It is hard to imagine a stranger career rescue than the one performed by “Lola”. In 1970 the Kinks were a band with a glittering past and an uncertain future, still smarting from years of lost momentum, and Ray Davies responded with a song about a night in a club that goes pleasantly, bewilderingly wrong. The tune was irresistible and the story was cheeky, but beneath the singalong lay something unusual for the time: tenderness toward someone the culture was not yet ready to understand. This article looks at where the song came from, what it says, and why its warmth still sets it apart from so much of what surrounded it.
A Night in Paris, or Possibly Bridlington
Davies has told the origin story more than once, and the versions do not quite match, which is probably how he likes it. The most repeated account involves the band’s manager, Robert Wace, who spent a night dancing in a Paris club with someone he took for a woman. When the sun came up, Davies noticed the stubble. Wace, by Davies’s telling, was too drunk to care. Davies has also pointed to a similar experience of his own, dancing with someone at an all-night gig in Bridlington in 1965. Some have speculated about other inspirations, including the performer Candy Darling, but those claims rest on less secure ground.
The lyric itself keeps the details deliberately loose. The narrator meets Lola in a dim Soho club, is charmed by her, goes home with her, and slowly realises something about her that the vocabulary of 1970 struggled to name. We would now describe Lola as a trans woman or a drag performer, and the song is vague enough to leave room for either reading. What is clear is how the narrator reacts. He is startled, a little thrown, and then oddly settled. The story is not really about Lola’s secret at all. It is about what happens inside the person who learns it.
The Riff, the Guitar and a Brother’s Claim
Musically, “Lola” is a small masterclass in making acoustic sounds feel enormous. The ringing opening chords come from a blend of a Martin acoustic guitar and a resonator guitar, giving the track a bright, metallic shimmer that cuts through radio static. Dave Davies later claimed he came up with the central riff while strumming in his brother’s back garden, a claim that Ray’s own memory does not exactly endorse. Brothers in this band rarely agreed on anything, and the dispute over who wrote what has never been fully settled.
What nobody disputes is the construction. It is a classic piece of pop theatre: a rolling verse that sets the scene, a chorus that bursts open with a childlike la-la refrain, and a final stretch that sweeps up the bewilderment into a shrug of acceptance. Davies has said he set out to make a great record rather than a great song, and the distinction is revealing. Every texture, from the sing-song chant to the slightly drunken sway of the rhythm, is designed to feel like the night itself, with its blur of noise, flattery and bad champagne.
Coca-Cola, Cherry Cola and the BBC
The most famous controversy around the song had nothing to do with its subject. Davies originally sang about champagne that tasted just like Coca-Cola, a small joke about the cheap fakery of a clip joint. The BBC, with its strict rule against advertising on air, refused to play the track. Rather than quietly accept the ban, Davies interrupted the band’s American tour and flew from New York to London and back, a round trip of roughly 6,000 miles, to re-record the line with “cherry cola” instead. The date, by most accounts, was 3 June 1970.
It is a lovely irony. The song’s real provocation was its sympathy for a figure many listeners considered shocking, yet the broadcasters objected to a soft-drink brand. The gender question passed through without much fuss, perhaps because the song never sneers. Davies told a magazine at the time that Lola’s sex was beside the point and that he thought she was all right, and the tone bears that out. The joke is on the narrator’s innocence, not on Lola’s identity, and that difference is everything. A song that laughs with its characters is a very different creature from one that laughs at them.
Glam, Gender and a Second Life
Seen from today, “Lola” sits at an interesting crossroads. The year 1970 is just before the full explosion of glam, when Marc Bolan and David Bowie began wearing glitter and ambiguity as armour, and when pop’s relationship with gender play shifted from the occasional novelty to a central feature. The Kinks, an old-fashioned London band, got there first, and arguably with a more affectionate eye than many of the glam stars who followed. The song does not turn Lola into a spectacle. She is simply someone met in a club, whose company the narrator ends up enjoying.
The record also rescued the band. The Kinks had been unable to tour the United States for several years because of a ban from the American musicians’ union, and their commercial fortunes had sagged. Dave Davies later suggested that if the single had failed, the group might well have drifted apart. Instead, the song reached the top ten in both Britain and America and gave the band a fresh lease of life that carried them through much of the decade. Few singles have done so much for the people who made them.
Reading It Now
Modern listeners tend to approach the song with more vocabulary and more caution. Some hear an early pop moment of affectionate acceptance, a narrator who learns something surprising and chooses warmth over panic. Others point out that the story is structured around a reveal, with Lola’s identity functioning as a twist, and that this framing can feel dated. Both responses are fair. The song was written at a moment when the language for these experiences barely existed in mainstream pop, and it should be judged partly on what it was willing to attempt. What it attempted was a gentle story with no villain, no panic and no punishment, told by a narrator who ends by choosing curiosity. That is a more generous ending than many songs, and many films, managed for decades afterwards. The vocabulary has changed, but the instinct underneath it has aged remarkably well.
Conclusion
The beauty of “Lola” is that it treats a delicate subject with a grin and a shrug rather than a lecture. Davies built a story of confusion and then declined to punish anyone for it, which was unusual in 1970 and remains refreshing now. Add that irresistible guitar sound, a dispute over a soft drink, and a comeback for a band on the brink, and you have one of the most characterful singles in British rock. The song asks us to enjoy the oddness of the world instead of fearing it, and to meet people with curiosity rather than alarm. Half a century later, that invitation still sounds like a good idea.