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ANGEL CITY - Doc Neeson's Quiet Return Page 4
by Martin Popoff

It's been notes that the Cheap Trick guys and Meat Loaf went out of their way to be nice to the guys. Not so with The Kinks...

"The Kinks. That was such a disappointment. I was a real fan of The Kinks. Ray Davies' songwriting to me is one of the best in the world. And all the way through the tour, Ray Davies was really very aloof to us. The rest of the band were great, by the way, including his brother. But he just sort of kept himself aloof and away from us. The situation seemed to be... I think this was about '83 or '84. The Kinks had had somewhat of revival, and Ray was looking to make the utmost of that opportunity with the band. I think he always felt that The Kinks were always underappreciated in North America. And he's got this band onstage from Australia, and I'm sure he probably thought, right, some colonials. England has always thought that they were the key to it all, the center of the universe. So I think he actually thought we would be fairly ineffective. But what happened instead was that we had half an hour before The Kinks came on and we just went for it. And I had a radio mic, which meant I could run all around the stage, and before long I was jumping into the audience and singing to people in the audience. And he got really upset about that. Because we were actually getting encores. Which is fairly unusual for a support band, to have to do encores. And then he started getting his crew to put strips of tape on each side of my microphone stand, about five yards or so on either side of me, suggesting this was only how far I could go on stage. And that didn't stop me. What's a piece of tape? It's not the Berlin Wall. So I kept using the whole of the stage. Then he told his lighting people to cut down on our lighting, and they only gave us half the lighting that we normally got. And still we got encores. And that was OK; we were just happy to be going down well. For Ray Davies, it was a threat. And on the night before the whole thing was to come to a peak, really, at Madison Square Garden in New York, he kicked us off the tour. That was his paranoia, but for us, actually, it was a bummer, because we had a lot of record company people lined up, media people. You know the way it goes - it was a showcase for us. And he kicked us off. And it was really bad timing for us. It meant that where we had thought we would catch the next way in North America, because of his actions we missed the wave, and it really slowed things down for us a lot."

With the rest of the Angels also touring and recording as we speak - as, in fact, The Angels - the obvious question is whether a reunion of the two camps could be in the cards. Seems doubtful, given that there was indeed tension building between the guys even before Doc's car accident.

ANGEL CITY - Doc Neeson's Quiet Return Page 5