‘Days’: The song The Kinks wrote as a goodbye to their career
Songs often mark specific moments in a band’s career. Naturally, these moments alternate between good and bad, but very few act as a goodbye. Arguably, writing a song and knowing it would be one of your last could be one of the hardest things a songwriter has to do. However, for The Kinks, the declining interest from fans and a lack of passion for what they were creating meant writing a goodbye was done with little interest in how it was perceived, and that lack of pressure produced one of their most famous songs to date.
The song ‘Days’ was initially created to feature on a 1968 concept album, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. The band worked on the album but lost faith in the creative process when their previous release, Wonderboy, was a commercial failure. The record fell flat when it came out, reaching number 12 on the UK album charts and failing to chart in the US.
After the failure of Wonderboy, the band decided to rush the release of ‘Days’ and put it out as a single instead of an album feature. Ray Davies commented on his blasé attitude towards the track then, saying, “I didn’t care anymore. So I thought, ‘Say goodbye nicely,’ and wrote ‘Days.’”
When looking for inspiration for the track, he looked back on his career, granted, but used the general concept of saying thank you and goodbye as the main inspiration behind the song. Firstly, he thought about his sister, who had recently left for Australia. “She left and said, ‘Say goodbye, my loving brother,’ and I said, ‘Thank you for being my sister,’… So the song’s for her, really, and her generation.”
He also thought about lost loves when writing, remembering making a dicey phone call during the creative process. “I wrote some of it in a phone box while I was phoning somebody I shouldn’t be phone,” said Davies, “the song wasn’t about the person on the other end of the line. Well, not really. But I suppose it’s the ultimate kiss-off, isn’t it?”
The song didn’t do badly, and a cover released by Kirsty MacColl went to number 12 on the UK charts, but in time, the track became one of the most poignant and well-received that Davies has ever written. The reasons for this are varied, but his ability to say goodbye to something bigger than himself whilst focusing on the human aspects of parting ways created something people could easily connect with.
It has become something new and entirely different from when it was first written. Davies admitted, “The song has grown in intensity over the years. I didn’t think much about the song when I wrote it. Sometimes songs occur like that. You don’t think about it, but it’s built up quite a lot of mystique over the years. It certainly left me. It belongs to the world now.”
