“Who the f**k is Moby?” Ray Davies, of The Kinks, said on hearing that the musician had taken issue with one of the band’s signature hits.
“He’s someone who does quite well,” his brother, Dave, explained. “I don’t know anything about the guy.”
All very quaint. Moby, aka Richard Melville Hall, celebrated his 60th birthday in 2025. He has been making music since George W Bush was in the White House. This week he has nonetheless taken it upon himself to school veterans on changing attitudes towards transgender issues.
In an interview with The Guardian he explained that he could no longer listen to The Kinks’ song Lola. “I thought the lyrics were gross and transphobic,” he said. “I like their early music, but I was really taken aback at how unevolved the lyrics are.”
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It’s quite something to accuse a song about a cross-dresser – maybe a transgender person, maybe not quite – from 1970 of being unevolved. Fifty-six years is a long time in pop music. It is a geologic aeon in gender politics. One may as well accuse a trilobite of being insufficiently evolved.
Lola has remained one of the London band’s most popular songs. Written as the 1960s were curling into a final foetal position, the lyrics describe the hero’s encounter with the titular glamour puss “in a club down in old Soho”.
There’s a certain amount of joshing about Lola’s physical strength. “When she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine,” Ray Davies sings. But the overall sense is of celebration. “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls,” the jaunty number concludes. “It’s a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world.”
Dave Davies sounded genuinely baffled by Moby’s objection. In his statement he quoted an unpublished essay by the seminal transgender artist Jayne County, a veteran of the Stonewall riots, on the positive influence of Lola – “one of those songs that for me ‘broke the ice’,” she wrote. “I was both thrilled and amazed that The Kinks would be singing a song about a trans person and wondered if anyone else had picked up on it.”
Marc Almond, voice of the great Soft Cell, offered a contemporary rebuttal to Moby’s remarks. “Oh, for god’s sake,” he sighed on Instagram. “A brilliant, funny, affectionate, sweet and actually groundbreaking song telling a Soho story of a naive guy in the city, one of my all-time favourites. Chill out.”
All this would greatly baffle those hearing the song first in 1970. Unsurprisingly, few were then complaining that Lola misrepresented the transgender community. The tune was banned by several radio stations in Australia and continued to cause unease among more conservative fans as the decade progressed. (The BBC, then paranoid about brand names, initially banned it because of a reference to Coca-Cola. Other soft drinks are available.)
Lola may, however, have facilitated an unexpected outbreak of androgyny in mainstream pop. A year after the song’s release, David Bowie appeared on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World in a dress. In 1972, Lou Reed, who had long been chronicling trans legends in The Velvet Underground, brought the likes of Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling into the UK top 10 with Walk on the Wild Side.
By this stage Top of the Pops, BBC’s weekly music television show, had taken on the quality of a fancy-dress party. Bands such as The Sweet, T Rex and Roxy Music arrived caked in Max Factor. Bowie began the second side of Ziggy Stardust with a paeon to an androgynous figure called Lady Stardust. Après Lola, le déluge.
That strain in popular music never quite went away. It was there in disco. It was certainly there with the New Romantics. And there were clandestine nods to transgender themes in the most unlikely places. In 2016, Deena Kaye Rose, the American songwriter, confirmed that her tune Some Days Are Diamonds (Some Days Are Stone), a hit for John Denver in 1981, had been inspired by her coming out as a transgender woman. (We can’t know what Denver, who died in 1997, would have thought, but he campaigned vigorously against anti-gay legislation in the 1980s.)
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Lola was not responsible for all this, but it sits on a cultural timeline that takes us from silence and embarrassment to the current open conversation about transgender issues. That has come with its own complications. No other topic causes such bellicosity in online spaces.
We can, perhaps, understand why Moby now approaches The Kinks’ tune with caution. Then again, we don’t really understand precisely what has got him so riled up. At time of writing, he has yet to rejoin the debate. “He’s throwing all this s**t up about something that shouldn’t bother him,” Dave Davies sighed. Hard to argue with that.
