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The Three Herberts at the Palais: Stepehen Lloyd, Marcus Ellard and Anthony Flaum |
Ray Davies pays homage to the Ilford Palais days
Ray Davies, the legendary lead singer of
The Kinks is taking a dance down
memory lane, as Simon Wroe discovers
IT’S been 26 years since Ray Davies, lead singer of The Kinks, first invited listeners to “Come Dancing” in his nostalgic, fairground organ-backed song of the same name.
Davies’s lyrics, about his older sister stepping out to the Palais club on Saturday nights and her coquettish behaviour with various eager suitors, harked back to the heady days of youth and asked that they were not forgotten. “Don’t be afraid to come dancing,” the chorus intoned, “it’s only natural.”
This week Davies’s words will be made flesh when Come Dancing, the musical, gets its world premiere at the Theatre Royal Stratford.
Set at Ilford Palais in the 1950s and featuring 20 new songs penned by the singer especially for the show, it is a story of the people who made the venue legendary; the guys and girls who worked all week in humdrum jobs so they could dance the night away.
The show has been a labour of love for Davies. The Highgate frontman, 64, is so inextricably linked to the project that he even stars in the stage show as himself, keeping the audience abreast of plot developments, despite a permanent leg injury sustained when he was shot during a robbery in New Orleans in 2004.
“Come Dancing has evolved on and off over the last 11 years,” he says.
“In a lot of ways it reflects my own childhood growing up in north London.
“My sisters went to ballrooms in Muswell Hill, Holloway and Kilburn but this is set at the Ilford Palais. As a child my family had connections with many east enders, so it’s based on some people I know and heard about as a child but inspired by some real-life events. One of my sisters met her husband at the Palais.”
If Come Dancing sounds like an object lesson in reminiscence, Davies insists he wants to show the parallels with modern culture.
“The elements are all still very relevant: the teenage angst, the desire to change, peer pressure, violence, knife culture and youths trying to find a voice. Nothing has changed apart from the wardrobe.”
And the music.
To stay true to the 1950s context, the new songs often lean more towards jazz, bebop and swing than the angular guitars of the Kinks’ output. In contrast to most of Davies’s songwriting, which is a lone and solipsistic endeavour, a cast of 13 will perform the show numbers under the auspices of musical director Robert Hyman.
“The whole experience is very different from what I normally do,” he admits. “The daily pressure, tension, it is good to share with others rather than cope by myself, which is normally the case.”
After 1981’s Chorus Girls and 80 Days (1988), Come Dancing is Davies’s third musical, but you could argue he has other germane experience on his CV. Several albums with the Kinks were originally conceived as “rock operas”.
He continues: “What’s most important for me as a musician though is that it captures an important era in music.
“Before I discovered American blues, country and rock music what I knew was the music of the big band through listening to my sister’s record collection. That really influenced my decision to be a musician.
“So it’s great to have the opportunity to showcase that and hopefully show people who have supported me throughout my career how this period helped me evolve as a musician.”
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