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Sun 14 September 2025 14:30, UK
Innovation was what The Kinks were all about. It was wizardry borne from agitation as much as anything else.
At the heart of the band were two bickering brothers. They were magical musicians in their own right, but the undercurrent of sibling exasperation twisted that magic towards something truly original.
How else can you explain someone slashing their amp for a reason that they supposedly can no longer recall, other than to say that an underlying urge for violence was afoot? However, it was this very act that inadvertently went some way to developing the distorted sounds of heavy metal once the butchered amp lent a joyously odious air to ‘You Really Got Me’.
The Kinks were full of such perverting tricks, and Jimmy Page was privy to a lot of them. While working as a producer and session musician, the future Led Zeppelin guitarist was present in the studio during a whole host of The Kinks’ recording stints with the great Shel Talmy.
In fact, Page was sniffing around so many sessions during those days that it’s easy to see how a desire to do something radically different was instilled in him. This is why he always admired The Kinks. Simply put, they were different. For one, they were a British Invasion band who were banned from America. They were also singing of cricket and cuppas when everyone else was more occupied with being hip.
But from a musical standpoint, few songs signposted that difference quite like the aforementioned ‘You Really Got Me’. It was raw and rough. There was a sexual energy that bravely barrelled into the liberation movement like a drunken teenager leaning into their first kiss, even at a time when some were trying to pretend society’s emancipation of lust wasn’t happening. But Ray Davies had gazed out into the front row at a Kinks show, fallen in love with a girl at a glance, and couldn’t deny it.
So, in 1964, he decided to get to work on something so rambunctious that it really would take hold of an audience’s figurative lapels and shake them like a second-hand Skoda trundling over a cattle-grid. When something like that comes along, you take note. So, it’s easy to see how Page had sat through thousands of boring sessions and been stirred supremely by the shocking ‘You Really Got Me’.
A little further down the line, it’s easy to see how he saw the Yardbirds effectively teeter in a thousand different directions until they were torn apart and crave a more direct musical assegai with his next outing. His vision for Led Zeppelin was to be the new liberators of the 1970s, innovating beyond where rock ‘n’ roll had been brought up to at that point, while staying true to its racy roots.
So, years after Page was in the studio with The Kinks, Dave Davies caught up with his old mates taking the new world by storm, and he recalled, “Later on, I’d bump into Led Zeppelin at the Hyatt House in LA. I saw them play in Hollywood, sometime around 1971 when they’d really made it big over there. John Bonham came up to me afterwards and said: ‘You know what? We just give ’em ‘You Really Got Me all night’. That’s what we do’.”
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