CityLife

Ray Davies

Ray Davies
Bridgewater Hall
December 15, 2009

JUST like John Lennon, Ray Davies wrote some of the most memorable pop songs of the 20th century – and got shot in America.

Unlike John Lennon, however, the former frontman of The Kinks, now in his sixties, beat the bullet and is alive and well and touring frequently - and he pitched up at the Bridgewater Hall with his usual armoury of dazzling, classic tunes.

So you’d think that, as a nation, we’d be grateful for his survival and recognise his legendary status more; that we’d pay him the kind of homage reserved for Jagger, Bowie and McCartney.

But the fact is that Ray Davies just doesn’t seem bothered by the superstar game. Between songs he chatted and joked like a mate and at the end he even went to the edge of the stage and signed autographs. 

And such is the power of his material and personality that he barely bothers with a light show and there are no backdrops or fancy stage props at all.

Full-throttle

Accompanied in the first half of the set just by another guitarist, Davies kicked off with a more languid, acoustic version of You Really Got Me – the song that apparently kicked off heavy metal – followed by equally creative arrangements of I’m Not Like Everybody Else, Apeman and the glorious Waterloo Sunset (the finest pop song ever?).

With most of the here-today-gone-tomorrow pop stars, that tally would have accounted for most of the recognisable numbers already, but with Davies they just kept on coming.

He jokingly referred to Dedicated Follower Of Fashion an ‘an old English folk song’, but he’s not far off the mark, and he could have thrown in a panto reference, too, especially when the audience joined in enthusiastically with bellows of ‘oh yes he is’.

From then on really, the audience couldn’t stop singing along, through Autumn Almanac and Dead End Street, although Davies’s more recent material, sprinkled here and there, received due respect rather than an accompaniment.

Once his youngish band joined him on stage, the still-skinny Davies discarded his chair and stood up, legs splayed like a true rocker, to power through After The Fall (dedicated to Tiger Woods), the coruscating Till The End Of The Day and much more before finishing off with a full-throttle electric version of You Really Got Me.

And he really had us from beginning to end - and it takes a legend with true genius to do that.

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