Ray Davies, Ironing Out The Kinks

August 04, 2024

Ray Davies is nearly 62 years old now. And even if 60 is the new 40, he and the Kinks broke out of Muswell Hill around the time that cool kids the world over were proclaiming they'd never trust anybody over 30.

So while Mick Jagger bares his midriff and cusses about not being allowed to cuss, Roger Daltrey heads around the globe again singing "Hope I die before I get old!" without a wink, and Paul McCartney aids and abets a hip-hop mush-up of "Yesterday," Davies spends a portion of his swinging new CD, "Other People's Lives," acknowledging the hurdle that the Greatest Generation of British Rockers face whenever they release fresh material.

"Let's run away from time!" Davies begs somebody, anybody, in a song of the same name before admitting it's a mission impossible. And then he resumes being downright Kinky. The leader of the band that popularized the power chord gives 'em out in bursts on "The Tourist" and "After the Fall." Davies recites the acoustic guitar strumming of "Lola" in both "Is There Life After Breakfast?" and "All She Wrote."

But the nods to his old band are almost exclusively musical -- a line about a "sunny afternoon" on the somber "Getaway (Lonesome Train)" is the only obvious exception. Davies's songwriting was consumed with nostalgia even in his twenties, and some of the best Kinks material (look no further than gorgeous 1968 single "Days") depended on it. But it's clear from the new disc's lyrics that Davies isn't in a mood to look in life's rearview mirror.

Davies says in press materials that the record was influenced by his stay in New Orleans ("N-O-L-A!" in Kinks-speak). The disc's first two cuts, "The Morning After" and "After the Fall," sure could have been inspired by Hurricane Katrina -- but Davies wrote and recorded them, and had moved back to England, before the city's brush with Armageddon. The tunes were also completed before Davies was shot in January 2004 while trying to prevent a street robbery in the French Quarter.

But for those willing to trust somebody over 60, there's advice for storm and crime victims in both tracks, which are ostensibly aimed at relationship survivors. In "After the Fall," he doles out the wisdom that bad times are as temporary as the good ones, a la George Harrison's "All Things Must Pass": "After the fall is over, there'll be a better day." And the same look-forward message is delivered with a heap of humor in "Is There Life After Breakfast?"

An obscure soundtrack and live album notwithstanding, "Other People's Lives" is being billed as Davies's first solo album. But given the revolving cast of characters that backed him throughout the Kinks' history and the dominant role he had in the band, this really just means it's the first record without brother Dave Davies, with whom he's enjoyed a relationship that, if we're to believe the tabloids, has long made Cain and Abel look like Romeo and Juliet. Aussie Mark Johns supplies the heavy guitars on these recordings. There's no mention of Dave in the album credits or thank-yous.

Just as you can't run away from time, it doesn't really heal all wounds, either.

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