With his autobiography, the cleverly titled X-Ray (which was published two years ago), Kinks singer and chief songwriter, Ray Davies, showed himself to be that rarest of rock personages - someone who could actually write, as opposed to produce painfully bad, ghost-written scribblings about "shagging groupies" and "smashing up hotel rooms". Perhaps it was only to be expected from a lyricist who always belonged at the more thoughtful and substantial end of the popular musical spectrum and has since been revealed as having had a major influence on a number of today's young turks, most notably Blur.
This follow-up effort, very much a companion piece to his autobiography, doesn't contain the same element of surprise as its predecessor and simply doesn't connect on the same level - there being a vast difference in style and content between autobiography and fiction.
Framed around the outdated idea of a "concept album" - out-dated not in terms of fashion but of creative redundancy - this is a collection of 17 stories inspired by lesser-known songs from The Kinks's back catalogue. The interlinking narratives are held together by the potentially striking character of Richard Tenant, a rock music manager who is attempting to relaunch the career of Lester Mulligan (who is based on the author himself).
Tenant and Mulligan represent the ridiculous and sublime of the rock world and Davies makes much of this contradiction as he brings the reader on a geographical and historical ride around his own personal magical mystery tour.
This is very much a treatise on the nature of song writing and the role of the popular composer in the modern world. There is much plodding prose about "the confusion between pretence and reality" and righteous ruminations on the notion of trends, fashion and sell-by dates.
While Davies is on safe territory dealing with the more "rock 'n' roll" end of things, being able to draw on his own considerable experience, which includes some original and insightful observations, he loses the plot somewhat when attempting to capture the world of the suburban commuter, a world which throughout seems to operate as some sort of needless counterpoint to the rock world.
Breaking up the action periodically is a sinister character from one of the songs whose overall intention is ambiguous. This three-way struggle between the characters is a slightly overworked metaphor about the music world, and Davies retreats into cliche just one time too many as he attempts to add more momentum to the narrative.
The same sort of literary devices which worked so well in his previous book (the enigmatic narrator, the whole notion of which is really controlling the thrust of the text) are used again, but don't carry the same weight second time around.
It's difficult to detect his exact purpose in basing all the stories around his own lyrics, but in his own valiant way he seems to be re-visiting the site of his previous literary endeavours in order to illuminate further what he was trying to say, with the benefit of hindsight and of being able to write at length about the original characters. The idea is noble but the execution of it is slightly less so.
On a fundamental level, he is writing about songwriting, but in a very subjective and frequently opaque manner. Evidently, he is far too close to his own lyrics to be able to substantially transfer them from a verse-chorus-verse structure into a cohesive narrative.
There is, though, some merit in his ability to create a sense of tension and a sense of character, and he does write with a pleasurable degree of self-deprecating wit. However, this one does seem to be strictly for the fans. Luckily, there are many of them.
Brian Boyd is a freelance journalist and critic
