How did The Kinks get their name?
When it comes to band identities, few are more clear-cut and distinctive than the British group considered one of the 1960s’ “big four”. Unlike The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who, whose various image shifts spanned the decade’s transformative years, The Kinks always appeared to have two very singular traits.
Their mod sensibilities fed into the proto-punk garage rock sound of their early years. And, even more so, their Englishness, as exemplified by their tetralogy of faux-nostalgic concept albums from 1966’s Face to Face to 1969’s Arthur: Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.
These two traits never seemed to sit comfortably alongside the band’s name. Back in the tight-collared, buttoned-down world of the early 1960s, “kinks” inspired terrifying images of weirdos and sexual deviants.
Such images seemed to fly in the face of early British invasion hits ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night’ with their macho power chords and the proper, “good old” British sensibilities of their later character studies and paeans for days gone by.
Kink controversies
However, any objections to the band’s name seem to completely miss the satirical undercurrent of Kinks singer Ray Davies’ songwriting throughout his career. Although he might have dabbled in mod subculture, he and his brother Dave Davies were certainly no scooter-riding rocker-baiters themselves. And they couldn’t have been further removed from the pre-war countryside conservatism of Merry Old England.
Apparently, this ironic dissonance still confounds people today. Brexiteers proudly blasted the godly exhortations about saving “china cups and virginity” of ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’ across the town square during their referendum campaigns without much thought to its actual meaning. And even the bots running Elon Musk’s iteration of Twitter don’t get it, as Dave Davies complained to the billionaire early last year. Still, in 2023, The Kinks’ name is seemingly too risqué to appear without a sensitive content warning.
These farcical anecdotes get to the heart of why the band’s name actually works perfectly for their music. It’s a joke that those too straight-laced to get the layers of irony in their songs and album concept aren’t going to understand. And it’s a moniker that allows the trans sexual encounter ‘Lola’, the unflinching social commentary of ‘Dead End Street’ and the visceral power of ‘You Really Got Me’ to exist side-by-side.
Contrary to their image, The Kinks were a patchwork of musical innovations and styles, whose variety of output only The Beatles could really better. Take the 1965 single ‘See My Friend’, for instance, which is arguably responsible for inventing raga rock.
Who came up with The Kinks as a band name?
So the name does fit the band, after all: out there, subversive, versatile bohemians skewering conventional society from without. But how did it come about in the first place?
There are two competing theories as to how The Kinks got their name, detailed by music journalist Jon Savage in his book The Kinks: The Official Biography. As they emerged on the London beat music scene in 1963 as one of the rawest exponents of repackaged rhythm and blues, they went through multiple name changes, first becoming The Bo-Weevils and then The Ravens.
Two former managers both claim to have coined the name that followed and stuck. Robert Wace was the first to claim that his friend had suggested the name as a media stunt. “If my memory is correct, he came up with the name just as an idea, as a good way of getting publicity.”
The four young band members weren’t swayed easily by the suggestion. Wace claims they were “absolutely horrified” at the idea of being “called kinky”.
The band’s second manager Larry Page went a step further in taking credit for the name. “I gave them the name,” he insisted, “which everybody thought was totally outrageous.” Page claims he even had the band do a photoshoot “with whips and all the rest of it.” His reasoning was, “I knew the only way they were going to achieve anything was by being brought to the public eye.”
Publicity or identity?
Whoever’s story is true, both managers agreed that the name served as a useful publicity stunt. And the band didn’t seem too happy about it but soon relented. Page is certainly stretching it to say that this “kinky” name is what got the band into the public eye, though.
Ray Davies’ songwriting not only propelled the group to early success on both sides of the Atlantic once American impresario Shel Talmy got hold of them. His makeshift two-note riff for ‘You Really Got Me’ changed music forever.
Davies, for his part, says he’s “never really liked the name” The Kinks. He might still be carrying some of the little England hangups that horrified him as a young man and inflected his satirical caricatures of British society. But he’s a Kink all the same and always will be.
