Destroyer

Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew has got the needle down on a record that still sounds like somebody kicked the amp over and then decided to keep playing. This is The Kinks, and the song is "Destroyer," from the 1981 album Give the People What They Want. If you are tuned in with us over at THE ZOO, you already know we do not do the hits-only shuffle. We pull the deep cuts, the sequels, the songs that sound like the band talking back to itself across a decade and a half. This one does exactly that, and it does it loud.

Ray Davies wrote it, and he did not pretend it was brand new. The opening line walks right back into an old story: "Met a girl called Lola and I took her back to my place." That is the same Lola from the 1970 hit, the one who walked like a woman and talked like a man. Davies has said the original was based on a real night in a club. Somebody fabulous asked him to dance, he said no thank you, and she left in a cab with the band's manager. Not every word was autobiography, he has been careful to add, but the night was real. On "Destroyer" he brings that character home, and the night goes sideways. Guilt, fear, hidden cameras everywhere. Lola ends up the only calm person in the room, trying to talk the narrator down while he comes apart.

The guitar does the same trick. Dave Davies rides a riff lifted straight from "All Day and All of the Night," the 1964 single that helped the brothers find the voice they were looking for. Some folks called the callback lazy. Ray treated it like a wink. The old power-chord grind is still there, only now it is propping up a song about a man who cannot get out of his own head. There is a red under the bed, a little yellow man in his head, a true blue somewhere inside him. Listeners have long read those lines as amphetamines and the spinning thoughts that come with them. Davies never glamorized that stuff. He had already written "Alcohol" like a warning label, and "Destroyer" keeps the same blunt attitude. Paranoia is the destroyer. The chorus does not whisper it.

The track almost did not make the record. It was sketched for the previous album, Low Budget, and then dropped because the band could not get a mix they liked. They finally cut it at the Power Station in New York, in the big ambient room. Drummer Mick Avory later said the room had a great drum sound, and once you hear that slap coming back at you, you want to cut loose. That is what he did. The result is heavier than the old British singles, closer to the arena rock the band had grown into after years of American touring. In the States, Arista put "Destroyer" out as the lead single on September 28, 1981, with "Back to Front" on the flip. Britain did not get it as a single at all. The album itself waited until January 1982 over there.

On October 10, 1981, the band played it on Saturday Night Live, then came back with "Art Lover." A couple of weeks later "Destroyer" slipped onto the Billboard Hot 100 at number 92, peaked at 85, and was gone in four weeks. Rock radio was kinder. It reached number 3 on the Mainstream Rock chart. The song was never a smash, and it did not need to be. It is a nervous breakdown with a backbeat, written while Davies was watching American tabloid noise and the feeling that somebody is always watching. "Hidden cameras everywhere" landed differently in 1981 than it does now, but the line still fits. The doctor in the bridge is not going to fix it. The fuse is already lit.

To get why a band this far along would quote its own old hits, you have to go back to a front room in Muswell Hill, North London. Ray and Dave Davies grew up there after the war, almost three years apart, learning guitar and skiffle while the house filled up with parties. Their folks sang and played piano in that front room. The brothers worked out the two-chord figure of "You Really Got Me" on the family piano. School dances came first. At William Grimshaw Secondary Modern they played with classmate Pete Quaife on bass, sometimes billed as the Ray Davies Quartet, sometimes as the Pete Quaife Quartet, depending on who booked the gig. A kid named Rod Stewart sang with them at least once, then went off and started his own local rival outfit.

Ray tried to sit on the side. He has said his heroes were Chet Atkins, Big Bill Broonzy, and the jazz guitarist Tal Farlow, and that he wanted to be the player at the edge of the stage, not the one out front. He went to Hornsey College of Art, asked Alexis Korner for advice at a college dance, and picked up short gigs with the Dave Hunt band and the Hamilton King band. Dave, meanwhile, had already started a group with Quaife. Ray joined what was then called the Ravens, later the Ramrods, and the name that stuck was the Kinks. Mick Avory came in on drums from South London. Ray has said they were mates first, and if they had not been friends they would not have survived. The fights between the brothers were real, sometimes physical, and they never really stopped.

Pye Records gave them a three-single deal and was not impressed. Early singles went nowhere. "You Really Got Me" was the one that had to work. Dave got the torn-speaker sound by slicing the cone of a little Elpico amplifier with a razor blade and running it into a Vox. The label thought the record was too aggressive and did not want to pay for the session. The band found another way to cut it. In August 1964 it went to number one in Britain and number seven in America. "All Day and All of the Night" followed, the same power-chord language, the same refusal to soften the edges. Ray has said the company told him he had good diction, back when manners still counted, and that he ought to be the singer. He had tried to hand the frontman job to Dave. Dave did not take it.

That is the long road into "Destroyer." The same brothers, the same riff language, now standing in a New York studio and looking back at Lola, at the old hits, and at a culture that would not stop shouting. Give the People What They Want was the arena record, the one that sat next to Low Budget in the American racks, with "Better Things" and "Destroyer" as the calling cards. The band has since remastered both of those albums from the original tapes, and the official pages still point listeners back to that stretch of the catalog.

If you want the records, the notes, and the anniversary sets straight from the source, the band's own site is thekinks.info, where Give the People What They Want is listed with "Destroyer" among the tracks. The official accounts sit right alongside it: Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans keep their own rooms too. The long-running unofficial archive is Dave Emlen's KindaKinks.net, up since 1994. Active Facebook circles include The Kinks Official Facebook Group and The Kinks Preservation Society Official Fans Facebook Group. We will keep spinning the rest of the album over here. Stay with the Zoo Crew, and tell the other Freaks what you heard.