The complicated life of Ray Davies

Ray Davies repeats something that Ned Sherrin, the late broadcaster and writer, told him: “Ned, who understood me, said, ‘Ray, you remind me of someone who’s got an open wound on the top of their head and nobody can see it’.” This image was a response to me asking one of our best-loved songwriters about his physical, mental, emotional and, possibly, spiritual health.

“Tenuous,” he says. On all fronts? “On all fronts and it’s always been that way. I tell you what it is: in order for me to be creative, and I think that a lot of people are like this, you’ve got to be sensitive, but then I can be incredibly hard when I want to be.” Are you fine mentally, now? No more nervous breakdowns? “Well, we all have wobbles,” he grins. “Just like the Mr Men books.”

I wonder whether, as he approaches his 67th birthday, Davies has found ways of dealing with the stress that has, at times, threatened to capsize him. “One just goes through another phase of emotional behaviour, same as you do with physicality,” he says. “It’s just part of one’s evolution.”

He has suffered from insomnia since he was a child: “It’s a relentless spirit that keeps wanting to think and dream up ways of doing things,” he says. He dreams a lot: “That’s how Waterloo Sunset came about. I had an idea in a dream and I woke up and wrote the song.” Do you find yourself singing your own songs? “I have a soundtrack in my head all the time. I have songs for emotions. When I’m feeling under pressure I have this song that comes into my head, and I can’t remember it now, but I’ve trained myself to have a soundtrack that helps me get through the day.”

Is it true that when you were 13 your mother took you to a psychiatrist? “It wasn’t called a psychiatrist then,” he says, “but I wasn’t adjusted to the way other people were. I’d just lost my sister [Rene, who died of a heart attack the day before his 13th birthday, while dancing at the Lyceum Ballroom; she had just presented him with his first guitar] and I’d been diagnosed with a physical problem of the spine that I’d had all my life and the pressures of school . . .” he moves on. “I think that’s why I do my writing courses. I want to develop a plan for kids in need. Writing is almost therapeutic for me — and being creative saved me. With the child awareness person [when he was a child], we worked using creativity to get issues resolved.”

Since 1991 Davies has been running residential songwriting workshops for the Arvon Foundation, the charity that was set up in the Sixties and counted Ted Hughes as one of its key supporters. My songwriting partner had been on one of Davies’s courses and enthused about his generosity, openness about his insecurities and his sweetness; when she had left early one night, feeling unwell, Davies came to her door, with her fellow students, and serenaded her.

When he lived in New Orleans in 2004 (where he was shot in the leg by a mugger as he was attempting to retrieve his former girlfriend’s handbag) Davies worked on a musical project with local children that aimed to set up an exchange programme with schoolchildren in Hackney, East London. Why does he devote so much time helping unknowns to grow musically? “It’s always good to stay in touch because writing, as you know, is quite lonely. I really admire and envy Lennon and McCartney in some ways for having had a partner to play off. So it refocuses me sometimes. It’s like a refresher course.”

I love Davies’s flatteringly inclusive “as you know” — and this from the guy who wrote hit after hit from 1964 to 1970 — including All Day and All of the Night, Sunny Afternoon, Waterloo Sunset and Lola.

Next month he follows in the footsteps of Nick Cave and David Bowie, as 18th artistic director of the Meltdown festival at the Royal Festival Hall. There is a retro feel to his programme, with the Sixties reflected in a recreation of the TV show Ready Steady Go! and appearances by Sandie Shaw and Ronnie Spector, and the Seventies through the punk poet John Cooper Clarke and Madness.

Davies confesses that one of the highlights for him is getting Terry Jones and Michael Palin together. Another highlight, which he’s too modest to mention, is a performance of the whole Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society album, with an orchestra and a North London choir, the Crouch End Festival Chorus.

Is he excited? “Yeah … it’s daunting … I’m quite vocally ‘down’ at the moment because when I don’t tour I rest my voice and my body. Having my body in tune with the way my mind’s working is as important to me as learning scales. That’s very important to me being a writer. I’m not a musician, I’m a writer,” he stresses.

While his Meltdown is partly a celebration of Englishness, the lyrics to the Village Green song could seem to be an ironic attack on our parochialism. “There’s some fun in that song of course,” he says and quotes: “ ‘God save little shops, china cups and virginity … God save Tudor houses, antique tables and billiards’. But I celebrate the British ability to be concerned about seemingly trivial things because that’s what’s built up our culture.”

He loved the community spirit of New Orleans, where he lived for three years with his girlfriend, and is thrilled that the Preservation Hall Jazz Band are coming to play at Meltdown. I am intrigued by his chivalry in pursuing his girlfriend’s handbag so assiduously. This prompts a sheepish grin: “Well, I’m British. I was brought up to let ladies through the door first.”

Davies is old-fashioned in other ways, too. When I ask him if he’s materialistic, he says: “I like to think I’m not, but the few things I do have, I like to cling on to them. I learnt not to be so materialistic after my first divorce,” he says with a rueful laugh. Does he think “If I don’t have any expensive possessions, I won’t have anything taken away from me”? “No, I think I’m very old school and when it happened to me [the first split, from Rasa, the mother of his two oldest girls, Louisa and Tor] I was very knocked back to actually go through divorce. I thought marriage was for ever.”

He is single at the moment, he says. How are you doing? “Pretty good.” Do you get lonely? “Everybody gets lonely but I just work.” We talk a bit about relationships and his observation that same-sex couples whom he has known seem to endure because they don’t have sex. (Though he has often played creatively with the idea of sexual ambiguity — Lola after all is a love song about a transsexual — he says that he has never been in a gay relationship.) “Sex messes up everything,” he proclaims. But it’s quite nice, isn’t it? “If you do it in your sleep, it is,” he mumbles. Later, when we discuss his love of Elgar, he adds: “Going back to your sex question, a lot of people have said to me, ‘You know, I really love you — just your mind, not your body’.”

Among his favourite songs are Jerusalem and Louis Armstrong’s recording of Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? He reads poetry and believes that he’s at the age when he should be tackling the epics: Tennyson and so on.

He has just spent the weekend in Ireland with his youngest daughter, Eva, 14, from his third marriage, to Patricia Crosbie. Do you ever wish that you’d had a son? “I do, but the poor kid would have to have been an Olympic athlete and the best artist in the neighbourhood. My expectations would have been so high. Not that the girls don’t live up to expectations, but my son would have had his work cut out for him.”

It’s easy to imagine how tricky Davies must have been as a partner when he talks about the demands that he makes on his friends. “You see, someone who’s my friend must understand that I’m a creative person and sensitive but I’m also competitive. I love great boxing matches, I love the poetry of combat.”

Are you selfish? “I expect so. Real friends allow me to indulge the way I am — and they know it’s an indulgence and not really me. I’ll pretend to be more selfish than I am and they enjoy not giving me what I want. It’s a game.” Blimey, how complicated you are! “Yes, I’ve written a song called Complicated Life and I’m thrilled it’s been covered by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. That, to me, sums up success.”

I ask about his younger brother, Dave, with whom he has had the most complicated relations of all. Born in Haringey, North London, they formed The Kinks together, fought viciously, stopped communicating and now appear to have had a rapprochement. Everyone always asks if they will reform the band. Actually, I didn’t, but after the interview Ray seems to have spent another sleepless night convinced that he had somehow suggested that they were getting back together musically.

I had asked how Dave was doing, after a recent stroke. “Very well. I think he’s driving now and playing music.” If anything, Ray seemed rather protective of his little brother. “I got an e-mail this morning and he wants to work out the paperwork that is the agreement for us to do new work together [which, come to think of it, does sound like some kind of reunion]. He wants it to be clearly defined what the work relationship will be.” At this point he grins like mad. “He’s still got a brilliant head on him — he’s smarter than I am.”

How do you think you’re going to die? “Unexpectedly.” Do you ever think about it? “I do.” In what way? “It will be a shock! I’ve been thinking about Schumann, because I’m using his music in something, and apparently he was terrified because his contemporaries died at an early age and he was roughly the same age, and it sent him a little bit cranky. Which happens if you dwell on it too much. I think the important thing is to think about living. Living is the antidote to dying.”

Then I ask him about Osama bin Laden, who had just been killed when we met. “Osama who?” he quips. And then he goes off on a Pythonesque riff: “Legend has it that he was an Arsenal supporter and I have this fantasy that he was watching Match of the Day when he was discovered. Arsenal won and they were very good on the day … I hope he enjoyed it.”

So, Ray Davies … definitely Mr Funny Ha-Ha but also a little bit of Mr Funny Peculiar, I think — and a good thing, too.

The Times