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The front room at the Clissold Arms on Fortis Green is something of a shrine. We suspect that many of the regulars wouldn’t know ‘Lola’ from ‘Apeman’ and might imagine ‘Waterloo Sunset’ to be a best-avoided cocktail. All the same, this pub pays fulsome tribute to the boys who grew up just opposite, Ray and Dave Davies, who formed the core of that magical musical ensemble, The Kinks.
A plaque by the pub door proclaims that the brothers played their first gig here in December 1960 – which is good going, as they would have been just 16 and 13. Reflected in the plaque, on a sunny day, is the old Davies family home immediately opposite at 6 Denmark Terrace. The two storey terraced house where the Davies brothers spent their childhood is now one of the more modest homes in what is a distinctly up-market corner of London. Their parents moved out of the back streets of King’s Cross, close to Caledonian Road, to escape the wartime Blitz. Not long after, in 1944, Ray was born; Dave followed three years later, the youngest of eight. The tiny family home was full to the brim.
The brothers both went to the local C of E primary school and on to William Grimshaw Secondary Modern on Creighton Avenue, which became a constituent of what is now Fortismere School. Liz (she didn’t want her full name given) told us she was in the same primary school class as Dave Davies. They sat next to each other, egging each other on in low-level naughtiness, in their final year at St James’s; she too failed her 11-Plus and went on initially to ‘Willy Grim’.
Liz lost touch with the Davies boys until, aged 16 or so, she went to a Friday night dance in Hornsey Town Hall where The Ravens, as their band was then known, were playing. The friendship was rekindled and she and Dave went out for a year or more. She often popped round with friends to 6 Denmark Terrace. ‘Fortis Green felt like a country area – it was pretty old-fashioned and there were chickens in some of the back yards.’ It was a busy, friendly house, very working class – ‘Muswell Hill was very different in those days to the chichi place it is today’, she says.
The youngsters would hang out in the front room and listen to records. And not just pop. Ray in particular was exploring the R’n’B music of the likes of Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters. ‘We had a wicked time’, Liz recalls. ‘We used to have black leather jackets and smoke Gauloises cigarettes and think we were terribly, terribly cool. We’d go along to The Marquee – I saw Rod Stewart there. The whole world of music was opening up. It was very exciting.’
Liz was around when The Ravens got a new manager, changed their name – kinky was becoming cool, and the band had a kinky fashion sense – and released their first single, a cover of Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’. But those first signs of success had a sting in the tail. ‘Dave dumped me when they started going places’, Liz laments. ‘I was devastated.’
Liz lost touch with the Davies boys until, aged 16 or so, she went to a Friday night dance in Hornsey Town Hall where The Ravens, as their band was then known, were playing. The friendship was rekindled and she and Dave went out for a year or more. She often popped round with friends to 6 Denmark Terrace. ‘Fortis Green felt like a country area – it was pretty old-fashioned and there were chickens in some of the back yards.’ It was a busy, friendly house, very working class – ‘Muswell Hill was very different in those days to the chichi place it is today’, she says.
The youngsters would hang out in the front room and listen to records. And not just pop. Ray in particular was exploring the R’n’B music of the likes of Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters. ‘We had a wicked time’, Liz recalls. ‘We used to have black leather jackets and smoke Gauloises cigarettes and think we were terribly, terribly cool. We’d go along to The Marquee – I saw Rod Stewart there. The whole world of music was opening up. It was very exciting.’
Liz was around when The Ravens got a new manager, changed their name – kinky was becoming cool, and the band had a kinky fashion sense – and released their first single, a cover of Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’. But those first signs of success had a sting in the tail. ‘Dave dumped me when they started going places’, Liz laments. ‘I was devastated.’
By that time, Ray Davies had escaped from Fortis Green - though only as far as Crouch End and the Hornsey College of Art. He later wrote a song about his attempts to impress an ‘Art School Babe’: ‘humming jazz tunes with words by Ferlinghetti, I thought I was ever so cool. But I was really such an obvious, pretentious, irritating little fool’. The Kinks made the big time when their third single, Ray’s ‘You Really Got Me’, topped the charts in September 1964 – and they went on to have ten more top five singles.
The band put Muswell Hill on the musical map when they released the album ‘Muswell Hillbillies’ in 1971. The title was a riff on ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’, an American TV sitcom which ran through the 1960s about a poor, backwoods family from the Ozarks who struck oil on their land and bought a mansion with pool in upscale Beverly Hills. Hillbillies would immediately have brought to mind at that time honest, unvarnished folks who didn’t fit in too well in the more status conscious streets to which they had moved.
Surprisingly for an album which takes its name from a neighbourhood, the cover photos are not Muswell Hill at all. The fold-out cover shows all five Kinks supping, slightly awkwardly, in an old-fashioned boozer, the Archway Tavern – the same side of London as Muswell Hill but fifteen minutes away (on a good day) on the 134 bus. On the inside of the sleeve, the band is depicted against a backdrop of two terraced streets – including, most prominently, the ‘Cats on Holiday’ cattery in a former shop – that have been fenced off ahead of demolition. Again, this is not Muswell Hill. Lulot and Retcar Streets on the southern slopes of Highgate Hill were cleared to make way for Camden Council’s Whittington Estate.
Surprisingly for an album which takes its name from a neighbourhood, the cover photos are not Muswell Hill at all. The fold-out cover shows all five Kinks supping, slightly awkwardly, in an old-fashioned boozer, the Archway Tavern – the same side of London as Muswell Hill but fifteen minutes away (on a good day) on the 134 bus. On the inside of the sleeve, the band is depicted against a backdrop of two terraced streets – including, most prominently, the ‘Cats on Holiday’ cattery in a former shop – that have been fenced off ahead of demolition. Again, this is not Muswell Hill. Lulot and Retcar Streets on the southern slopes of Highgate Hill were cleared to make way for Camden Council’s Whittington Estate.
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‘Muswell Hillbillies’ is a statement of Ray Davies’s working class identity – reflected in so many of his other songs, from ‘Waterloo Sunset’ to ‘Working Man’s Café’ – and a howl of anger about the wholesale demolition of working class neighbourhoods and destruction of communities and culture. The title track runs:
They’re putting us in little boxes
No character just uniformity
And then proclaims: ‘they’re never going to kill my cockney pride’. There’s perhaps an echo here of Ray and Dave’s parents’ enforced wartime move from the streets of south Islington.
‘They’re knocking down all the places in Holloway and Islington and moving all the people off to housing projects in new towns’, Ray Davies once remarked. ‘They say the houses they’re tearing down are old and decayed, but they’re not really.’ Happily, Denmark Terrace is still standing proud.
They’re putting us in little boxes
No character just uniformity
And then proclaims: ‘they’re never going to kill my cockney pride’. There’s perhaps an echo here of Ray and Dave’s parents’ enforced wartime move from the streets of south Islington.
‘They’re knocking down all the places in Holloway and Islington and moving all the people off to housing projects in new towns’, Ray Davies once remarked. ‘They say the houses they’re tearing down are old and decayed, but they’re not really.’ Happily, Denmark Terrace is still standing proud.