In 1965, at the absolute height of the British Invasion, the Kinks were banned from touring America for four years, a punishment that gutted the band’s commercial momentum at the exact moment it mattered most. The reason traced back to a single violent outburst onstage in Cardiff, Wales, born out of the band’s notoriously combustible internal relationships.
The Kinks, fronted by brothers Ray and Dave Davies, had built a reputation almost as much for onstage chaos as for hits like “You Really Got Me.” The brothers fought constantly, both onstage and off, and drummer Mick Avory was frequently caught in the middle of the tension. According to Ray Davies, the trouble at Cardiff’s Capital Theatre began the night before the incident, when an intoxicated Dave had insulted Avory, leaving the drummer simmering with anger heading into the next night’s performance.
Unaware of, or simply indifferent to, how upset Avory still was, Dave needled him again midway through the Cardiff show, kicking over part of his drum kit and hurling a crude insult about his playing in front of the audience. Avory, by his own admission already furious, lunged from behind his kit and struck Dave over the head with either a cymbal or his hi-hat pedal, accounts vary on exactly which. The blow opened a deep gash that required Dave to be rushed to the hospital for 16 stitches. Ray has said he stood onstage in shock, screaming that Avory had killed his little brother, genuinely uncertain in the moment whether Dave would survive.
Dave did recover, but the fallout from the incident, combined with the band’s broader reputation for unpredictable, alcohol-fueled behavior on tour, led an American musicians’ union to effectively ban the Kinks from performing in the United States for the next four years. Ray has since called the timing of that ban devastating, noting that it stripped the band of access to American audiences during precisely the period when bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were cementing their commercial dominance there. He has said the ban robbed the Kinks of what should have been the most important years of their career.
The brothers’ feud never fully disappeared even after the American ban was lifted, flaring up repeatedly over decades through songwriting disputes, onstage fights, and very public arguments in the press, in some ways foreshadowing the later sibling warfare of bands like Oasis. Despite it all, both brothers have separately acknowledged a deep underlying love and respect for one another, even while insisting the friction between them was, in Ray’s words, the very thing that made their music special and the very thing that eventually helped tear it apart. Avory himself remained the band’s drummer for nearly two more decades after the Cardiff incident, suggesting that whatever damage the fight caused to the Kinks’ American prospects, it did surprisingly little lasting harm to the working relationship between the men actually involved in it.