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Dave Davies: ‘I love my brother… I just can’t stand to be with him’
10.13.2011
11:11 am
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Though his stroke in 2004 made Dave Davies more mindful of what he is doing and “appreciative of the chance to do it,” there’s still little chance of a Kinks reunion anytime soon, as Dave tells Neil McCormick in an interview over at the Telegraph:

“About an hour with Ray’s my limit, so it would be a very short reunion.”

Dave talks to Neil about his relationship with Ray, his time in The Kinks and his thoughts about being a sixties superstar:

‘I felt that I was indestructible, but rock and roll does that, you strap on that guitar and think, ‘F—- the world.’ I wasn’t a very academic kid, and music was the way for all that feeling and angst and sex and love and anger to be channelled.”

Dave has always been “the other Kink”, and it is his dysfunctional relationship with his more famous, more acclaimed and, arguably, more accomplished brother that has come to define him in the public’s eye. They could be the prototype for the Gallagher brothers, their bickering, battling relationship so mutually dependent and disharmonious that, even though the Kinks disbanded in 1996, Ray still constantly hovers at the edges of conversation, alluded to directly and indirectly.

One moment Dave will describe Ray as “a vain, egotistical arsehole”, but another he will profess profound respect and affection, saying: “How could I not love my own brother? I just can’t stand to be with him.”

Dave and Ray grew up in a large (six girls, two boys) working-class family in Muswell Hill, close to where we meet. “I had to look sibling rivalry up in the encyclopaedia: for years, I didn’t even know what it meant. He was my older brother. I looked up to him; he inspired me.

“I thought what we were doing in the Kinks was collaborative. But Ray uses different words to me. He would talk about me as his muse. So I’m important to be in his life, but only as a support for what he’s doing. That’s a pretty hard pill to swallow.”

Davis is still performing, and claims he sounds and plays better now than ever before. He is working on a ‘new’ alum, and though never as prolific as Ray, Dave is still a fine songwriter, as this classic track, “Death of a Clown” attests.

Read Neil McCormick’s with Dave Davies here.
 



 
Via the Daily Telegraph
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.13.2011
11:11 am
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