The Book of Dave

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From his teenage discovery of Rhythm & Blues in 1950s Bexleyheath, walking into his favourite Friday night haunt, The Silver Lounge ice-cream parlour, and being instantly and utterly devastated by Ruth Brown's '(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean', blasting out from an American jukebox freshly installed in the corner of the room. It's depressing. Much of the Kinks music is sad, downer stuff, but the sheer beauty of it redeemed it every time. An aptly named autobiography that really broadened my understanding of Dave Davies. I learnt of his many repressed emotions and feelings on topics, his lifestyle as well as his interests outside of music (it gets a bit Kinky, but it does tone down... thankfully). Dave suffers a breakdown, and comes under the care of the psychiatrist Anthony Bohm. Despite discovering that Carl is actually Cal's son, Dave slowly recovers his sanity and, during a stay in hospital, forms a relationship with Phyllis Vance, the mother of Steve, another patient. Dave regrets the content of his book, and attempts to dig it up from the Hampstead garden, but fails. Dave moves into Phyllis's cottage on the fringes of outer London and, under her guidance, writes a second book that repudiates the content of the first, and recommends a life based on tolerance and freedom. He mails the new book to Carl, but shortly afterwards is confronted at the cottage by loan sharks to whom he is heavily indebted. Dave brandishes a shotgun but is fatally injured in a struggle with the men, who arrange the scene to make the death look like suicide – an arrangement that is readily believed by Phyllis and the police. Carl and Cal then place Dave's second book in a metal film canister and bury it in their garden.

Thumbnail sketches of the brothers at the heart of the Kinks habitually paint Ray, the elder, as the more complex and deep-feeling character, and Dave as flamboyant, more forthcoming and into UFOs. A lifelong square peg, the younger Davies is every bit as hard to pigeonhole as his sibling, swinging between the weary defence of his input to the band – always the subject of contention between Team Ray and Team Dave – and low self-esteem. Kinks fans will be familiar with the retelling of the band’s serpentine ups and downs, both musical and financial, how a ban on touring the US in the late 60s resulted in the Kinks turning more parochial and producing social commentary and albums such as The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, an Englishness that fed into punk and Britpop. Less familiar are the latterday updates, like Davies’s reunion with his teenage flame and their daughter, 30 years down the line. The two young lovers were forcibly separated by their parents; the loss of Sue and baby Tracey haunts Davies throughout his life. It's still a collection of TMI as one other reviewer described it, from the silly to the nasty and then circling around to the wildly insane. I always get lost once we get into the otherworldly jazz, and the level of crazy is truly appalling. People who hear voices need help. Period, full stop. People who hear voices and *heed* them really, really need help. People .. who hear voices from space and heed them to the point of altering their lives are the frightening, weird cults we read about on the news. He writes in such a fun and quirky way, that I’d find myself laughing out loud quite often. I feel like I got to know him better on a personality level just through the writing. (Picture Book came on). Writing in The Guardian in 2007, the author said he was inspired to write the book after having read The Bible Unearthed, a text that claims that archaeological discoveries imply that large elements of the Old Testament have no basis in historical reality whatsoever. [4] He writes that he intended to suggest imaginatively the notion he received from Finkelstein and Silberman's book, namely that revealed religion is a necessary function of state formation, and that the content of this or that holy book is irrelevant, compared to what people make of it. [4] At the same time, reports of increased raisings of the Thames Barrier had led him to contemplate that a catastrophic flood of London would render even detailed archival knowledge unable to reconstruct the metropolis. [4]For anyone interested in how a hyperactive misfit from Virginia became a third of Nirvana and went on to become a stadium-filling star with his own Foo Fighters, The Storyteller lives up to its billing... Those years spent crammed into vans, living off fumes and the kindness of female mud wrestlers are some of the most vivid here. The camaraderie and sudden violence of the international punk ecosystem is beautifully evoked... Grohl is a lively and thoughtful writer.' I love The Kinks, hell, I’m listening to them as I write this very review (Drivin’ is the song, if you wanted to know). Most people know their 1964 hit You Really Got Me, including my fellow Zoomers thanks to TikTok, but they are criminally underrated wholly. (The song changed- Days just came on). They wrote songs about their childhood, which give ME nostalgia, despite being just a listener. Come Dancing, an upbeat hit of theirs during the 80’s, is profoundly sad when you find out the story behind the song. (Dead End Street came on now).

The band’s ascent is exciting and bewildering – until it isn’t. When Nirvana ends, he turns down a cushy number playing drums for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to record Foo Fighters’ terrific debut album in a makeshift home studio, playing every instrument himself.

This wasn't the crapola slush of popular music expounded by white folks, this was real men and real women, as opposed to boys and girls, talking about real passions and hard emotions."... He once booked in a Russian film from the silent era and I don't know how he dared book it 'cos it had Russian sub-titles and no one could understand it. But he had them all translated into English and each sub-title put on a postcard. As the film was shown Dave stood there at the front of the cinema with a little light over a lectern and as each sub-title came up he read the translation out loud from the postcard. The cinema was full that night and the audience reaction to Dave reading out each Russian sub-title in English was one of true amazement!" (ANVIL ASSISTANT MANAGER DENNIS O'GRADY) I won't say how, but there is an event mentioned throughout the book (it's not exactly mentioned. It's more like a re-occurring nightmare that haunts and troubles Dave and gradually starts to involve the reader as it finds its way into almost every chapter of the book) that changed Dave's life (for the better or worse depends on whose side you're on) and near the closing of the book something on the breach of unbelievable happens that made me cry with sadness. Or maybe it was joy. I'm not 100% sure, by this point it was around midnight and I was too tired and confused to figure out what category of crying mine fell under. Davies writes at length about his deep interest in the esoteric, an enthusiasm for the unexplained that dovetails into a penchant for the occult. His nervous breakdown in the early 70s makes for painful but cautionary reading. In 1982, there was an encounter with what he calls “the Intelligences” – mysterious beings with whom he enters into “telepathic exchange”. Does satire ever alter our habits? In one respect The Book of Dave may have done so. A couple of readers confessed that their behaviour towards taxi drivers was not the same since reading Self's novel. "I feel obliged to give more money in tips to 'my Dave' who has just driven me somewhere." Self's Dave is a man of acid insight as well as angry prejudice, and some of the most memorable passages from the "recent past" sections of the book record his unspoken judgments on the self-revealing "fares" who sit his cab. "Now when I get in a taxi I always feel I'm being judged," observed one reader. "Writing this book has ruined the cab experience for me," confirmed the author. Self talked of writing into the character of Dave characteristics he took from the unnamed cabbie who conducted him around London's "points and runs" when he was researching for the book. At least one reader was surprised to hear this driver was also a psychotherapist. It was ironical, considering the author's previous yen for satirising the culture of psychotherapy - though he confessed he had "mellowed with regard to shrinks". "There are fatter fish to fry."

The 1990s saw Dave's professional return to Soul music with the critically acclaimed and best selling CD compilations, 'DAVE GODIN'S DEEP SOUL TREASURES' for the Kent/Ace label. The final release compiled and released shortly before his death. I thought the biography would take about six months to research and complete until I discovered how many facets there was to Dave Godin. Over six years later, here we are! I signed up here to review some good books, and in the process found the Dave books come up. They're awful. Not the quality of the book, but the content, the actual substance. We get to know Dave in ways we didn't want to, and it doesn't improve our opinion of him. The Kinks get a crap bath as well, stories that may or may not be true. I remember on an EP many years ago, a live concert, Ray referring to his 'delectable brother'. As a regular contributor to Blues & Soul magazine his bi-weekly column became the stuff of legend, avidly read by Soul fans and DJs alike, the latter using his recommendation's of 45s worthy to source to add to their playlists. On occasion Dave himself would make an unscheduled appearance in the DJ booth to spin a new white label release as in the case of 'Blowing Up My Mind' by The Exciters which he uk debuted at Manchester's Twisted Wheel. The island in the novel is inspired by the hilltop town of Hampstead in London and its famous parkland Hampstead Heath. In the book, Self describes a future England which has been inundated with rising seas, leaving Hampstead as the only remaining part of London. The inhabitants of this area, unaware that the drowned city of London is so close by, know their island as Ham. The geography of the island, illustrated in a map at the start of the book, bears close resemblance to the modern areas of Hampstead which inspired it. [5] Contemporary narrative [ edit ]On the isolated island of Ham, a tiny community ekes out an existence from the land, assisted by semi-intelligent pig-like creatures known as 'motos' that are unique to the island. The community lives according to the severely enforced religion of the country known as "Ing" (i.e. England) whereby men and women lead separate lives but share childcare in accordance with the dictates of the Book of Dave, which is regarded as a sacred text, but which is evidently the book written by Dave Rudman and buried in a Hampstead garden some two thousand years earlier. A young male 'Hamster', Symun Devush, explores a forbidden area of the island and emerges claiming that he has discovered a second Book of Dave that repudiates the tenets of the first. Although Symun's revelations are popular, and he is lauded throughout the country as a prophet, religious authorities from the reconstructed city of New London send a deposition that arrests Symun on a charge of heresy (or 'flying') and transports him to New London, where he is physically and mentally broken, his tongue torn out, and returned to live in isolation on the desolate outcrop of land known as Nimar, not far from Ham. I used to go to all the 'do's' where Dave used to rent a room above a pub and you'd get The Four Tops performing!" recalls Graham Moss. "There would be a reception for society members and whenever groups and singers came over to play there'd be a meet.... I also appreciated Dave Davies' candid comments about the man whom he loves dearly...yet who has used and abused him all his life...his genius older brother Ray Davies It is their tortuous relationship that is at the heart of KINK. From what Dave Davies says...its a bonafide miracle that he and his brother were able to stay together (as a band) for as long as they did..it also gives fascinating insight into why The Kinks eventually broke up...never to reunite again (at least as of this writing). For anyone interested in how a hyperactive misfit from Virginia became a third of Nirvana and went on to become a stadium-filling star with his own Foo Fighters, The Storyteller lives up to its billing... Those years spent crammed into vans, living off fumes and the kindness of female mud wrestlers are some of the most vivid here. The camaraderie and sudden violence of the international punk ecosystem is beautifully evoked... Grohl is a lively and thoughtful writer.' - Kitty Empire, Observer Raised in a household short on cash but big on maternal love, Grohl believes he probably had ADHD, such was his restlessness and inability to turn his natural curiosity into good grades. While his mother, whom he adores, encouraged him to seize the day, Grohl’s divorced father disowned him when he dropped out of school to join punk band Scream, playing venues Grohl wasn’t legally allowed to enter because of his age (he had lied to get the gig).