subject: Ray Davies Tickets : Davies Is A Long-time Enthusiast Of British Music Hall [print this page] Davies' compositions for The Kinks' early recordings of 1964-65 ranged from chiming, melodic beat music to the more distinctive and influential proto-metal, protopunk, powerchord-based rock and roll which first brought the band to prominence. Indeed, it was the latter style that characterized their first two major hits, "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night", as well as the B-side "I Need You" and the minor hit "Till the End of the Day".
However, by the mid-to-late 1960s, this raucous early sound had gradually given way to more sensitive, introspective and complex songs, such as "Tired of Waiting for You", "See My Friends", "Where Have All the Good Times Gone", "Too Much on My Mind", "This is Where I Belong", "Waterloo Sunset", "Wonderboy" and "Days".
In addition to American rock and roll and blues, Davies is a long-time enthusiast of British Music Hall, vaudeville, trad jazz and ragtime music; and from about 1966 onward, he composed a number of songs which reflected these latter influences, including "Dandy", "Little Miss Queen of Darkness", "Mister Pleasant", "End of the Season", "All of My Friends Were There", "She's Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina" and "Look a Little on the Sunny Side".
During this period, he also became known for writing cheerful but occasionally ironic celebrations of traditional English culture and living ("Autumn Almanac", "The Village Green Preservation Society", "Victoria", "Have a Cuppa Tea", "Cricket") as well as songs championing individualistic personalities and lifestyles ("I'm Not Like Everybody Else", "Johnny Thunder", "Plastic Man", "Lola", "Apeman", "Celluloid Heroes", "Sitting in the Midday Sun").
By the mid-to-late 1970s and for the next decade, Davies began to combine elements from all of these styles to create a more overtly commercial sound again with songs like "Sweet Lady Genevieve", "Juke Box Music", "A Rock & Roll Fantasy", "Wish I Could Fly Like Superman", "Better Things", "Destroyer", "Come Dancing" and "Do It Again".Davies' writing has often been called more mature, sophisticated and literate than that of many of his peers among British and American rock musicians.
His lyrics often contain elements of topical satire and pointed social commentary about the aspirations and frustrations of common working class and middle class people in England, and as such demonstrate a great awareness and insight about the psychological effects of the British class system. In a 2008 Rolling Stone profile, journalist Charles M. Young called Ray Davies "an anthropologist with a guitar".
Prime examples of Davies' keenly observant songwriting include "A Well Respected Man", "Situation Vacant", "Shangri-La" and "Cliches of the World (B Movie)"all of which describe the class-bred insecurity and desperation underlying the materialism and conservativism of English middle-class respectability. Similarly, songs such as "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and "Party Line" mocked the Carnaby Street-based 'Swinging London' scene of the mid-1960s, while "David Watts" humorously expressed the wounded feelings of a plain schoolboy who envies the grace and social privileges enjoyed by a charismatic upperclass student.
Other songs took aim at the corrupt motives of greedy businessmen and self-serving politicians ("King Kong", "Powerman", "Mr. Big Man", and the Preservation Act 1 and Act 2 albums), the heedless ostentation of nouveaux riches soon to get their comeuppance ("Most Exclusive Residence For Sale", "Mister Pleasant"), as well as the complacency and indolence of wealthy playboys and the English upper class ("A House in the Country", "Sunny Afternoon").
Davies also wrote songs which described the bleakness of life at the opposite end of the social spectrum: released as the complementary A-B sides of a single in 1966, "Dead End Street" and "Big Black Smoke" offered grim, neo-Dickensian portraits of the desperate poverty that existed amidst the thriving urban British economy of the 1960s.
