The Kinks co-founder and guitarist Dave Davies hit back at Moby after the US electronic musician said that he could no longer listen to the band’s 1970 hit Lola on the grounds that he found it “gross and transphobic”.
Moby told the Guardian Saturday magazine’s Honest Playlist feature that he was repulsed by the song after it came up on a Spotify playlist. “I like their early music, but I was really taken aback at how unevolved the lyrics are,” he said.
The song details a young man in a nightclub falling for a figure who “walked like a woman but talked like a man”. It concludes: “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world / Except for Lola.”
Davies responded on X: “I am highly insulted that Moby would accuse my brother” – Kinks songwriter Ray Davies – “of being ‘unevolved’ or transphobic in any way.” In another post, he continued: “I don’t wanna show the guy up, but Moby should be careful what he says.”
Davies referenced the 1970s San Francisco psychedelic hippy theatre group the Cockettes, which had transgender members and performed in drag, saying that their members and friends “used to follow us around on tour”.
He continued: “We appreciated them. Why is Moby being so rude about this simple song? We’re not transphobic. Why does he have to have a go at us?”
He also shared a letter from trans punk icon Jayne County, who he said wrote to him and his brother to express her delight over the song: “Of course, when I first heard the name Lola, it conjured up memories of Marlene Dietrich standing on a stage in a crowded, smokey room singing one of her most famous songs, ‘Lola!’ From the 1930 film The Blue Angel,” County wrote.
“I always thought that the young lady in the song by the Kinks had perhaps taken her name from the Dietrich character! And [a] trashy, dark bar in London’s Soho district would for sure have an ‘interesting’ array of night-time denizens! And a woman with a low voice and the name Lola, would certainly qualify for a possible encounter with either a transvestite or transsexual!”
In the letter, County described herself as “thrilled and amazed” that the Kinks would write such a song, and wondered if other listeners had clocked its subject. “Lola will always be one of those songs that for me ‘broke the ice’ so to speak! A song that breaks down barriers and brings a used to be, hush, hush subject to the forefront and makes it sound perfectly natural to be singing a song about a ‘girl’ named Lola!”
She said that the song had propelled the Kinks into “the modern world. The REAL world! A world full of all kinds of people! Bisexual, gay, trans, not just a world full of straight heterosexuals!”
The LGBTQ+ subject matter of Lola was not without precedent for the Kinks. In 1965, their song See My Friends centred on a man unsure of his sexual orientation. Dave Davies also wrote in his 1996 autobiography Kink about having had affairs with musician Long John Baldry and producer Michael Aldred.
