Ray Davies Remains A Hard Working Man
Wednesday March 05, 2008 @ 05:30 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

Ray Davies

It's been 44 years since The Kinks exploded on to the scene with the proto-punk classic, "You Really Got Me." As you'd probably expect, Ray Davies — the man who wrote, sang and played guitar on that track and numerous other memorable Kinks songs over the years — isn't making that kind of riff-heavy rock these days. But while the multi-talented 63 year old's music has mellowed, his lyrics have rarely been sharper than on his recently released New West album, Working Man's Cafe.

Some of the songs were written between 1999 and 2003, at the same time as those that appeared on 2006's Other People's Lives, while he penned others after being shot in the leg in New Orleans while chasing down a mugger in January 2004. He had 35 songs to choose from before he recorded the album in two weeks in Nashville with producer Ray Kennedy (Steve Earle, The V-Roys) last March.

"It's the first record I've made where I'm the only English person on it," the London-born Davies says of Working Man's Cafe, a collection of as intelligently written and keenly observational songs as you're likely to hear this year. It's the most American-influenced album of his career, both lyrically and with its musical mix of pop, jangly rock, roots and subtle jazz.

"As a kid, like so many millions of other people, America came to me in the form of westerns and John Wayne movies and adventure stories," says the man considered the godfather of Brit-pop and a major influence on Blur, Oasis, Supergrass and many others. "'Vietnam Cowboys' is about how culture spreads. But now there's a backlash and the Third World is coming back, certainly in China and those places."

"No One Listen" was written as a result of the helplessness he felt in being given the run-around by authorities as he sought justice following his shooting. The title track and "The Real World" are about trying to find a comfortable place in life, "Hymn For A New Age" tackles religion and "One More Time" takes an anti-corporate stance. Such songs can be looked at both micro- and macrocosmically, so one can interpret personal and more far-reaching themes, but there's no denying how close "Morphine Song" is to Davies.

"I wrote it on a notepad in the hospital. I was in intensive care and I was actually afraid because they thought I could die, not so much because of the wound in my leg, but from a heart attack or something from the shock. I wrote that and, when I did the record, I just read it from the notepad. I only changed one name. Nothing else was changed."

The deluxe edition of Working Man's Cafe comes with a second disc featuring a film called Americana: A Work In Progress that Davies made about his experiences over the course of writing and recording songs for the past two albums. It's not his first foray into the medium — having written and directed a 1985 made-for-television film called Return To Waterloo in 1985 and a Charles Mingus documentary titled Weird Nightmare six years later — but it's something he'd like to do more of.

But that may have to wait until another project called The Ripper, which Davies envisions playing "in a good, old-fashioned Victorian music hall," is out of the way. The stage musical (which includes a song called "I, The Victim" that's included as a bonus track on Working Man's Cafe) is loosely based on a woman his great-grandmother knew who was an aspiring music hall singer who came close to encountering Jack The Ripper and allegedly knew one of his victims.

"It's theatre of the absurd," says the 1990 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductee who claims to have never heard of Dallas, Texas indie rock band The Deathray Davies. "It's actually called poor theatre. It's extremely minimalist."

But the main project that most people want to know about is the rumoured reunion of The Kinks. That came through loud and clear the day after this interview took place, when Davies performed and signed autographs at Toronto's Yonge Street HMV superstore. While three songs from Working Man's Cafe received polite receptions, the large crowd clapped and sang along joyously when he performed "Lola."

Original Kinks bassist Pete Quaife (who worked as a graphic designer and lived in Belleville, Ont. for 25 years until moving to Denmark in 2005) and drummer Mick Avory are all for getting back together, Davies says. His brother, lead guitarist Dave Davies, has been holding out.

"The real deal is that Dave had a stroke and was quite ill, but he's playing again now. He says he's just not ready to go into the studio for six months. But when we made albums with The Kinks in the '80s, I'd do the back tracks with everybody and he'd fly in and do his guitar bit and leave. He's never been one to spend a lot of time."

Davies has saved two or three songs that he thinks would be good for The Kinks, "but I wouldn't start writing seriously unless everyone said they wanted to do it." While he says he has a back-up plan regarding his younger brother's involvement, he won't reveal it.

"It's an alternative way of doing it to make him comfortable, but he's got to agree to do it first."

Davies returned home to London from Toronto to rehearse for a tour of Australia and New Zealand, but will return to North America in late March and play Toronto's Music Hall on April 3. Tickets go on sale through Ticketmaster at 10 a.m. on Thursday.

—Steve McLean