5 Songs You Didn’t Know Ray Davies Wrote For Other Musicians! JJ

Ray Davies wrote some of the most iconic songs in British rock history, but not all of them stayed with The Kinks. Some of his best work ended up in someone else’s hands, and the stories behind those hand-offs will surprise you. Five, Stop Your Sobbing. Ray Davies wrote Stop Your Sobbing in 1964.

He was 20 years old, newly famous, and already writing songs faster than The Kinks could record them. The song came from a real moment, a girlfriend crying in front of him. Her sadness making him uncomfortable, her tears filling a room he did not know how to leave. He wrote about it the way he wrote about everything in those early years, directly, simply, with just enough distance to turn a private moment into something that felt universal.

The Kinks recorded it for their debut album and moved on. For the next decade and a half, the song sat quietly in the catalog, known only to the most devoted fans. Then Chrissie Hynde walked into a rehearsal room in 1978. Hynde was an American living in London, trying to put together a band that would become The Pretenders.

She’d been a Kinks obsessive since her teenage years in Ohio, absorbing [music] everything Ray Davies had ever written with the intensity of someone who understood [music] that his songs were built differently from everything else around them. During rehearsals one afternoon, she suggested the band try Stop Your Sobbing. Nobody else in the room had heard it before.

She pulled it out of thin air, taught it to them on the spot, and they recorded it almost immediately after. >> [music] [singing] >> The Pretenders’ version of Stop Your Sobbing became their debut single. It announced the band to the world with a song that was 14 years old, written by a man who had not intended it for them, in a style that somehow sounded completely current in 1978.

The record reached the UK charts and established the Pretenders >> [music] >> as one of the most important acts of the new wave era before they had released a single original song. >> And seeing all these pop songs, I thought one day they’re going to be singing one of mine. >> That is an almost impossible achievement to launch an entire career on someone else’s forgotten early work and make it feel like the most urgent thing anyone had heard all year.

The story did not end with the record. Chrissie Hynde eventually met Ray Davies at a club in New York in 1980. [music] They began a relationship that lasted several years and produced a daughter together. The woman who had rescued his forgotten song became the mother of his child. Ray Davies wrote Stop Your Sobbing about a girl crying in a room he did not know how to leave.

He had absolutely no idea that the song would one day lead him to the person who saved it from disappearing entirely. Four, This Strange Effect. There is a number one record that Ray Davies wrote and never released. Not a song the Kinks recorded and shelved. Not a track that ended up as a B-side or a bonus cut decades later.

A fully finished, completely realized Ray Davies composition that went to number one in an entire country and the Kinks never put it on a single album. The song [music] This Strange Effect. The country is the Netherlands and the man who took it there was an English singer named Dave Berry who had already scored three top five UK hits and had the kind of brooding magnetic stage presence that made him one of the more distinctive performers of the British Invasion era.

>> You’ve got [music] this strange effect on me. >> Davies wrote This Strange Effect in 1965 during one of the most productive periods of his entire career. The Kinks recorded a version for a BBC session which remains the only studio recording that exists of Davies performing the song himself, but he gave the release version to Berry who recorded it for Decca and put it out in the summer of 1965.

>> And I think John Lennon’s a bit like that, whereas people don’t really remember me much. They would just remember the songs. >> The single reached number 37 on the UK singles chart, a decent result [music] by any measure. But in the Netherlands, something else happened entirely. Dutch radio picked it up, Dutch audiences responded to its slow-burning hypnotic quality, [music] and it climbed all the way to number one.

A Ray Davies song topped a national chart, and it was not a Kinks record. The song itself deserves far more attention than it has ever received. It has a quality >> [music] >> that is genuinely hard to name, something still and almost mesmerizing underneath a melody that pulls you forward without ever rushing. It sounds like Davies at his most understated, which in 1965 meant it sounded like almost nothing else being made in British pop at the time.

Barry’s voice suits it perfectly. He had a lower, more shadowed tone than most of his contemporaries, and he let the song breathe in a way that a more aggressive recording might have completely crushed. Ray Davies has performed this strange effect live over the years, and audiences who hear it for the first time tend to respond with immediate recognition, not of the song itself, but of its unmistakable quality.

It feels like something they should already have known. That is the particular frustration of this entry in the Ray Davies catalog. It is a number one record that most Kinks fans have never heard, written by one of the greatest British songwriters of the ’60s, handed to someone else, and left there ever since. Some songs find their audience.

This one found the wrong country and stayed there. Three, I Go to Sleep. On the 23rd of May, 1965, Ray Davies sat down at the piano in his parents’ house in Fortis Green, North London, and wrote a song while he waited for news. His wife was in hospital about to give birth to their first child. He was not in the room with her.

He was at his parents’ piano, doing the only thing he knew how to do when he did not know what else to do with himself. The song that came out of that afternoon is one of the most beautiful things he ever wrote. The Kinks never recorded it. Ray Davies gave it away instead, and it found its way to one of his personal heroes.

Peggy Lee was not an obvious match for a song written by the lead singer of British rock band in 1965. She was a jazz and pop vocalist from North Dakota, one of the [music] great stylists of American music, known for recordings that moved with the quiet confidence of someone who had nothing left to prove. [music] Davies was a devoted admirer.

When his publicist sent Lee a demo of I Go to Sleep, Davies was genuinely stunned that she responded at all. She recorded it that same year and released it as a single. It did not chart, but the fact that Peggy Lee heard something in a Ray Davies demo worth recording says everything about the quality of what he had written at his parents’ piano on the afternoon his daughter was born.

>> [music] >> The song stayed in circulation quietly for years, recorded by a handful of artists across the ’60s and ’70s. >> To me, >> [music] >> I go to sleep. >> None of whom managed to turn it into a hit. Then Chrissie Hynde found it. The Pretenders recorded I Go to Sleep for their second album in 1981 >> [music] >> and released it as a single.

It reached number seven on the UK singles chart. [music] Hynde has said the French horn arrangement was one of the things that drew her to the recording of those small musical details [music] that make a great song feel inevitable rather than carefully constructed by someone at a piano. The Kinks demo of the song finally surfaced in 1998 on an expanded reissue of their second album.

Listeners hearing it for the first time understood immediately why Peggy Lee had said yes and why Chrissie Hynde had gone back to it 16 years later. Ray Davies wrote it in an afternoon while waiting for his daughter to arrive in the world. >> Um I I have lots of musical knowledge uh that people my age shouldn’t have had.

>> The song took the better part of two decades to find the audience it deserved. Some songs are patient that way. [music] They wait as long as they have to. Two, Dandy. Ray Davies wrote Dandy about a man who moves from woman to woman without guilt or consequence, charming everyone he meets and committing to no one.

The inspiration, by Davies’ own account, was sitting right next to him every day. His younger brother, Dave Davies, was the lead guitarist of The Kinks and one of the most effortlessly attractive people in [music] any room he walked into. Dave moved through relationships the way other people moved through conversations quickly, easily, leaving an impression and then [music] disappearing before anyone could ask too many questions.

Ray watched him do it for years. Then he wrote a song about it and gave it to someone else entirely. Herman’s Hermits were one of the biggest acts in America in 1965 and 1966, led by Peter Noone, a boyish grinning Manchester singer who had the kind of face that American teenage girls found completely irresistible.

The band had a string of US hits that made them genuine rivals to the Beatles in terms of chart presence during the British Invasion years. They recorded Dandy in 1966, around the same time The Kinks released their own version on the Face to Face album. The Kinks’ version did not chart in the UK or the US. Herman’s Hermits’ version reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of their signature recordings.

>> You low-down dandy. >> [music] >> A song Ray Davies wrote about his own brother became one of the defining hits of a completely different band’s career. The contrast between the two versions is genuinely interesting. The Kinks’ recording of Dandy has the sardonic edge you would expect from a band that knew exactly who the song was about.

It is winking and slightly cutting. The sound of someone describing a person they love and find maddening in equal measure. Herman’s Hermits play it straighter, leaning into the melody and Noon’s natural warmth, which gives the whole thing a different quality, more celebratory than satirical, more [music] fond than sharp.

Both readings work beautifully. The song is strong enough to carry either of them without effort. Dave Davies, for his part, has never seemed particularly troubled by being the inspiration for Dandy. He has acknowledged the connection over the years with the kind of easy amusement that suits someone who was never especially worried about his own reputation.

Ray wrote a song about his brother’s effortless charm. His brother’s charm was genuine enough and well-documented enough that the description felt less like an accusation and more like a tribute. Herman’s Hermits understood that. Their version of Dandy sounds like a celebration. That is probably exactly what it was. One. When I see that girl of mine, Bobby Rydell grew up in South Philadelphia and became [music] a teenage idol in the late 1950s on the strength of his voice, his smile, and his ability to fill a television screen with the uncomplicated

energy of someone who genuinely enjoyed being famous. He had hits. He appeared in films. His name became so embedded in American popular culture that when the writers of Grease needed a name for the high school at the center of their story, they called it Rydell High, a casual tribute that has since outlasted almost everything else about his career.

By 1965, though, the British Invasion had changed everything around him. American teen idols were struggling to stay relevant. [music] The charts belonged to bands from England, and Rydell needed new material that could compete in a world that had shifted underneath his feet. Ray Davies gave him a song.

When I See That Girl of Mine was released by Rydell in October 1965, 1 month before The Kinks put out their own version on The Kink Controversy album. It is a driving, bright, energetic piece of pop gang vocals, a punchy guitar rhythm, the kind of forward momentum that does not give you time to think before the chorus arrives. It sounds deliberately and unmistakably like a British Invasion record.

That [music] was exactly the point. >> When I see [singing] that girl of [music] mine, makes me want to sigh. >> Davies wrote something that could help an American artist sound [music] current in a moment when current meant British. It was a generous act [music] and a quietly shrewd one. Most people who know Bobby Rydell have never heard the song.

Most people who know Ray Davies have never connected his name to it. It sits in a corner of both their catalogs, too obscure to appear in greatest hits collections, [music] too well-made to deserve the obscurity it has quietly settled into over 60 years. When I See That Girl of Mine is not a throwaway or a contractual obligation.

It has the construction of a songwriter who knew exactly what he was doing, and who genuinely wanted to give a struggling artist the kind of material that could actually help him stay in the game. The song did not make Bobby Rydell famous again. The British Invasion was too thorough and too relentless for a single track to reverse what had already happened to the American teen idol market, but it exists as a small, clean, perfectly made piece of evidence [music] about who Ray Davies was as a writer in 1965.

Generous enough to hand his best work to someone who needed it more. Confident enough to know he could always write something else tomorrow. He could. He always did. The songs [music] never stopped and he never once seemed worried about running out. Ray Davies wrote songs the way other people have conversations constantly, naturally, without making a big deal of it.

Some stayed with the Kinks, some found their way to other hands, other voices, other charts and countries he had never visited. Every one of them carries the same fingerprint. If you want more stories like this, subscribe. There is always another song worth finding.