Then at the City Winery, New York, on May 28, 2013, Dave played his first concert in 10 years.
“It came to the point in the end when I didn’t give a fuck,” he explains. “What are they gonna do if I fuck up, kill me? New York’s always been a really great place for The Kinks. I thought I’d start there because I thought I’d have more of a chance. I couldn’t sleep the night before. You start thinking really weird shit about failing. And come showtime I was absolutely petrified. But when you get out onstage, it all comes back, because you’ve done it so much of your life.”
How did he feel when he came offstage?
“About 16,” he laughs.
Dave was equally thrilled by his new album, I Will Be Me [see sidebar, p29]. It contained one song, “Little Green Amp”, which acted as an origin story for “You Really Got Me”. It was the closest he had come to Kinks music since his stroke. “This year was the only time I’ve been tempted by a Kinks reunion,” he explains. “Once I got I Will Be Me finished, I sat and listened to it and thought, ‘Fuck it, I love it, that’s what I wanted to do.’ It made me feel fulfilled. I felt then that Ray and I could do something. And going on the road and playing live, getting that feeling back, it does make you think, ‘What if?’”
“I was coming back to London to do some business,” continues Dave, who now lives in America. “And I thought, we’ve got to talk about what we want to do. And I got some songs together, half thinking about me and Ray. It was nice to see him again when we got together in August in the pub. It was wonderful. It made me feel like we’re the last of a line.”
“He got in touch with me,” Ray remembers more coolly. “I said, ‘Yeah, why not?’ First of all he asked me for an amazing favour that I could no way deliver, out of the blue. Then he came to see me. It was good to see him confident and liberated again. I felt the same way anybody would feel. How have they changed, are they happier? He’ll always be on the edge of something. It was like Michael Corleone and Lee Strasberg’s Godfather character, Hyman Roth, when they met in Miami,” he says. “The thing with Dave is, he’s got this look about him, like Al Pacino. He’s talking affectionately, but behind the veil of his eyes, he looks like he can kill you at any moment. He still has that, which is hunger. Which is ambition, which makes him a great guitar player. I’m more like Hyman Roth, seeing the big picture.”