Despite their position at the forefront of British pop, The
Kinks have never gotten as much ink as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or The
Who. There have been a few slim biographies by Jon Savage, John Mendelssohn
(both published way back in the eighties), and Neville Martin & Jeffrey
Hudson, one exhaustive day-by-day guide by Doug Hinman, and perhaps most
significant of all, landmark autobiographies by Ray and Dave Davies. That’s
about it. Recognizing the void, Mojo
writer and kultist Rob Jovanovic got to work on his own biography five years
ago in an effort to bring The Kink kronikles up to date. It’s likely Jovanovic
did not realize that at the same time, his fellow writer Nick Hasted was
working on his own Kinks biography with input from Ray, Dave, and drummer Mick
Avory and that You Really Got Me: The
Story of The Kinks would beat his book to the shelves by two years. That
must have been frustrating, especially since both books cover a lot of the same
ground (they even come in at almost the same page count) with the major added
bonus of those new interviews with the brothers Davies.
Here’s why God Save
The Kinks: A Biography remains a relevant read for Kinks fans: more so than
Hasted, Jovanovic looks beyond the core members of the band to explore the
experiences of those not named Davies. Naturally, Ray and Dave remain the key
players, as they should, and like Hasted, Jovanovic also gets quotes from Avory
and bassist Pete Quaife’s brother David. However, we also get primary
perspectives from bassist John Dalton, keyboardist John Gosling, and back-up
singers Debi Doss and Shirlie Roden, whose contemporary remembrances and period
journal entries commandeer the storytelling during The Kinks’ mid-seventies
theatrical phase. The rest of the book is good too—a well-written, reasonably
thorough blow-by-blow of the Davies’s activities and accomplishments alone and
together up to the present day—but it is the expansion of the orbit from the brothers
to their extended musical family that makes God
Save The Kinks an essential companion volume to You Really Got Me.
