The Stage

Pete Quaife

Published Monday 12 July 2010 at 15:37 by Michael Quinn

Pete Quaife formed The Kinks and helped keep the iconoclastic Sixties pop band together for almost a decade by mediating in the constant career-threatening rifts between co-founders and sibling rivals Ray and Dave Davies. Such were his political skills that his fellow feuding band members dubbed him “the Ambassador”.

The three met at school in Muswell Hill, north London, following Quaife’s move from Tavistock in Devon, where he was born on December 31, 1943. The trio formed a band while still students. Quaife, so the legend has it, drawing the short straw to play bass guitar.

While studying commercial art, Quaife and the Davies brothers, joined by drummer Mick Avory, formed The Ravens, attracting the attention of guitarist Robert Wace and his stockbroker partner Grenville Collins - their managers to be. A change of name, a fashion makeover (hunting crops and riding whips soon abandoned for smart Carnaby Street suits) and a collaboration with producer Shel Talmy led to The Kinks’ third single, You Really Got Me, hitting number one in 1964.

Eleven top ten hits - among them Waterloo Sunset, Sunny Afternoon and Autumn Almanac - followed over the next three years. When Quaife broke his leg in 1966, he resigned from the band after being replaced temporarily, then rejoined after a quick change of mind. But as songwriter Ray Davies became the dominant force in the band and more involved studio recordings led to a lack of touring, Quaife resigned a second time in 1969, ruefully complaining: “We just sat around at home collecting our royalty cheques. It was an easy life, but not a very fulfilling one”.

A brief dalliance with country-rock quartet Mapleoak led to one failed single in 1970 before Quaife left the band, and the music industry, to move to Denmark. Apart from occasional appearances at fan conventions, The Kinks’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, and with a tribute band in Utrecht in 2004, his only regular public performances were with a church band in Belleville, Ontario, where he emigrated in 1980 (returning to Denmark in 2005).

Working as a graphic artist, Quaife published a collection of cartoons, The Lighter Side of Dialysis, in 2004 following the onset of kidney problems. He died of renal failure on 23 June 2010 at the age of 66. He is survived by his partner and a daughter from a previous relationship.

Paying tribute on his website, Ray Davies said: “Without Pete there would have been no Kinks”, and described him as “a true musician, a true artist and an immensely gifted man full of life and love”.