Dave Davies is trying to remember a particular Kinks song. It’s a track, he says, that somehow encapsulates his famously fractious sibling relationship with his brother Ray, chief songwriter and lead singer of The Kinks, one of the “big four” sixties British Invasion bands, along with The Who, the Stones, and The Beatles. But he can’t remember what it is.
His PA, and girlfriend of 14 years Rebecca Wilson, enters the room at his request and reels off a list of suggestions that reminds me what an astonishing back catalogue The Kinks have. “’You Really Got Me?’ ‘Lola‘? ‘Days’? ‘Sunny Afternoon’? ‘All Day and All of the Night’? ‘Waterloo Sunset’?” Batting away all of these with an exasperated “No,” Davies is clearly frustrated at his level of recall – he suffered a stroke in 2004 aged 57, and though he has made a very good recovery, he still slurs his words and occasionally needs a nudge in the right direction from Wilson.
Finally, it comes to him independently: “’I’m Not Like Everybody Else!’” he says, with great relief. He doesn’t have anything to hand to play it to me, so I pick up my phone and blast the song down my laptop mic, both of us sitting for 30 seconds listening to a song he recorded 60 years ago.
