Kinks guitarist Dave Davies hits back at Moby for calling 1970 single Lola ‘crude and transphobic’ | music

Dave Davies, co-founder and guitarist of The Kinks, has hit back at Moby after the American electronic musician said he could no longer listen to his 1970 hit Lola on the grounds that he found it “crude and transphobic”.

Moby told Guardian Saturday’s Honest Playlist feature that he was shocked by the song after it appeared on a Spotify playlist. “I love their early music, but I was really surprised by how undeveloped the lyrics were,” he said.

The song details a young man in a nightclub who falls in love with a character who “walks like a woman and talks like a man.” He concludes: “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It’s a mixed up, confused, shaky world / Except for Lola.”

Davies responded to He continued in another post: “I don’t want to show the man off, but Moby has to be careful what he says.”

Davis pointed to the 1970s San Francisco psychedelic hippie theater group The Cockettes, which had transgender members and performed in drag, saying their members and friends “used to follow us on tour.”

He continued: “We appreciated them. Why was Moby so rude about this simple song? We are not transphobic. Why did he have to attack us?”

He also shared a letter from Trans Punk icon Jayne County, who he said wrote to him and his brother to express her excitement over the song: “Of course, when I first heard the name Lola, it conjured up memories of Marlene Dietrich standing on stage in a crowded, smoke-filled room singing one of her most famous songs, ‘Lola!'” County wrote: From the 1930 film The Blue Angel.

“I always thought the young lady in The Kinks song might have taken her name from Dietrich’s character! [a] This dark and dingy pub in London’s Soho is sure to have an ‘interesting’ group of residents for the night! And the low-voiced woman, whose name is Lola, would certainly qualify for a possible encounter with either a transvestite or a transvestite!

In the letter, County described herself as “delighted and amazed” that the Kinks would write such a song, and wondered if other listeners had registered her theme. “‘Lola’ will always be one of those songs that ‘broke the ice’ for me so to speak! A song that breaks down barriers, brings silence and silence to the forefront and makes it completely normal to sing a song about a ‘girl’ named Lola!”

She said the song 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 homosexuals!”

Lola’s LGBTQ+ theme was not without precedent for the Kinks. In 1965, their song “See My Friends” centered on a man unsure of his sexual orientation. Dave Davies also wrote in his 1996 autobiography Kink about having relationships with musician Long John Baldry and producer Michael Aldred.