“I said to Ray I thought that it’d be a great shame if we don’t try and do something,” confides Dave, mindful of the Stones’ recent 50th anniversary celebrations. “It’d be pathetic finishing up being two waddling old men fucking up. Although the Stones do it quite easily! [Laughs] Playing the same tune for 60 years – ‘Oohh, take me wallet, oohh, take me clothes!’ What the Stones should do now, they’ve amassed so much wealth and money, they should start the Gimme Shelter Foundation, and use it to help the homeless people, or people who’ve really given up. When I first saw the Stones, I thought, ‘Wow, this is fucking great.’ I felt so in tune with it. And it helped me, as a young player. But I don’t want to cast judgments. People go, ‘It’d be great if you and Ray got together and you played the O2’, and that fills me with despair.” Ray, it transpires, has more ambitious ideas for a Kinks’ reunion. “I’d like something good to come out of it, not something sad,” he explains. “I couldn’t think of anything worse than something sad, like those infomercials you see for country greats. I’d like to do something sensible, artistic and dignified. There’s every possibility it could happen, if people behave. Or misbehave at the appropriate moment.
“It’s just grabbing the unit,” explains Ray, describing Dave’s talent. “I want to see what the hands can deliver. But don’t forget, key to The Kinks, in both recording and performance, is the uncertainty of it all.”
Uncut meets Dave, 66, outside an East Finchley coffee shop in late October. He is wearing a pin-striped suit jacket, dark trousers, a Star Wars T-shirt and a fedora, which sits on the table between us. He looks healthier and happier than when I first met him, a decade ago, before his stroke. When he speaks, he emphasises certain key points by mimicking a boxer’s “one-two” punch. “It’s funny,” he begins. “Me and my son Martin were doing some filming for a documentary we’re making this morning, and I looked over the fence of 6 Denmark Terrace, where me and Ray grew up. We lived on Fortis Green, halfway between here and Muswell Hill. But I didn’t really want to go in our old house. My memories are so full of that time, and how we played in the garden, and the boxing matches between me and Ray, and I think when you see it today it looks a bit sad. It’s all posh and new, and they’ve actually got a proper bathroom! It was better when it was falling apart a bit, and there was people fighting and screaming. Aunt Lil being wheeled home drunk at four o’clock in the morning in a wheelbarrow because she was pissed and couldn’t stand up. She couldn’t even raise her hands to finish her last gin and tonic! But I don’t see the point in going back there.
“Everybody talks about us fighting and bad-mouthing, but that spirit comes from my family,” he continues. “My mum was like that, she had to be. Those working-class families that grew up through the Blitz, seeing their friends blown up across the street, houses flattened, you’ve got to be a pretty powerful optimist to live through all that. It’s embedded in the DNA of The Kinks. We grew out of that, and brought it with us through the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, right to the present day. I know that’s a core of Ray’s DNA, and mine. We approach what’s going on today differently to other people. I’d even go so far as to take it back to a bit of Celtic in us [the family are part-Irish]. It gave us a ferocious desire to survive.”