The tragic lament at the heart of The Kinks’ classic ‘Strangers’
Everyone is familiar with The Kinks’ biggest hits. It can feel like you’re born already aware of, and already in love with, songs such as ‘All Day and All of the Night’, ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Lola’, ‘This Time Tomorrow’ and ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, but beyond just the heavy hitters, their albums are full of incredible, rocking, moving and captivating hidden gems, as well.
A favourite amongst hardcore Kinks fans but not as widely known by the rest of the world, one such song is ‘Strangers’. Penned by Dave Davies for the 1970 album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, the song is unusual in being written by brother Dave, and not Ray, but it isn’t his only composition on the record (the other Dave Davies written song here is ‘Rats’).
Speaking with Stay Thirsty Media in a 1990 interview, the younger Davies brother opened up about his inspiration for the track, saying that he wrote it as a tribute to his old school friend, George Harris: “We were dear friends. Actually, George and I were going to start a band, but he got too heavily into drugs, and it kind of pulled us apart.”
Adding, “The drug thing was like a three-way affair. He died of a methamphetamine overdose. They found him departed. He was young. I always felt it was going to be me and him. I didn’t think at that age that it was going to be me and Ray. So I really kind of wrote it to him, ‘Strangers on this road we are on, we are not two we are one’. It was like, what might have been if he hadn’t died so tragically.”
The loss and tragedy hang heavy in the vocals on the song, as well. Not only had Dave Davies written the song – which features a handful of lines inspired by Hank Williams’ legendary ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’ – but he also took the lead where the singing was concerned, too. Pitching at the highest, outer limits of his vocal range (and sounding an awful lot like an early incarnation of The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne), Davies has a raw, visceral intensity at the root of his performance, which underlines all the heartbreak in his lyrics. There is a gripping, urgent poignancy in every gut-wrenching note that he reaches for as the singer remembers his late friend and wonders what might have become of his life.
In remembering George Harris, Davies was also set off to think about the changes he had noticed in himself between first picking up a guitar and leading the charge at the head of the British invasion. “I was going through a lot of change, personally – spiritual stuff and getting into different philosophy,” he later recalled in another interview. “I was 15 at the time when we first started. And we had success; we were touring, and it doesn’t really give you a chance to grow up.”
Not only is the song the sound of Dave Davies asking where his friend has gone, but it is also asking questions of himself, like “What’s going on? What are we doing? Why are we here?”
The Kinks only performed ‘Strangers’ together on ten occasions, but Dave Davies continues to remember his friend in concert, to conjure up his spirit and bring him back to life, and has sung the song 94 times in total at his solo shows, including most recently at every night of his latest tour, in 2019.
