{"id":161874,"date":"2025-09-26T16:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T16:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/161874\/"},"modified":"2025-09-26T16:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T16:31:09","slug":"the-guitarist-dave-davies-said-tried-to-copy-the-kinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/161874\/","title":{"rendered":"The guitarist Dave Davies said tried to copy The Kinks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <img width=\"1140\" height=\"855\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/The-Kinks-Dave-Davies-London-1965-Far-Out-Magazine-F-1140x855.jpg\" class=\"attachment-single-feature size-single-feature wp-post-image\" alt=\"Dave Davies of The Kinks - London, 1965\" layout=\"fill\"  style=\"object-position: 50% 50%\" loading=\"eager\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" \/><\/p>\n<p>(Credits: Bent Rej)<\/p>\n<p> Fri 26 September 2025 14:00, UK <\/p>\n<p>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 \u2013 particularly when those artists are as all-encompassingly influential as <a href=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/tags\/the-kinks\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">The Kinks<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>Contrary to the<a href=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/the-kinks-camouflage-the-1960s\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\"> nostalgia-tinted image<\/a> of the swinging 1960s, peddled by those revisionist documentaries fluffed up with archival footage of Mini Coopers, the Carnaby Street scene of \u201960s 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\u2019s cultural revolution.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So, England\u2019s capital was indeed overflowing with rock and roll revolutionaries back in the 1960s, but those artists didn\u2019t exist on their own islands of isolation. Arguably, it was the fact that the plethora of bands filling the capital\u2019s airwaves during that time were all rubbing shoulders with one another that kept driving the nation\u2019s music scene forward, as everybody scrambled to compete with one another. The Kinks <a href=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/the-yardbirds-inadvertently-invented-the-modern-rock-guitarist\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">and The Yardbirds<\/a>, for instance, were two of those groups consistently embroiled in friendly competition.<\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cJeff was always a wild character. He had the potential to be really insane, I think,\u201d Davies told <a href=\"https:\/\/www.loudersound.com\/features\/dave-davies-the-kinks-interview-ray-davies-jimi-hendrix-led-zeppelin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">Classic Rock<\/a> in 2010. \u201cHe was born to be Jeff Beck; he could never have been a conventional pop star.\u201d In fairness, that unconventional nature saw Beck rise to the top of London\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n<p>Still, that didn\u2019t stop Beck from having a natural affinity for the sounds of The Kinks. \u201cThere was a lot of mutual admiration between the Kinks and the Yardbirds,\u201d Davies recalled. \u201cWhen 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: \u2018If Dave can do that, so can I\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t seem to harbour any resentment over that apparent plagiarism between the pair. <\/p>\n<p>Everybody was trying to copy one another back in the day, but The Yardbirds were never going to write a song that matched \u2018You Really Got Me\u2019, just as The Kinks couldn\u2019t have penned \u2018Heart Full of Soul\u2019. 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. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Bent Rej) Fri 26 September 2025 14:00, UK There are only 12 distinct notes in Western music&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[23629,96,30322,128,23631,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-161874","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-dave-davies","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-jeff-beck","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-the-kinks","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}