“Very revealing”: The Kinks song that drew the wrath of the music industry
The 1960s were a transformative era, not just for music itself but for the music industry as a whole. Groups like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks created a need for the industry to move with the times, as they redefined many of the conventions employed by the business for years. The Kinks, for instance, pioneered a defiant style of rebel rock, noted for its distortion, social realism, and honesty, not the kind of safe, sanitised, committee-created pop that the industry had previously favoured.
Pretty quickly after the Ray Davies-led outfit first emerged in 1963. The Kinks proved themselves to be a band with massive commercial appeal. Their roots in the mod subculture and tendency to draw upon ordinary life for working-class people in London meant that their music and lyrics resonated with mass audiences of young people in ways that other, more far-out bands failed to do. Tracks like ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night’ typified the rock sounds of the era and earned the band mainstream success, too.
Inevitably, though, the relationship between The Kinks and the music industry soon soured. At that point, the business favoured hit songs above everything else, so as soon as The Kinks’ sales began to drop, as they searched for something more expansive and profound on albums like The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, record executives and management figures were not best pleased.
After all, Davies’ songwriting was far more groundbreaking and universal than a simple pop hit could give him credit for. As such, the band lost favour with executives, leading Ray Davies to pen a track that targeted the fickle, cutthroat nature of the music industry itself. The song, titled ‘Denmark Street’ after the area of London that housed British music publishers, took a cynical view of the industry and chronicled The Kinks’ annoyance with the attitudes of record company executives.
“You go to a publisher and play him your song, he says ‘I hate your music and your hair is too long, But I’ll sign you up because I’d hate to be wrong,’” read the lyrics of the 1970 track, not painting a particularly generous image of the music industry. According to guitarist Dave Davies, the song drew the wrath of the industry following its release.
Speaking to Vulture, the guitarist recalled how “the ‘Denmark Street’ comments about how fucked up the music business is” had annoyed a number of people in the industry. Davies went on to explain, “Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround was pretty heavy-duty, but remember, they’re observations. It’s not categorical information. It’s observations. It’s our viewpoint or Ray’s viewpoint.”
“We caused some anger because we had a very keen observation quality about people — what they’re doing and why they’re doing it,” the guitarist continued. However, this observational quality was also essential to the band’s output. “We knew about our family and the conditions that surrounded our working-class life. Things were happening, so you would sing about them all and how you react to them,” Davies confirmed.
Continuing, “Life lessons are like an incredibly complicated school for us. Especially with the funny times, you don’t always know what you learn in laughter and what it means to you as a person. You don’t always find out straight away. Sometimes, you look back at something and think it’s funny. It’s very revealing.” There is indeed humour to be found in ‘Denmark Street’, as there is in the lead single from the same album, ‘Lola’. Again, though, these tracks resulted from Davies’ penchant for observation rather than a desire for controversy.
