Kink of All Media

“I’m a 20th century man, but I don’t wanna be here.”

--a 25-year-old refrain that is Ray Davies’ pithiest statement of his attitude toward modernity

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While many of his rock ‘n’ roll peers during the 1960s were trying self-consciously to break with the past and declare the dawning of a brave new age (that somehow never came), Ray Davies was writing songs for his band, the Kinks, that often cast him as the last of the Victorians.

While the big world rushed forward through a decade of crisis and tumult, Davies paused, in a series of unerringly brilliant late-’60s albums--”Face to Face,” “Something Else,” “Arthur” and “The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society” (the title says it all)--to paint the struggles of everyday denizens of suburban Britain.

He portrayed them with a warm, sympathetic but not falsely sentimental eye, reserving his considerable fund of underdog’s ire for the impersonal forces of modern efficiency. As he saw it, these forces were regimenting away the charm and the character of the slow-paced little world of his nostalgic fancy.

Songs from the classic Kinks period of ’64 to ’71 form the backbone of “20th Century Man: An Evening With Ray Davies.” The intimate theatrical production (with accompanying guitarist Peter Mathson) weaves Kinks songs into a spoken narrative based on “X-Ray,” the typically idiosyncratic novel-cum-autobiography Davies published in 1994.

Davies, 52, has been performing the show since 1995, when it had its West Coast premiere at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana. He will give what he says is essentially the same show Tuesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, allowing for whatever variations might come of the spontaneous interaction with the audience that is built into the evening’s framework.

In something of an irony, the waning days of the century he views so dubiously find Davies embodying some of the buzzed-about concepts that have become signposts along an entertainment superhighway that has nothing to do with the preservation of old-fashioned life and village greens.

Today Davies is a multimedia man, a man of creative synergies, wherein a song can become a scene in a book, a book can become a stage show, and the stage show a film or video. He also is a harried modern man who says that the hectic pace of it all leaves him little time to write songs--the thing that made him a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer in the first place.

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He spoke over the phone recently while driving from London to the northern English city of Birmingham for a gig in his solo series. His update on works planned and works in progress was so extensive as to be almost daunting--not just for him, but for a listener trying to keep track of it all.

The stage show, he reported, soon will morph into a home video, possibly incorporating footage of the present-day Kinks playing in a studio decked out to resemble the “front room”--the parlor of Davies’ childhood home. The room figures prominently in the show as the proving ground where Davies and his younger brother Dave, the Kinks’ lead guitarist, invented the band’s rough-and-ready early sound and came up with its career-launching hits.

There also is the possibility of a movie based on “X-Ray”--Davies says he talked about it with some Hollywood producers last year but was dismayed that “they wanted to do a Forrest Gump II” in which the Kinks, like Gump, simply would be a device to explore a cavalcade of scenes from the ‘60s. The moguls wanted to emphasize more widely salable figures, such as the Beatles.

Davies recalls that when they talked about playing up and extending a wonderful John Lennon anecdote that figures in “X-Ray” and the stage show, “I said, ‘Excuse me, I have to go and do a gig.’ ” Naturally, he thinks the Kinks make a compelling story in their own right, albeit one lacking in Beatles-grade mass-market pull. Hollywood types “want a safe bet, to sell it to 3,000 theaters,” Davies said. “I don’t think it’s in the Kinks’ makeup. It will be a good art-house movie that kind of graduates” to a wider public.

More immediate on Davies’ agenda is completing a book of short stories, which he aims to finish within a month. Though it’s not an extension of his autobiographical writing in “X-Ray,” Davies says that some of the scenes and characters he treats in prose will ring familiar from Kinks songs.

Also on his front burner is a new musical, to be produced in London, based on “Come Dancing,” a hit Kinks song from 1983. “It’s about my sisters and all the aspirations they had,” said Davies, who grew up with six older sisters, plus Dave, his partner both for music making and famously bitter fraternal feuding (see accompanying story).

Ray, who wrote the songs for an unsuccessful musical in 1988 based on Jules Verne’s novel “Around the World in 80 Days,” has completed a first draft of the script for “Come Dancing” and plans to write a full set of new songs for the piece, working in just two thematically related Kinks nuggets--the title song and the lovely ballad “Don’t Forget to Dance.”

Meanwhile, the acclaimed solo show must go on. “It’s like a day job now.” he said. “It’s difficult to get out of it. The success is great, I’m thrilled, but it’s kind of frightening. I don’t have time to write. I’m probably the busiest I’ve been in my life.”

He said his multimedia present is not a case of trend-hopping, but a natural outgrowth of the training he had before he became a rock star. “I was an art student who went on to do a theater course [that included] film. It’s all come together. I didn’t really go into making bands my career. It just was a lovely hobby, and it’s still a hobby, ‘cause I’ve got no [expletive] time to do it, so I have to treat it like a hobby.”

The Kinks still exist, but the band hasn’t had an album of new material since the workmanlike “Phobia” in 1993. In 1995, the Kinks released “To the Bone,” a live, partly acoustic retrospective collection that included two good new songs that Davies has incorporated in his solo show. He says his full plate won’t allow him to work on a new Kinks album until 1998, though his list of projects does include making the first solo album of his career.

His decision to tour extensively with his solo theatrical show stems partly from a missed opportunity more than 20 years ago. In 1974, the Kinks released “Preservation,” a concept album of songs that by Davies standards were only fair-to-middling on record, but which blossomed onstage into a rock musical so witty and full of life that it made for the most enjoyable rock concert this scribe has ever seen.

“People said, ‘ “Preservation” is potentially a great show, and you should tour and perfect it, then bring it to a major London stage for an extended run as a musical,’ ” Davies recalled. Instead, the Kinks treated it as business as usual--just another album to be toured and promoted for a short spell until the next one came along. “With this [solo] show, I’m trying to learn from my mistakes.”

He said he isn’t concerned that the current Kinks hiatus might be ill-timed. In England, this is a time of rediscovered affection for the Kinks among a new corps of highly successful, ‘60s-influenced pop bands led by Oasis and Blur.

“I love Blur and Oasis. They’re great guys, and I love their music,” Davies said, bestowing further Kinks kudos on such up-and-coming, like-minded English bands as Reef and Kula Shaker. “They identify with the Kinks, and that’s really a compliment.”

So why not take the cue and, while the moment is right, come up with a new Kinks album showcasing the old mastery that has inspired the young lions?

“You’d have to persuade me a bit more than that,” Davies replied. “When you sit down to write, you’re not the grandmaster of the form. You sit down to write and try to make it half-good, or wholly good. Because you’ve got a great reputation, it doesn’t mean you can write great songs easily. I think we’ll do a great Kinks record [when the time comes], but everyone [in the band] has to be up for it.”

At 52, Davies is an actuarially sound bet to fulfill his plea from that great, galloping, angry rock song of long ago: “I’m a 20th century man, but I don’t want to die here.”

“Don’t speak too soon--something could happen between now and the new century,” he said lightly. He is hoping to see what the 21st century holds, but the singer who has made a career of contradictory, guardedly hopeful pessimism doesn’t see good omens for the remainder of the 20th.

“I think there will be a tremendous fear factor in the world, because people are afraid of numbers,” he said. “The last 18 months of the century are going to be pretty awful. Horrible TV shows trying to tell the story of the world. A marketing bonanza.”

For all his big plans at the moment, Davies said, he has no idea what permutations his solo theatrical concept might take as he records new music in the years to come and tours to promote it.

“The great thing about being me is I don’t have a clue,” he said, chuckling as he signed off. “If you want to know about the future, ask Bon Jovi.”

* Ray Davies plays Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. $35. (714) 854-4646 (box office) or (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).