Reflecting on the cross-generational appeal of his band in an interview in the mid-90s, Ray Davies said The Kinks were immune to the backlash that some of their 60s peers suffered when punk arrived. “The great thing about The Kinks,” marvelled their frontman and chief songwriter,” is that none of the new punk bands said anything about us being boring, old farts. They knew we could out-punk them.”
There is almost a version of that for each decade. The Kinks were a band who could match any melody during the sweet, harmonic highs of 60s pop, rock with the hardest of them in the 80s and the group who set the blueprint for Britpop in the 90s.
But let’s hone in the 80s, the era that a set of exuberant hard rock titans very much got their Kinks on. It’s for no small reason that it was with the cover of the North London troupe’s classic You Really Got Me that Van Halen introduced themselves in 1978, its mixture of hard-riffing and razorsharp hooks a formula that would run right the way through their illustrious career. Eddie Van Halen might have later bemoaned the choice of his band’s debut single being a cover rather than one of their own compositions but You Really Got Me remained on Van Halen setlists right until their very last show at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl in October 2015. It was a song that helped define them.
The mix of unease and satisfaction runs both ways. Google “Van Halen You Really Got Me” today and one of the People Also Ask options returned reads, “Is You Really Got Me Van Halen or The Kinks?”. But whilst Ray Davies might grumble about the lack of widespread recognition that he was, in fact, the sole composer of the 1964 single, he and brother Dave would eventually acknowledge its importance in introducing The Kinks to a new generation.
“We got pissed off when we played America,” Ray told Classic Rock in 2010. “The Kinks had an album out called Low Budget. Some kid came up to me after one of the gigs and said, ‘I like your cover of Van Halen’s You Really Got Me’. You have to smile sometimes,” he explained, probably not smiling. “Van Halen’s version was very Middle America,” he continued. “It was like, ‘Hey man, look at me with my tight trousers!’”
In a sign that both brothers had an issue with the stylistic choices and restricted airspace afforded to strides in the 80s, Dave Davies made a similar complaint in a chat with Van Halen News Desk in 2013. Recalling what went through his mind upon hearing Van Halen’s version of the song, he said, “I felt, ‘This sounds really flashy’,” he stated. “But it depicted the era in that it was when stadium rock was big and guitars were flashier and tight trousers. There’s a chasm between the. Two versions. One’s about a comfortable, American urban life. And one is about a raunchy, desperate kind of survival instinct.”
But the Davies siblings changed their tune over the years and came to appreciate Eddie & co.’s more muscular take on the song. “The great thing about them is that they took You Really Got Me up a tone and played it in A,” he said in the 90s. “The allows you to thrash the chords out more and it changed the sound of the whole thing. It was a great idea. More no-nonsense than our version.”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t a good record,” appraised Dave in a separate interview. “It always makes you feel good when people are inspired by your work.” He explained that he had come to understand that it was an important song for Van Halen in much the same way it was for his own band. “That song kicked off their career and it was also the song that launched The Kinks,” he said. “When I first heard it, it sounded like someone trying to cash in on my own music, get on my coattails with their music. But they made it their own with Edward’s playing, which is so of that genre, of that era, which is special in its own right. That’s not cryptic – it’s just different.”
Both versions have earned the right to stand on their own two feet. The original turned 50 last year but remains a pioneering, pugilistic tour-de-force that introduced a heavier, harder sound into rock'n'roll. Eddie Van Halen didn’t just pluck the cover out of thin air, either - this was a song already in his blood. “We’ve been waiting to do that song since we were four years old,” he told Classic Rock’s Steven Rosen back in 1978, getting his maths slightly wrong – he was eight when You Really Got Me was released. But he was confident they had put their own turbo-charged spin on it. “It’s updated. It’s been Van Halenised like a jet plane.”
