Forget Oasis, The Kinks were the original bad boys of British pop! 60 years after their first No 1, RICHARD LITTLEJOHN pays homage to the band that became the soundtrack to his life

They were the original bad boys of British pop and turned sibling rivalry into an art form. No, not Noel and Liam Gallagher.

Thirty years before Oasis released their first album, Ray Davies and Dave Davies of The Kinks were already at each other’s throats.

Fisticuffs on stage were not uncommon, often involving drummer Mick Avory – the ‘third Davies brother’, according to Dave.

A concert in Cardiff came to an abrupt halt when Dave ended up in hospital after Avory hit him on the head with a cymbal.

Violence was never far from the surface. Ray was notorious for settling any and every argument with a well-aimed volley of punches.

Their first tour of America in 1965 ended ignominiously when Ray decked a musicians’ union official backstage – leading to The Kinks being banned from the US for the next four years.

Bad blood between the ­brothers dates back to their childhood. They had six elder ­sisters. Ray was the baby of the family until Dave came along, hogging his ­sisters’ attention. Ray’s resentment persisted, even as they enjoyed chart ­success and critical acclaim.

Their first hit, You Really Got Me, went to No 1 on September 1, 1964, 60 years ago yesterday.

To mark the occasion, Boom Radio invited me to record a ­personal tribute to one of ­Britain’s most significant and influential bands. The Kinks And Me goes out on Wednesday.

Steve Van Zandt – Springsteen sidekick, band leader, arranger, musical historian, and Silvio Dante from the Sopranos – has proclaimed You Really Got Me as the first genuine hard rock record. He won’t get an argument from me. Dave Davies says he came up with the unique guitar riff after taking a razor blade to his speaker cone.

He was going through a personal crisis at the time and says if he hadn’t slashed the speaker, he would have slashed his wrists.

Ray claimed it was his idea, though he might have meant Dave slashing his wrists.

That Christmas, 1964, we got our first record player.

It was a Pye Playboy Compact – complete with Garrard Autochanger. There was only one problem – we didn’t have any records.

Fortunately, my stocking ­contained a couple of record vouchers. My dad took me ­shopping in the Boxing Day sales next day. He bought: ‘I (Who Have Nothing)’, by Shirley Bassey. I bought: You Really Got Me, by The Kinks.

It was the start of a lifelong devotion. As I wrote here recently, whenever someone asks me how I manage to churn out two ­columns a week for the Daily Mail, when there’s nothing new in the world and we’re all going to hell in a handcart, I reply, honestly: I put on The Kinks and start typing.

There’s something about the Ray Davies songbook which never fails to inspire me.

The Kinks’ American ban was a blessing in disguise. Back in Blighty, Ray turned his attention to his own backyard. They say you should write about what you know. And what followed was a string of quintessentially English hits, which in my opinion stand comparison with anything ­written by Lennon and McCartney in their pomp.

Well Respected Man played into the mood of mid-Sixties Britain, the death of deference, the expanding middle class.

Dedicated Follower Of Fashion lampooned the whole Carnaby Street scene, as Ray took a dig at the fickle ‘Carnabetion Army’ in thrall to the ‘latest fads and trends’.

Not that I was immune from those fads and trends. I was too young for the Carnabetian Army, but did make it to Carnaby Street a couple of years later.

In one of those famous ­boutiques, I acquired a pair of salmon-pink hipsters, with a thick exposed zip. I have no idea what possessed me, but I remember my old man hitting the roof the first time I wore them, especially as I’d back-combed my hair using some of my mum’s pink hairspray from Woolworths.

I also bought a pair of ­elasticated suede Hush Puppies. My grandad, a London docker, thought anyone who wore suede shoes was seriously ­suspect.

I hate to think what on earth he’d have made of the salmon-pink hipsters.

The Kinks were the sound of the Sixties summer. I vividly remember our family heading to the seaside in our Ford Consul 365 one boiling ­summer’s day. A few miles from the beach, traffic came to a ­complete standstill.

Cars were overheating and tempers were getting frayed. These were the days when in-car entertainment was limited to playing I-Spy, and transistor radios hanging from the rear-view mirror.

This particular day, most of the radios were tuned to the same pirate station, Radio ­London or Caroline, I don’t remember which.

As if on cue, they were all turned up loud when on came Sunny Afternoon by The Kinks.

There was a collective smile, a singsong. Some people were dancing in the street. I wish I could have bottled that moment.

Pre-Covid, I was privileged to see The Kinks musical, Sunny Afternoon, when it was being developed at a theatre in Swiss Cottage, North London, before it transferred to the West End.

At the interval, I watched through the window as Ray paced around the patch of green behind. He had no reason to be anxious. It was a triumph.

And if Sunny Afternoon was the definitive sound of summer, a singalong social satire which resonates to this day – particularly after the election of a Left-wing Labour government which intends to let the taxman take all our dough – then Autumn Almanac is a joyous ­celebration of the English, well, autumn. Ray’s lyrics are the equal of John Betjeman’s poetry.

Dead End Street is a beautifully crafted song of desperation and featured one of pop’s first videos. The Kinks were dressed as undertakers, carrying a coffin into a dismal, sooty terraced cottage underneath a railway bridge.

It was filmed in Kentish Town, North London, then a down-at-heel working-class neighbourhood a million miles away from the fashionable, gentrified suburb it is today – now home to none other than our new prime minister Keir Starmer.

The Gallagher brothers didn’t only model their sibling feuds on The Kinks. They also ripped off Dead End Street, video and all, for their 2005 track The Importance Of Being Idle.

North London is The Kinks’ happy hunting ground. Ray and Dave grew up with their sisters in a small house in Fortis Green, between Muswell Hill and East Finchley.

I’ve always seen Ray as an outsider, a sceptical suburbanite, looking down with suspicion on fashionable, neophiliac London from the serene northern heights of Muswell Hill.

Perhaps that’s why I identified with his music. My job as a columnist is to sit at the back and throw bottles, not follow the herd who – as Bob Dylan sang on Positively 4th Street – just want to be on the side that’s winning.

I also share Ray’s sentimentality and acute nostalgia. Which is why I loved the Kinks’ concept album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society.

It bombed at the time, but I’d put it right up there with The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper. It’s been hailed subsequently as a work of genius by everyone from Noel Gallagher himself to Paul Weller of The Jam and Suggs, from Madness.

Where would Britpop, Blur in particular, be without The Kinks?

I get the world Ray writes about. I’ve lived in North London for the past 45 years, a dozen of them at the foot of Muswell Hill.

I’d see Ray occasionally out running on his way to the Kinks’ Konk recording studio, in beautiful, downtown Crouch End.

My kids have grown up with the Kinks. My son William went to the same school as Ray and Dave, though it’s called something different these days.

My daughter Georgina has got a big birthday coming up. She’s decided to hold the party at the pub over the road from the Davies family home, where Ray and Dave first performed in public. It’s something of a Kinks shrine these days.

I didn’t get to meet Ray until I started doing a bit of TV in the Nineties, although we used to drink in the same pub in Highgate.

He was the first celebrity guest on my Sky News talk show. We went on to share an agent, and he subsequently appeared on a couple of my late-night programmes on London Weekend.

One evening, I was sitting in my dressing room, watching rehearsals on the in-house monitor when Ray launched into a song I’d never heard before.

It was about the view from Highgate Hill, featuring a cast of famous Londoners, and containing the line: ‘And don’t forget the Kray Twins’.

Which was interesting, because one of the other guests on that show was Mad Frankie Fraser, sometime enforcer for the Krays in the Sixties, which could have been tricky.

Fortunately, Frankie loved it.

When I worked at LWT the studios were on the South Bank of the Thames. I used to cross Waterloo Bridge every Friday night… just like Terry and Julie, from Waterloo Sunset – consistently voted the Kinks’ best-loved song.

Speaking of Suggs, he was a guest on one show. After­wards we repaired for refreshments to the green room, on the 18th floor of the LWT tower with a view overlooking Waterloo.

Suffice to say, we were well refreshed when the sun came up. We linked arms, raised our glasses and launched into Waterloo Sunrise. Trust me, it wasn’t a patch on the original.

My favourite Kinks song? There’s not a cigarette paper between the string of Sixties hits, from See My Friends in 1965 to Lola in 1970. But I’d probably choose Come Dancing, from 1982, a celebration of Ray’s big sister Rene. What clinched it was they filmed the video at Ilford Palais, where my mum and dad used to go dancing when they were courting. I was born just down the road.

There’s a line in the song which I’ve borrowed time and again to describe the end of an era, the passing of something or someone we thought would last forever.

The day they knocked down the Palais.

Unlike Oasis, I don’t expect there will ever be a Kinks reunion. Ray and Dave are too old to be trading blows, so let’s just remember the good times, and in the words of one of the songs which didn’t make it on to the Village Green:

Thank you for the Days.

The Kinks And Me, by Richard Littlejohn, is on Boom Radio, Wednesday September 4, at 9pm and catch up later on.