The band who made themselves legends, according to Ray Davies: “Great at publicity”
In 2018, the impossible seemed to be flickering into life, as after decades of icy silence and public sniping, The Kinks hinted at a resurrection, with Ray Davies going so far as to confirm to Channel 4 News that he, his brother Dave, and original drummer Mick Avory were back in the studio.
For a duo whose relationship has long been defined by ‘fractious’ as a baseline, it was a miracle, and it was all thanks to a bit of healthy envy directed at The Rolling Stones. While the Davies brothers were still weighing up old grudges, the Stones were tearing through their 14-date UK and EU No Filter tour. And, despite being grandfathers (and in Jagger’s case, a great-grandfather), they were receiving the kind of rapturous press usually reserved for hungry 20-somethings.
“It won’t be well-organised like The Rolling Stones,” Ray joked of his own band’s reunion, “You must praise The Rolling Stones for being great at publicity… Mick Jagger has done an incredible PR job, and it’s kind of inspiring to see them doing it. But The Kinks will probably be playing the local bar.”
And yes, in one sense, the Stones were a bit of a PR machine. Behind the ‘Street Fighting Man’ exterior, Mick Jagger has always famously run the Stones like a Fortune 500 company, and that included their relationship with the press too.
It’s something that kept their longtime PR man, Alan Edwards, awake at night, as he told Saga magazine in 2024: “The [1982] tour was well received, but never mind the 19th nervous breakdown; I started to worry if the intense pressure might give me my first. The band members wanted a report under their door each morning, including reviews of the previous night and the schedule of media to be done that day. Some days, I found myself running alongside Mick on his morning jog, reading him the previous day’s press clippings.”
That said, the Stones weren’t always conventional or accommodating when it came to the press, and they certainly knew when to weaponise chaos. In 1981, they announced a run of shows by performing on a flatbed truck in the middle of New York City, a stunt inspired by Charlie Watts’ memories of jazz musicians. It infuriated the journalists around them, as Ronnie Wood recalled, “Journalists raced after the flatbed, yelling at us, complaining that we’d promised them interviews. And the more they yelled, the more we yelled back, ‘Fuck you!’”
Likewise, the video for ‘Undercover of the Night‘ was banned by MTV and the BBC for violent content, not a particularly calculated promotional move, though it did cement their image as untouchable provocateurs, and by keeping the internal rot behind closed doors, aided by a tight-lipped inner management circle, they were able to return with Steel Wheels in 1989 as if they’d just stepped out for a cigarette.
Unfortunately for Kinks fans, the ‘Stones blueprint’ proved impossible to replicate, and the final curtain ultimately proved too heavy to lift back up again. In a December 2020 interview with The New York Times, Ray gave no indication that much, if any, work had been done towards achieving a reunion, saying, “I’d like to work with Dave again, if he’ll work with me”. Dave echoed the uncertainty in January 2021, relaying, “We’ve been talking about it. I mean, there’s a lot of material and, you know, it could still happen…”.
By March 2023, Mick Avory had fully laid rumours of their 2018 reunion spark to rest, citing both health and irreconcilable differences: “I don’t think it’s possible now; one thing, health-wise. And I don’t think we could ever work it out because Dave wanted to do it one way, and Ray wanted to do it the other, which was quite normal thinking for them.”
