THE KINKS – “You Really Got Me”
The sound of the atom splitting. Break open the basic unit of pop music, the hook, and we discover a mess of gimmickry, noises and ideas so primeval you can often barely describe them, let alone hum one. Find one strong enough and you can top the chart. Find one really strong and you change pop history.
This particular record has two really strong ideas, which makes it a blueprint for everything from Iggy Pop to Eric Prydz. The essence of pop songwriting is finding a strong hook – a riff, a chorus – and repeating it. Between the hooks you have some other stuff, maybe different hooks, maybe some instrumental work, maybe just a bit of charisma. Fine. But what if you don’t bother with the other stuff? What if you just take your hook and hammer it? That’s the first idea.
If you do that, though, people will get bored. Particularly if your ‘hook’ is a four-note stub of aggression that barely even gets as far as a riff. So what do you do? Here’s the second idea – you get louder. The fun in “You Really Got Me” comes from the way Ray Davies switches up from disinterested English wimp to, well, snarling English wimp. Noisy Ray doesn’t quite convince, for all its formal brilliance the song seems to end before it really gets nasty – which is probably why he didn’t make a career out of doing “You Really Got Me” again. Or maybe he just thought enough people were making those careers already.
7
What did Dave Davies say – he didn’t know he was inventing heavy metal at the time, or some such thing? Godly, I’d happily give it a 10.
Its the brooding intensity of the move up that makes this for me…The aahs coming behind as the chords rise..Brilliant
This, ‘All Day and All of the Night’ and ‘Till the End of the Day’ really were the start of heavy metal. Around this time people like Clapton were playing electric blues in the style of his live ‘Stormy Monday’ with John Mayall – lots of notes but never hammering any one riff. A year or so later Cream were mining blues songs like ‘Spoonful’ and ‘Crossroads’ for the riff which would underlie the whole song. Bands like Ten Years After, Led Zeppelin and then Black Sabbath and Deep Purple carried this on into the 70s with varying degrees of originality.
Meanwhile the Kinks, having invented the genre, moved on to their glorious lyrical English phase, capturing London in a few songs just as it was about to change beyond recognition.
But it wan’t called ‘metal’ in 1970. TYA, Purple and Sabbath were ‘progressive bands’ – just like Yes and ELP, or King Crimson or Floyd or Kevin Ayers.
It was somewhere between 1973 and 1975 that the metal audience – for Priest, Sabbath, Heep etc, and the biker-influenced metal style – the cut-offs, the belts, the leather, coalesced into HM. By then us hip students had left Sabbath long behind as a thing of the lower sixth form.
I can remember my astonishment in maybe 75 seeing a huge crowd in metal attire outside St George’s Hall in Bradford.
‘Who’s playing ?’
‘Black Sabbath’
‘Are they still touring ?’
I went to see the play Telstar a couple of years ago and much as I enjoy Joe Meek’s records, the syrupy waywardness and endless curlicues began to grate. At the moment in the play where we are supposed to feel for our hero as musical fashions changed, they play ‘You Really Got Me’, and, quite contrary to the intention of the play, one felt the entire audience thrill to a genuinely exciting sound. This is a 10 for me.
…and a resounding 10 for me too. Davies wrote more carefully crafted songs later, but this raw splatter of a record was surely one of the earliest punk songs. Terrific. It really got me.
“Top of the Pops” from the Lola album pays tribute to/quotes/mocks “You Really Got Me.”
I like the way you can segue YRGM into ADAAOTN and it still sounds like one song.
TOTPWatch: The Kinks performed You Really Got Me on Top of the Pops on five occasions;
19 August 1964. Also in the studio that week were; Dave Berry, The Honeycombs, Dionne Warwick, Brenda Lee, The Bachelors and Manfred Mann. Pete Murray was the host.
26 August 1964. Also in the studio that week were; Gerry & The Pacemakers, The Honeycombs and The Zombies. Alan Freeman was the host.
2 September 1964. Also in the studio that week were; Dave Berry, Herman’s Hermits, Marianne Faithful and The Honeycombs. Alan Freeman was the host.
24 December 1964. Also in the studio that week were; Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas, Herman’s Hermits, Manfred Mann, Sandie Shaw, The Animals, the Beatles, The Four Pennies, The Honeycombs and The Searchers. Jimmy saville, Alan Freeman, Pete Murray & David Jacobs were the hosts.
29 September 1994. Also in the studio that week were; 2 Unlimited, The Cranberries, Reel 2 Real & The Mad Stuntman, East 17, Shane MacGowan & The Popes and Whigfield. Claire Sturgess was the host.
Only the 1994 edition survives.
The first one in the list I’d give a 10. Utterly compelling and primal.