Ray Davies vs. the Machine

A 1986 Interview for the Kinks' Overlooked 'Think Visual'

I was delighted to find the printed Q&A from an interview I did with forever Kinks leader Ray Davies in 1986. For those of you new here or just coming back, newspapers and magazines rarely ran question-and-answer interviews in those days. We used the Q&A's as the structure of a feature story.

My problem now was trying to remember what Kinks album Davies was promoting. The folder just said, "Ray Davies/1986." I checked the Billboard Top 200 Albums list and found the Kinks' Nov. 1986 release Think Visual, their debut for MCA after a successful run at Arista, never got beyond No. 81 on the chart.

I called my friend and colleague Tom Kitts, author of an academic biography of Davies. He sent me over a paper he had done called Think Visual: The Kinks vs. the Music Industry, from the journal Popular Music and Society (Routledge) published online Dec. 12, 2006.

Kitts wrote: "While Think Visual is a strong album, musically and thematically, it is a dark record, a subtle concept album about one of…