(Credits: Bent Rej)
Fri 26 September 2025 14:00, UK
There are only 12 distinct notes in Western music convention, and only so many ways that those notes can be ordered. So, the fact that bands have routinely borrowed, begged, or stolen riffs and chord progressions from each other over the decades is not quite as scandalous as some folks would have you believe – particularly when those artists are as all-encompassingly influential as The Kinks.
Contrary to the nostalgia-tinted image of the swinging 1960s, peddled by those revisionist documentaries fluffed up with archival footage of Mini Coopers, the Carnaby Street scene of ’60s London was fairly tight-knit. As opposed to being a vast free-for-all of artistic revolutionaries, you could step into any trendy Soho nightclub back in 1966 and quite conceivably find The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Michael Caine, and Twiggy all passing around a bottle of Mateus between themselves; the head-honchos of the era’s cultural revolution.
So, England’s capital was indeed overflowing with rock and roll revolutionaries back in the 1960s, but those artists didn’t exist on their own islands of isolation. Arguably, it was the fact that the plethora of bands filling the capital’s airwaves during that time were all rubbing shoulders with one another that kept driving the nation’s music scene forward, as everybody scrambled to compete with one another. The Kinks and The Yardbirds, for instance, were two of those groups consistently embroiled in friendly competition.
At the core of those two groups were their guitarists, Jeff Beck and Dave Davies. Guitarists are the frontline soldiers of rock and roll, and both The Yardbirds and The Kinks boasted incredibly heavy-hitters in the form of Beck and Davies, respectively. Given the overlap in their six-stringed stylings, though, it would be easy to assume that there was some kind of rivalry between the pair. In actuality, the now-legendary guitarists became regular drinking buddies back in the 1960s.
“Jeff was always a wild character. He had the potential to be really insane, I think,” Davies told Classic Rock in 2010. “He was born to be Jeff Beck; he could never have been a conventional pop star.” In fairness, that unconventional nature saw Beck rise to the top of London’s rock and roll landscape with The Yardbirds, before going off on his own journey, embracing the increasingly complex compositions of jazz-rock, which rarely afforded him the same kind of mainstream commercial success enjoyed by his former brother-in-booze.
Still, that didn’t stop Beck from having a natural affinity for the sounds of The Kinks. “There was a lot of mutual admiration between the Kinks and the Yardbirds,” Davies recalled. “When Eric Clapton left and Jeff Beck came in, he got wrapped up in the glamour of it all, and we got to be good mates. I think he was actually trying to copy me. You know: ‘If Dave can do that, so can I’.”
Admittedly, both bands could certainly be paced in the same sonic category as one another, pioneering the sounds of swinging sixties blues-rock, with a pinch of modernist taste to boot. Perhaps that is why Davies doesn’t seem to harbour any resentment over that apparent plagiarism between the pair.
Everybody was trying to copy one another back in the day, but The Yardbirds were never going to write a song that matched ‘You Really Got Me’, just as The Kinks couldn’t have penned ‘Heart Full of Soul’. Rather than copying each other outright, the pair of guitarists seemed to spur each other on to bigger and better things; those late-night drinking sessions certainly have a lot to answer for, within the context of rock and roll history.
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