The only song on The Beatles album ‘Revolver’ that Ray Davies actually liked
Revolver was the album that transformed The Beatles, and, in turn, pop culture. As Dougie Payne from Travis recently told us: “To my mind, The Beatles are like two different bands,” he explained. “When I was little, my sister was a Beatles obsessive, and her room was next to mine so their records would filter through the wall — so, they just sort of seeped in.” However, when Revolver was released in 1966, that all changed.
“[My sister] was only into the mop-top Beatles albums so that to me was The Beatles. Years later when I discovered the weird, hairy, druggy Beatles I absolutely fell in love with them all over again. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ 55 years on still sounds like it was recorded tomorrow,” he concluded of its Promethean sound and the influential wallop that it landed.
However, not everyone saw the record as such a vitalising turning point for edgy culture. When The Kinks’ Ray Davies assessed the ground-breaking ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, he sarcastically stated: “Listen to all those crazy sounds! It’ll be popular in discotheques. I can imagine they had George Martin tied to a totem pole when they did this.”
That’s about as kind as he got for the most part in his Disc and Music Echo Magazine review of Revolver. He said that ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is a song that “sounds like they’re out to please music teachers in primary schools” calling it “very commercial”. Thereafter, Davies only gets even more merciless. He describes ‘Yellow Submarine’ as “a load of rubbish,” and levelled that ‘Taxman’ was “a bit limited.”
And it is not as though he bitterly slated everything they ever put out either. While being interviewed by Legs McNeil and Stacey Asip-Kneitschel in 2009, Davies opened up about his admiration for The Beatles. “I think they were such good businessman,” Davis explained. “And you know the difference between a writer and a businessman. The Beatles were organized about what they did. We did a few shows with them and it was apparent that they knew what they were doing”.
Adding: ”It is apparent just meeting them they are just very organised businessmen and it shows in their writing. In the great stuff that they wrote. And they’ve had some ropy songs, iffy songs”. While he seemingly felt that Revolver was full of iffy tracks as the band got experimental, he claims that one diamond stood out from the rubble. As he says of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’: “It’s a most beautiful song, much prettier than ‘Eleanor Rigby’. A jolly old thing, really, and definitely the best track on the album.”
It is, in his view, a song that typifies the compositional beauty of the band, and the difference between the ‘Fab Four’ and The Kinks. Compared to The Beatles, Davies considered himself as “barely articulate. I could barely fill out a form at college. I got through college out of sheer talent because of painting. Academically, I was okay. But…I was barely potty-trained.”
Regarding the differences, he concluded: “I think they were very well organized about the way they worked. And they had a team. I didn’t really have a team. They knew exactly what their music was being cast for. I didn’t. I knew I had a good riff guitar player [in brother Dave Davies]…but I had no one to collaborate with”.
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