Ray mond douglas davies jim green essay

A s a keen-eyed chronicler of British manners and mores, Ray Davies is thinking about Brexit a lot. He’s currently writing a book about Britain – “focusing on what it had when I was young” – and he predicts a potentially problematic departure.

On a sunny but chilly afternoon in mid-April, Sir Raymond Douglas Davies is taking tea with milk and honey in an expressly non-working-man’s cafe in Highgate Village, close to his north London home, and a brisk stroll from the house where he was born in Muswell Hill.

Davies’ best songs have come from bittersweet personal experience: Dedicated Follower of Fashion, the deathless Days and, of course, Lola. “The incident with Lola happened in the Castel Club in Paris,” he recollects. “My manager was dancing with a drag queen.

Please try again later. Davies admits that the current US situation is “scary” but retains a fondness for the country, conceding that the Kinks’ ban, which he took “very personally”, may have been a blessing in disguise. “Because we couldn’t tour there, I took solace in being English and wrote The Village Green Preservation Society, ” he says.