As the bass player with the Kinks, Peter Quaife provided the throb and muscle to some of the greatest pop songs of the 1960s, including You Really Got Me, Sunny Afternoon, Dedicated Follow of Fashion and Waterloo Sunset.
Only the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had more chart success than the Kinks. The group’s hits were the soundtrack of the swinging London of the mid-1960s, as Quaife and his colleagues cut dandified figures in the latest fashions of Carnaby Street and the Kings Road. But just as success opened fissures within the Beatles, so the image of the Kinks as a similarly fab foursome, smiling winningly out of their record covers, was a myth.
The group’s songs were all written by Quaife’s school friend, Ray Davies, who maintained an obsessively tight rein over the Kinks’ output. Quaife later criticised Davies as a “control freak” who reduced him to feeling like a session man in the group he had helped to found. “It could have been anybody in the studio there playing bass. That’s not right if you’re supposed to be a full-time member of a band,” he told an interviewer in 1998.
Frustration, and his despair at the in-fighting that dogged the group, particularly between Ray Davies and his guitarist brother Dave, led Quaife to leave the Kinks for good in 1969. He moved to Denmark, drifted out of the music industry and became a graphic artist. But by then, his place in pop history was secure and his bouncing, effervescent bass lines had contributed to some of the most enduring songs in British popular music.
Peter Quaife was born in 1943, in Tavistock, Devon. He grew up in North London, where he attended William Grimshaw Secondary Modern School and formed a band, the Ray Davies Quartet, with his schoolmates Ray and Dave Davies and the drummer John Start. Quaife and Ray Davies went to art school, but by 1963 both had dropped out and returned to Muswell Hill, where they re-formed the group, performing under several names, including the Pete Quaife Band, the Bo-Weevils, the Ramrods and the Ravens.
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A 1964 appearance on the ITV show Ready Steady Go!, a support slot with the Beatles and press hype, with Quaife, the best-looking member of the group, often featured as the group’s spokesman, made them the most talked about new group on the scene and led to a chart breakthrough came with the third single, You Really Got Me. Davies’s energetic composition made No 1 in the British charts in the autumn of 1964. When the Kinks followed the Beatles in the second wave of the so-called British invasion of the US You Really Got Me got to No 7.
In swift succession over the next 18 months, All Day and All of the Night, Tired of Waiting for You, Set Me Free, See My Friend and Til the End of the Day kept the Kinks in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. But Davies was developing as a songwriter and a sharp change of direction came in 1966 with Dedicated Follower of Fashion, in more whimsical style and with a lyric full of sharp social observation, and Quaife began to feel overshadowed.
After recovering from a foot injury sustained in a car crash in 1966 and a brief return to the band, during which the Kinks topped the charts with Sunny Afternoon, he left. His retirement lasted only a few months but by the time he rejoined the Kinks had become a quite different band, as Davies blossomed into a playful and and very English songwriter on hits such as Waterloo Sunset. In April 1969, Quaife again announced that he was leaving.
“I just couldn’t take the constant brawling among everybody any more,” he said. On reflection, he concluded he had not enjoyed life as a pop star at all.
He later said: “The morning after You Really Got Me hit No 1, I woke up in bed and looked down at my feet and noticed a hole in the toe of my sock. At that moment I realised that I should be celebrating with French chefs waiting on me and things like that, not worrying about a hole in the toe of my sock. That was my high point. As for the low points, let’s just say there were too damn many.”
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Despite his disillusionment he had one further musical fling, with Mapleoak, a bunch of Canadian country-rockers he met in London in 1969. But he stayed little more than a year.
From Denmark Quaife moved in 1980 to Canada. In Toronto in 1981 he reunited with the Kinks on stage for the only time. It was not a happy experience — he later confessed that he had been drunk and other band members were yelling at him for playing in the wrong key.
Sessions for a proposed Kinks reunion album in 1998 were aborted when Quaife suffered kidney failure. He later published The Lighter Side of Dialysis (2004), a book of cartoons drawn while he was undergoing treatment. His art was exhibited in a number of galleries. His only recent musical activity was to play bass in an amateur Christian rock/gospel group at his church.
He moved back to Denmark in 2005 after divorcing his second wife and is survived by a daughter from his first marriage.
Pete Quaife, musician, was born on December 31, 1943. He died on June 24, 2010, aged 66