let Ray walk away without getting his tuppence worth in , even if he does spend most of his time these days writing screenplays and scoring movies - his account, Kink, is published this month. All bands argue, of course, but when the band members are related and the band has lasted 30 years, no is ever going to have the last word. It wasn't always thus. Both brothers lovingly recall the front-room jams in Muswell Hill that created You Really Got Me, with Ray hammering away at the piano and Dave messing with his amp to fashion the song's crunching, distorted riff. That riff turned The Kinks into pop starts overnight.

The first Kink's records still have the insinuating, feral power which inspired other British garage bands like the Who and the Troggs. Dave's was the instinctual, wild guitar, Ray's the coy, suggestive voice of something approaching reason. No matter that Ray was writing wry, melancholia epics like Sunny Afternoon and Waterloo Sunset, in which Dave's contribution was less immediately apparent - The Kinks were their joint creation. Yet the brothers are at pains to point out that they were never really close as kids and Ray makes no bones about the fact that, in a family of sisters, he regarded his younger brother as a rival from the first. Early in X-Ray, the four-year old Ray runs out of the house, crashes face first to the ground and comes up bleeding yet smiling. "My last image of this dramatic little scene were Aunt Dollie's finely chiseled face as she tried to pacify me, then, my infant brother lying in his pram, abandoned by the rest of the family who were trying to mop up the blood. This was my first victory over my newly arrived adversary sleeping in the cot by the kitchen table. All the pain I was suffering was inconsequential.

I was once again the center of attention." According to Dave, Ray's been pulling the same kind of stunt ever since. Dave doesn't feature largely in X-Ray, but when he does, he remains a rival, an object of jealous scrutiny. Ray's response to pop stardom was to get married, have a baby and struggle to come up with more hits. By the end of the decade, he was immersed in legal battles, convinced that the powers-that-be were out to destroy The Kinks. While Ray bought a house when the Kinks took off, Dave bought a giant Scalextrix set. Ray grew up too quickly. Dave didn't grow up at all. Instead, Dave spent most of the decade off his face, enjoying life to the full as a young pop god who seems to have had sex and drugs on tap. The quintessential '60's raver, he spends much of the kiss-and-tell style Kink indiscreetly reminiscing about such high-jinks as crapping in a hotel hand basin in Wigan, throwing up over a girlfriend mid-blow job and nearly literally sharing a Parisian girlfriend with Brian Jones.

Amidst all this mindless hedonism, Dave portrays himself as a man with an original wound, a man ever haunted by his enforced separation from his teenage girlfriend and their child. As he enters the '70's, his youthful excesses and this original loss come to haunt him, and much of the latter part of his book dwells on the spiritual and psychic explorations with which he attempts to heal himself. If Ray only occasionally mentions Dave in X-Ray, Dave is constantly drawn back to the puzzle of his brother, who, he insists, is manipulative, uncaring and unbelievable mean. Even as save admires the sensitivity of Ray's songwriting, he shakes his head over his brother's emotional cruelty. "I am still totally frustrated and flabbergasted by Ray's detached and abusive attitude towards me - all the put-downs, the childish mind-games - when I know deep down that he loves me and that at heart he is a deeply compassionate person ...

But I believe that Ray has never understood the true spirit or concept of collaboration." To further his underlying argument, Dave emphasises his contribution to various Kinks albums, even revealing the moment in the '80's when he discovers that one of his songs can't possibly be released as a single because Ray's contract stipulates that the first three Kinks singles off an album must be Ray Davies compositions. The bad blood here is that old rock'n'roll bugbear, the question of credit. Yet while both Ray and Dave acknowledge the key importance of that creative womb back in Muswell Hill, there's clearly no way that either will ever give the other their due or recapture that old, easy creativity. Locked in a lifelong struggle for dominance of a family and then a band, they've wound up replaying the same old fights like two kids arguing over toys. Sooner or later, most of us leave home; judging from their books, the Davies brothers have never been so lucky.

By Mark Cooper - Q Magazine - April 1996 Watch The Kinks' Ray and Dave Davies Reunite in Concert for 'You Really Got Me' Watch The Kinks' Ray and Dave Davies Reunite in Concert for 'You Really Got Me' Pin it Share Kinks fans, rejoice – the British rock band’s founding members Ray and Dave Davies performed together on stage for the first time in nearly 20 years on Friday night (Dec. 18). Ray Davies Says New Album ‘Americana Is Coming Soon,’ Shares Thoughts on Adele & Ed Sheeran The unexpected reunion took place at Dave Davies’ concert at London’s Islington Assembly Hall, where the brothers joined together for a performance of the Kinks’ classic hit “You Really Got Me.” Watch above. “We had a great night – it was a fun show – had a blast with Ray,” Dave Davies tweeted after the show. Friday evening marked the Kinks’ first performance together since the finish of the group’s 1996 summer tour, Rolling Stone points out. Kinks fans have been hoping for a reunion ever since. Earlier this year, Ray Davies discussed a possible reunion with Billboard.

Dave Davies Reflects on the Kinks Origins & Embracing Technology “This is always my answer: If we make it relevant to new music,” he said in December during an interview about his solo album, Americana. “Not saying we need a new album, but it’s got to relate to new music. Because it’s impossible just to do the hits. I like playing the hits, I just did a solo tour, but when the Kinks get back together, I need to be inspired to write new material.” We certainly hope the Davies brothers have set aside their differences and are considering another Kinks tour in the near future.

Question: The founding brother members of the Kinks were Ray and Dave what?
Answer: Davies