Dave Davies, the lead guitarist for legendary English rock band The Kinks, has said he is “keeping his fingers crossed” about getting the band back together before the 60th anniversary of their groundbreaking hit song “You Really Got Me” in 2024.
The Kinks’ Dave Davies: ‘Ray and I have spoken about a reunion – it’s possible!’ | The Independent https://t.co/DrU0XytBpZ
— Dave Davies (@davedavieskinks) July 26, 2022
Dave and his brother, lead singer Ray Davies have famously had a difficult relationship. The band never formally split, last taking the stage together as The Kinks back in 1996. Talking to The Independent to promote his candid new memoir Living on a Thin Line, Davies said about the possibility of the reunion, “Ray and I have spoken about it – it’s possible! We get on okay…We talk about football! We’re born-and-bred Arsenal fans… So, yeah, I’m optimistic about the future.”
Back in 1964, Davies was a 17-year-old obsessed with science fiction and liked to “make silly things that didn’t make any sense with bits of wire”. On the creation of the seminal guitar sound that Davies used on “You Really Got Me”, he told The Independent, “I’d had an argument with my girlfriend and I was full of rage and pissed off. Rather than slash me wrists, I thought I’d attack the speaker cone. I sliced the cone down, virtually all the way around, and was quite surprised that it was still working. It had this kind of raspy sound, and I liked it.”
The brothers had just formed the band with a friend Pete Quaife playing bass, and Ray was starting to write songs on the family’s upright piano. Davies goes on to explain the origin of one of rock music’s most famous riffs telling the paper, “He wrote the ‘You Really Got Me’ riff on that piano, I tried it with my new sound and that’s how we really started.” The rest was history as that crunching F chord crashed out of speakers all over the world; the sound influencing musicians from Jimi Hendrix to Tom Petty – rock music was never the same again.
Asked about his thoughts on the song after all these years, Davies told The Independent, “I thought it was amazing, I felt more like an inventor. Some people adored the sound, and others hated it, but once we put it into the context of the song Ray was writing it started to become what it became, which was a phenomenon. It was a phenomenal time anyway. It seemed like the working class was really breaking through with art and movies and music.”
“You Really Got Me” was released in August 1964 as the band’s third single and quickly hit the number one spot the following month, searing the band’s influence onto the beating heart of the Swinging Sixties.
