Time & Perspective Quote by Ray Davies

Davies slides a little pin into the balloon of rock mythology. “I was an art student at the time, like thousands of others” refuses the heroic origin story where a singular genius emerges fully formed, destined for the stage. Instead, it frames him as one data point in a postwar British pipeline: art school as a holding pen for the ambitious, the restless, the not-yet-employed. The line is modest on the surface, but it’s also a sly claim to credibility. In the UK of the early 1960s, art school wasn’t just training; it was a scene, a set of influences (design, theatre, modernism) that fed directly into pop’s new visual and conceptual swagger. Saying he was “like thousands” places him inside that generational machine.

The subtext is democratic and defensive at once. Davies is acknowledging how common his starting point was, but he’s also pre-empting the idea that his later success was inevitable or purely meritocratic. The shrug in the phrasing suggests contingency: there were many would-be artists, few got to become Ray Davies. That gap between the ordinary beginning and the extraordinary outcome is where the real story lives.

It also aligns with Davies’s enduring obsession: the poetry of the everyday. The Kinks’ best songs turn tea-time details and small frustrations into national portraiture. This quote does the same work in miniature, making the unglamorous background not an embarrassment to overcome, but the texture that gives the music its bite and truth.