"See My Friends" (Ray Davies) |
| Ray Davies: I got that idea from being in India. I always like the chanting. Someone once said to me "England is gray and India is like a chant". I don't think England is that gray but India is like a long drone. When I wrote the song, I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea, and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog — big as a donkey. |
| Jonathan Cott. “The Kinks’ Ray Davies Talks.” Rolling Stone (10 November 1969): https://www.kindakinks.net/misc/articles/rs69.html |
| Ray Davies: I’m just throwing things out here but I think [folk guitarist] Davy Graham was an influence. I met him and something about his weird tunings stuck with me. Then I went to India. I’m hoping I was stoned but I was probably jetlagged when I saw these fishermen on a beach going to work carrying their nets and chanting. They weren’t chanting See My Friends but I wanted to establish that tone, a mixture of sitar and Gregorian chant, really. “A lot of people have said See My Friends is one of the first pop songs about homosexuality. It’s more about you’ve lost the female love of your life, therefore you only have your friends left. That little interchange — ‘She is gone’ — is the sound of someone who is completely distraught. It’s more about camaraderie than homosexuality. But then it borders on that. You go out for a pint with the blokes and then it gets to that moment… [whispery laughter] and they’re singing to one another pissed, and they hug one another. As for ‘the river’? The river’s life. The plane across the river. It’s not the Thames. It could be. Or it could be the Mississippi. It’s best to be non-specific. |
| Q Magazine. "Face to Face with Ray Davies." Q Magazine (29 November 2016): https://www.pressreader.com/uk/q-uk/20161129/283519385486701 (accessed December 2017). |
| Ray Davies (to Maureen Cleave, Evening Standard): The song is about homosexuality. I know a person in this business who is quite normal and good-looking, but girls give him sucha a rotten deal that he becomes a sort of queer. He has always got his friends. It's lie a football team and the way they're always kissing each other... (238) |
| Ray Davies (1994): It's patently obvious that the friends I'm singong about are not girls... They're across the river, it's a gulf!... I was thinking I hav the choice to go there if I want... A lot of audiences think because I'm singing in the first person, it's me. People don't realize I'm like a novelist. I write characters. It worries me when people think that I am one of those characters. (238) |
| Johnny Rogan. Ray Davies: A Complicated Life. London: The Bodley Head, 2015. |
| Ray Davies (1994): Next stop was one of the most unforgettable of my life: Bombay. We were checked into the hotel late at night. It was built on the beach and was supposed to be the best hotel in the city. I couldn't sleep, partly from excitement at being in a mysterious continent, but mainly because of the cockroaches and ants crawling around, so I got up and watched the sun rise on the beach. It was there that I heard the chanting of native fishermen as they carried their nets to work. It was a sound / that for some indescibable reason was immediately personal to me, and was to be very influential in my songwriting. It's difficult to describe how a sound or a song gets into your soul. It just connects and stays there. This sound later formed the basis of a song called "See My Friends." (204-205) |
| Ray Davies. X-Ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography. London: Penguin Books, 1994. |