The hospital stay that gave Ray Davies his best song: “I was badly injured”
The annals of cultural history are littered with hospital visits. From Joni Mitchell to John Cooper Clarke and all the Frida Kahlos in between, it appears that a brush with mortality is a recurring muse among many artistic greats. Ray Davies is no different.
While it is easy to see why a lengthy spell of uncannily contemplating life and death in your youth might inspire a desire to create, it’s hardly a recommendable way to get into the arts. But for Ray Davies, it is even more complex than that. For him, it was less about mortality than it was about the window his bed was near.
He was 13-years-old and an illness had rendered his breathing so poor that he had to be rushed to St Thomas’ Hospital in London where an emergency tracheotomy was performed. So far, so grim. But Davies has never been one to wallow in misfortune, and his recovery would soon seed one of the greatest songs ever written.
As he later told Uncut, “‘Waterloo Sunset’ was about the view I had from my hospital bed when I was badly injured as a child.” When the nurses saw that he was enamoured with the pastoral cityscape framed by his window, they even wheeled him out to the balcony where he could gaze at the vast, glistening expanses of the sludgy Thames at his own leisure.
This observatory deck, coupled with a wistful, renewed appreciation for life, encapsulated the songwriting style that lay ahead of Davies. “If you listen to the lyrics, I’m a voyeur in the distance, watching the young couple,” he said of ‘Waterloo Sunset’. There is always an element of that in his songs. Even when he’s the central protagonist, he serves as a mirror to the wider world.
As it happens, most of the best British songwriting follows this path. Paul McCartney believes that using a figurative window as your canvas is how you achieve a great song. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the secret to successful songwriting is the ability to paint a picture,” he says in his recent book, The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present.
The ‘picture’ that a perfect song paints just happens to be three-dimensional. Imbued with the moody textures of music, these melodic moments in time have a wealth of depth and backstories beyond the observable surface. They are vignettes of life that we listen to for five minutes and get a sense of years contained within. In bustling Blighty, the inspiration for these perfect songs is always just passing by your window.
In ‘Waterloo Sunset’, we never learn much about Terry and Julie. While plenty of theories have come in since, Ray Davies himself has always been vague on their existence. But no matter who they are, we know them. Similarly, you might have never set foot in Waterloo in your life, but the park bench that he doesn’t even explicitly mention is lyrics is equally familiar.
By painting the song en plein air, Davies was able to create a little world of wonder, and it all began in the grim depths of a hospital stay, where the peculiar disposition of recovery cast an appreciative hue of beauty over the normalcy of life and living.
