Ray Davies: “Everyone’s been traumatised these last 18 months”
ALEX LAKE; JACK ROBINSON/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
"IT starts in a leafy suburb in north London – and ends up going to hell and back!” Ray Davies is telling Uncut about his new project, the BBC radio musical Lola Versus Powerman, based on The Kinks’ 1970 LP. “When I made the album all those years ago,” he recalls, “I did a sketch storyline, and I wanted to write about the stories going through my head. Now it’s about a songwriter who’s made a pact with the Devil, partly inspired by a 15th-century morality play called Everyman. It’s about his struggles with demons. I steered away from The Kinks’ story –I wanted to make it a story that everybody could relate to. It describes how I was having a slight mental breakdown at the time.”