An unexpected comeback hit for the Kinks in 1983, the success of which was greatly assisted by the charming video directed by documentarian Julien Temple (whose film The Filth and the Fury, chronicling the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols, is a classic of its kind). Come Dancing, like so much of Ray Davies’s work, is imbued with a yearning nostalgia for the England of yesteryear, when there were rules to be followed and traditions to be honoured, especially, if by no means exclusively, when it came to the rituals of courtship. Come dancing, that’s how they did it when I was just a kid. The music is upbeat, but the listener might sense a certain sadness in this fond remembrance of things past, now that so much has changed:
They put a parking lot on a piece of land
Where the supermarket used to stand
Before that they put up a bowling alley
On the site that used to be the local Palais
A lousy parking lot where there used to be live music, dancing, and anxious kids out on dates and hoping to get as lucky as decency allowed. All that energy, colour, and vibrancy replaced, ultimately, by a featureless, monochrome concrete square. Note the depiction of steady, relentless decline: first came a bowling alley, not half as much fun, but still a place where people could get together for a little R&R, and then a supermarket, no fun at all, but catering, at least, to human needs. Now it’s just an empty space for bloody cars to sit idle.
That’s the way the whole world seemed to Ray, when you got right down to it. You can hear it in songs like 20th Century Man, Victoria, Village Green Preservation Society, and Do You Remember Walter?, in which he imagines a conversation with an old friend he hasn’t seen in years:
Walter, remember when the world was young
And all the girls knew Walter’s name?
Walter, isn’t it a shame the way our little world has changed?
Do you remember, Walter, playing cricket in the thunder and the rain?
Do you remember, Walter, smoking cigarettes behind your garden gate?
Yes, Walter was my mate,
But Walter, my old friend, where are you now?
Things change. Fine. But why did they always have to change for the worse?
Come Dancing was inspired by Ray’s childhood memories of older sister Rene, who seems to have beguiled most of the young men whose paths she crossed. She was still quite young when she married a Canadian soldier and moved overseas, swept off her feet either during, or in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but by all accounts it wasn’t a happy marriage, and she seized every opportunity to get away for a while and return home; in 1957 she visited to celebrate Ray’s 13th birthday, and gifted him his first acoustic guitar, an inexpensive Spanish model that he’d been unable to persuade his parents to buy for him. That very night, she went out dancing at London’s famed Lyceum Ballroom, and dropped dead of a heart attack. She was only 31, but had been left weakened by a bout of rheumatic fever, an affliction that all but guaranteed her an early grave. She understood that; young Ray probably didn’t, and Rene’s sudden death must have come as a terrible shock. These are Ray’s own recollections, excerpted from a piece in American Songwriter:
She also gave me my first guitar on my birthday as a present. We played it. It was quite a surreal scene, almost. It was a sunny day. I was born on a mid-summer day, so the 21st of June. And she was told she had severe heart problems, but she loved to dance and the doctors told her if she walked down the road, she’d probably have a heart attack. So she bought me this not very expensive Spanish guitar [and] gave it to me on my birthday. We played a few songs. She played a song on the piano and I tried to play with her and she said she was going out now and I watched my sister go out. It was a sunny afternoon. She walked down the road and my mother stood at the gate and that was it. The next morning we got a call from the police. She had died dancing in a ballroom in London in the arms of a stranger.
He sounds almost matter-of-fact, but the loss obviously affected him deeply enough to remain top of mind 25 years later, when he imagined an alternate fate for his beloved sibling with the closing lines:
Now I’m grown up and playing in a band
And there’s a car park where the Palais used to stand
My sister’s married and she lives on an estate
Her daughters go out, now it’s her turn to wait
She knows they get away with things she never could
But if I asked her I wonder if she would
Come dancing
Come on, sister, have yourself a ball
Don’t be afraid to come dancing
It’s only natural
Come dancing
Just like the Palais on a Saturday
And all her friends will come dancing
Where the big bands used to play
It’s surprising, isn’t it? At first blush the song seems so light-hearted, rollicking along like a genuine artifact of the big band era, and the casual listener could be forgiven for hearing nothing but cheerful memories of the good old days. Yet at its heart Come Dancing is really about loss, and poignant wondering about what might have been. I doubt many knew the backstory, as the video went into heavy rotation on MTV and the single climbed to the top of the charts, becoming the Kinks’ biggest Stateside hit. I wish sometimes that I didn’t know it either. Divorced from context, it’s such a fun song, tuneful, charming, even uplifting, but the thing is, it was written by Ray Davies, for whom the tears always lay just beneath the laughter.
the needlefish 