Dave Davies believes ‘Arthur’ killed The Kinks: “It was a different band”
Being a hot topic in negative conversations is a nightmare for most people. But with musicians, suddenly, all your dirty laundry is hung for all to see. In the 1960s, against all that, The Kinks learned how freeing it can be.
“It was a strange time,” Ray Davies said. “But, in a way, that freed me. So I indulged myself.”
Most will know immediately what made him say such a gloomy quip, but for those catching up, it went something like this. The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society bombed. Hard to believe now, but it’s the truth. Pete Quaife had had enough and left the band. Legal disputes were flying in left, right and centre. And they were banned from America.
But emerging through these fires, the ones hot enough for anyone to have just sighed and called it quits, was Arthur. In Davies’s style, it saw them looking at the world around them and trying to make sense of it. Specifically, and a lot like Village Green in that sense, Arthur took the perils of the working class and how the generation that fought in the war sought to find societal liberation elsewhere. Which is basically where it came from in a more literal sense, with Davies writing around his sister and her husband, Arthur, when they chose to move to Australia.
But it was also a farewell record of sorts. Which is why it probably feels a bit resigned, defeated, whenever you listen back to it. Arthur is more direct and cutting in some places than Village Green, and a lot of that was Davies pouring his mindset into it, thinking he wasn’t going to be doing anything else after. But it was also that way because he’d localised himself, again just like Village Green, looking out to the English landscape to make stories that felt like a mirror.
“I did immerse myself more in English subject matter,” Ray told Ultimate Classic Rock. “If we’d been on tour in America, I probably would have written about other subjects, but the records would have sounded a lot different. The band may have gone down a slightly different route.”
A lot of this also gave Davies’s words a grittier feel, or, as Dave Davies put it, “There was a lot of feeling of resentment and cynicism” in his words.
It’s interesting looking at how Ray and Dave looked at their new direction. For Dave, The Kinks had already ended when Quaife left. This put them in a weird position with Arthur, almost like they were on borrowed time. Or that messing up didn’t mean anything, because they were already done. Everything else was merely a bonus. But while they’d already met their end, it made it a little exciting, for Dave especially, who talked about it as though the lack of expectation (or enthusiasm, weirdly) made them drop all pretences and just do whatever they wanted.
“It was a different band,” he said. “Fortunately, John brought his own energy to the project. When Pete left, The Kinks kind of ended in one sense. So we were starting all over again. I thought Nobby did a brilliant job in filling Pete’s shoes. They were very, very different types of musicians, but it was still a very expansive and exciting time.”
It’s a strange thing to contend with, but it’s also unmistakably The Kinks for them to talk about something they’ve done, something that later earned respect, and be a little ambiguous about it all in the moment. But suppose that tortured cynicism was also something they always had, that strange detachment that just went with it, no matter how it landed after the fact.
