“Made us split up”: The tour that broke up The Kinks
Going on the road is the moment when musicians usually leave their best material. Although anyone can come back to the comfort of the studio and finetune their songs until they’re perfect, it’s much more difficult trying to make them come alive in a way that makes the audience want to keep listening to the tunes for hours on end. But the touring life can also be borderline poisonous to rock and roll bands, and by the time The Kinks reached the album State of Confusion, going around the world again was enough for them to throw in the towel completely.
Then again, it’s not like they were on the best of terms every time they got into the studio, either. Looking through their best material, half the reason why they worked so well off each other is because of the distinct rub between Ray and Dave Davies, especially when they turned ‘You Really Got Me’ into one of the most ferocious rock songs of the 1960s.
While Dave would get the occasional lead vocal on a handful of songs, there was no doubt that Ray was the driving force behind the group, and that normally meant going in some strange directions. Although The Kinks are the VIllage Green Preservation Society was one of the best examples of them at the peak of their powers, this wasn’t meant to be the same kind of Flower Power being preached by The Beatles.
This was an example of Ray painting a picture of England that he still remembered from his youth. The pure landscape of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ was slowly becoming a thing of the past for them, but that didn’t mean that the dream of what they envisioned was gone forever. However, State of Confusion became that one step over the line that the band weren’t ready for on the road.
Although the record led to the group graduating into stadiums, the differences between Mick Avory and Dave hadn’t smoothed over throughout the years. No one really is going to forget being in a band with a drummer who throws half of their drums at them during a performance, and now that they had tens of thousands of people in front of them, that just gave them a much bigger audience for a fight.
Ray always had a special affection for State of Confusion, he thought that their time on the road was an absolute nightmare, telling Uncut, “That’s what the world is missing without The Kinks: their realism, and their mistakes. If you look at the cover, everybody’s going in different directions. The feuds between Mick and Dave had reached a final peak, and it was horrible to be on tour. We’d gone through massive hard work to get in stadiums. And success made us split up.”
Although the group could stick it out for a few more albums, Avory would only be featured in passing, only being credited on a few songs, and Bob Henrit stepping in to play most of the drum parts live. While it looked like The Kinks had what it took to become the counterpart to The Rolling Stones, it’s probably better to cut things off when one’s personal safety is at risk every time they get up onstage.
