Ray Davies at the Royal Festival Hall

Ray Davies is curating the Southbank Meltdown Festival this year and he kicked it off in grand style with a sold-out gig of his own at the Royal Festival Hall on Friday evening. I saw Ray at the Royal Festival Hall just before Christmas last year when he brought on the Crouch End Festival Chorus in the second half of the show for his choral versions of Kinks songs but this time it was just Ray and his band for about 2:20 hours. He's doing a separate show with the Chorus next week.

Ray took to the stage with his guitarist to open the show with an acoustic set, playing a dozen songs or so before the rest of his four-piece band appeared mid-way through 'Dead End Street' to make a lot of noise. You know it's the acoustic set because Ray sits down on a stool throughout it and he stands up for the full band. It's always entertaining to see and hear Mr Davies, with a story or joke for every song, and he has a lot of songs. An awful lot of songs and most people know most of them, and he invited us to sing along to lots of them. He can still spring a surprise by playing a song from his later albums, such as 'Full Moon' from 'Sleepwalker'.

Most of the songs were from the classic Kinks period of the mid-60s to early 70s plus some great songs from his more recent solo albums. A mixture of rockers and more thoughtful, gentle songs, Ray has them all with guitar playing a prominent part in most of them, due his brother Dave. Ray tells the story of writing 'You Really Got Me' on the piano in the front room of his parents' house and yet we all think of this as a guitar-based song due to the riff invented by Dave that propelled him and The Kinks into rock history.

Favourite Kinks songs from this gig were 'See My Friends', 'Apeman' (the first time I've seen Ray play this - I bought the single back in the day), 'I'm Not Like Everybody Else', 'Well Respected Man', 'Victoria', 'Set Me Free' and 'Dedicated Follower Of Fashion' (which Ray introduced as a traditional English folk song). Of his solo songs, I'd pick out 'The Morphine Song' and 'Vietnam Cowboys', both of which sounded excellent. He didn't play any of the 'Village Green' songs, presumably because he's playing them with the Crouch End Chorus next week.


Ray played three encores and that's where we got some of the greats, including 'You Really Got Me', 'Waterloo Sunset' and the final encore of 'Lola'. I think there's something interesting about a hall full of ordinary people chanting and singing along to a song about a tranny (there's some interesting psychology there). I love 'Lola' and, clearly, so did most of the audience with the hall erupting into a mass sing-a-long.

It's always great to see Ray Davies play live - there aren't that many people still playing that could go on for hours and not need to repeat any songs. He's been writing songs for 50 years and, no doubt, there's more to come. I must admit that I had a slight hope that Dave might walk on for one of the encores, pick up his guitar and blast out some power chords but that was not to be. I expect we'll see more of Ray over the Meltdown week so watch this space...