ONE FINE RAY

With Waterloo Sunset, a new collection of stories, Kinks leader Ray Davies has taken the lyrical talent behind "Lola" and "You Really Got Me" into a different arena—the rocker who writes is now a writer who rocks

Books

Ray Davies, the leader of the Kinks, was always the most writerly of British rockers. The plangent incan tation of "You Really Got Me." The bucolic melan choly of "Sunny Afternoon." The Sweeney-amongthe-Adam's-appled-nightingales of "Lola." Ray could rock, Ray could write. Small wonder, then, that he's become, well—what else to call it?—a real writer. ical appreciation of Shakespeare to be uttered since the death of A. L. Rowse: "I don't know why."

But enough shoptalk. There's something I need to know. As

If his 1995 autobiography, X-Ray, seemed an odd embrace of Quintilian's Late Latin desideratum of the ornatus, his new collection of stories, Waterloo Sunset, evinces a voice that is his own, freed, sure, and fine.

Writing, he says, is "a different discipline." More isolation, more flexibility. "I don't have a drummer giving me a backbeat." In making music, "there's slightly more brain damage involved." No metaphor: "The sound attacks your ears."

He speaks of Dickens, of Conrad. "And late in life I've grown to like Shakespeare." Then, perhaps the only salient original crit-

Dne of the few true lords of English rock 'n' roll, is he ashamed of Elton John?

"Bunter, you mean? We used to call him Bunter. Billy Bunter was a fat chump at school, a comic-strip character in the 50s." He continues: "Who is that woman who's related to Princess Diana that writes all those books? She's about 90 years old. Well, he's become the her of rock 'n' roll."

Actually, Dame Barbara Cartland is 98, in better shape than rock 'n' roll, Presleyed, Beaded, and Buntered to moribund mediDcrity as it's been.

So here's to Ray. May he stroll smiling through the graveyard for many a year, Lola to his left, Conrad to his right, Shakegrowing him, his not quite knowing why.

NICK TOSCHES

FOR DETAILS, SEE CREDITS PAGE