Re: Ray Davies presents "Come Dancing" musical

www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3_m8yORGRk


jaimej78 wrote:
> "The Times"
> September 3, 2008
> Ray Davies: The Kink kronikler
> The Kinks presiding genius has written Come Dancing, a musical
> inspired by his childhood memories
> Mick Hume
>
> “I broke up with my first girlfriend on that bench,” Ray Davies says
> as we sit in a leafy Highgate square. “No, she broke up with me”.
> Davies, now almost unbelievably 64, is once more living close to where
> he was brought up in North London. He tells me that he is still “just
> a regular bloke” and “a bit of a square, really”. In which case the
> former Kinks leader must be the most irregular, non-conformist square
> in town.
>
> He is writing and appearing in a new musical, Come Dancing, at the
> Theatre Royal Stratford East. While the title comes from the Kinks'
> 1982 single, the show features 20 or so new songs. “Stratford East
> have got a lot of bottle to put this on. I'm just a regular bloke and
> this is a regular show for regular people. I went to see Rent in New
> York, I didn't get as far as the foyer. Didn't like the audience.”
>
> Davies, who plays the show's narrator, “who may or may not” be him,
> has always been an astute observer and storyteller. He might remember
> the Sixties, but he was too busy writing wry lyrics about it to do
> much swinging. “Sometimes the culture was just overwhelming. So I
> stayed in my semi in North London and wrote songs. I did throw a
> couple of parties. A lot of hippies would come, smoke joints. I put on
> Max Miller records, people just left.”
>
> Come Dancing is set in Ilford Palais in 1959, at the end of the big-
> band era, before the dawn of Sixties pop. Davies says it is about “the
> tensions of a society in change, both ethnically and musically, and
> the emergence of teenagers”. It is inspired by the “magical time” when
> he would watch his six older sisters get ready to go dancing. He spent
> some years living with one of them, Rose. “I don't know why. A mixture
> of [my parents] not being able to look after us...” His eldest sister
> died in a dance hall from a heart complaint, just after giving Davies
> his first guitar for his 13th birthday, though he declines to speak
> about it, saying it's “a family thing”.
>
> The show is more than Fifties nostalgia. “It's about these youths
> trying to emerge and find a voice. That could be done in Victorian
> times, it could be done now.” He has drawn on the memory of “hard kids
> who grew up near us, a gang called the Mussies, no guns fortunately
> but a lot of flick knives”.
>
> Does he see parallels between the panics about teenagers then and
> about antisocial youth today? “I think people are driven to actions.
> You drive past kids in Hackney, obviously nothing to do. In our day we
> started a band, and maybe they make their own music, but it is more
> violent now, this gangsta music. We are getting the shootings here,
> almost as bad as America, New Orleans.” Davies was shot in the leg in
> New Orleans while chasing a robber who stole his female companion's
> bag in 2004, though his injuries weren't life-threatening.
>
> One of the first pop stars to dare to sing with a London accent,
> Davies worries about his city “becoming ghettoised. I'm really pleased
> about the Olympics coming here. We can see the cranes building the
> stadium from the Stratford rehearsal room. I hope good things come out
> of it. What worries me is whether all the people who celebrated it
> going to East London will be able to afford to live there afterwards.”
> He was rumoured to be standing for London mayor - “a joke. But Boris
> Johnson, day by day his shoulders are slouching. It's a poisoned
> chalice. I don't want to go on about it; there are still magical
> things about London. The great thing about human beings is we will
> adjust.”
>
> Kerry Michael, artistic director at Stratford East, says that after
> they staged The Harder They Come, about the black community, Come
> Dancing is giving a shout to “the white East Ender”. Davies, the North
> London boy, prefers to talk about the white working class. “The
> working class has no voice. It's disappearing, it's being eradicated,
> with stealth rather than ethnic cleansing. I'm not saying it's that
> bad, but I think it's getting harder to have a voice if you've at all
> got a working-class feeling.
>
> “It's difficult for me to talk about being working class because of my
> nominal success. But when I moved into Highgate a friend said: ‘In
> your brain, Ray, you'll still be living in a tenement.' I didn't grow
> up in a tenement, it was a semi, but I try to keep the same ethic. I
> like the underdog to have its voice.” His most recent solo album,
> Working Men's Café, dealt with the loss of local traditions to
> globalisation.
>
> But then maybe Davies has always been a things-ain't-what-they-used-to-
> be miserabilist. The Kinks brought out Where Have All the Good Times
> Gone way back in 1965. “Yes, I wrote that when I was 19! I am one of
> the few people who wrote songs to make my parents feel good. I wasn't
> a rebel at all. I wouldn't have put Sunny Afternoon out if they hadn't
> liked it. So I'm a bit of a square really. Although I am a rebel
> against corporate control - but it's a losing battle.”
>
> How about his reputation as a “quintessentially English writer” who
> recorded The Village Green Preservation Society at the height of the
> Sixties cultural revolution? “No, I wanna be from Alabama - not
> really. But I was inspired to make music by the American sound. Then
> we were banned from America for four years [after a bust-up with union
> fixers]. So I withdrew into being English, moved out to the suburbs,
> and wrote a dotty English song. I was 22, a kind of wistful old person
> even then. I do think we've lost some of our English charm. We should
> warm to other cultures, but not forget our own culture and history.
> But you can't just stay in history, and that's what the show is about,
> people trying to move forward.”
>
> A new book compares Davies to Wordsworth as a great English romantic.
> “I am a romantic, but I'm a realist too. When I write hard stuff, it
> is always done with a little bit of humour. But we all do have some
> darkness in us. Writers who deal with dark characters interest me,
> Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad. It's what I'm trying to do at the
> moment, find the darkness in one character - then we'll have the
> show.”
>
> Davies says there is “some good energy out there” but “the X Factor
> thing worries me. I like to encourage songwriters who have got
> something to say but don't know how to get it out in a conventional
> pretty way that Simon Cowell will enjoy.”
>
> The singer, who refused to cover the gap in his teeth for his first TV
> appearance, has never been a fan of manufactured pop. “Music is
> exciting when there's a great band that comes from nowhere and can say
> what it wants on its terms. When the industry runs things, as it has
> for ten years, all the music becomes like cabaret.”
>
> Many of those who have made music exciting were inspired by the Kinks.
> Fortysomethings such as me really got it in the Seventies, when the
> likes of David Bowie and the Jam covered Kinks tracks. Now they are
> being rediscovered again; Shangri-La, a Davies satire on middle-class
> life, has been hijacked for an advert about carbon footprints. Even
> when looking to the past, Davies's music has influenced the future.
>
> So to the inevitable question about a Kinks reunion. “I think it's
> possible. Three quarters of the band want to do it, the other one's
> undecided.” The other one is his brother Dave, with whom Ray enjoyed a
> famously volatile working relationship. “It's all about the deal. The
> way to do it is in a dignified way. And it's important to me that we
> do new music as well. If we just did a greatest hits tour, I'd be
> totally depressed, it might turn me into a heroin addict.”
>
> After Come Dancing, how about a Kinks musical? “I'm not fond of all
> these catalogue musicals. But there is a good Kinks one wanting to get
> made called Sunny Afternoon. It appeals to me because it's about real
> people, and they've got it about right. But I'm a novice at doing
> musicals. I don't mind being collaborative, as long as I get what I
> want at the end of it.”
>
> That hints at Davies's reputation as a bit of a diva, difficult to
> work or live with. He is as particular as ever, as the hard-working
> young actors at Stratford East might testify. But listening again to
> the Kinks music reminded me of why it was worth giving up the first
> day of my holiday to interview the irascible critic of society's
> pretensions.
>
> As he prepares to take the stage in Come Dancing, the characteristics
> of our time that he would most like to lampoon are “unoriginality,
> role-playing, following the pack”. Not something he has often been
> guilty of, I suggest. “No, maybe not - other than the times I've been
> to the Arsenal, with 60-odd thousand others.” The once and future Kink
> of England an Arsenal fan? Well, nobody's perfect...
>
> Come Dancing runs at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London E15
> (020-8534 0310), Sept 13 to Oct 25
>
> Copyright 2008 "The Times."
>
> Jaime
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Jerry Marty (04.09.2008 17:11)