As you trudge the Christmas streets trying to find this year's shopping list, amid all the Slade and the Wizzard you might be lucky enough to hear The Kinks' Father Christmas ("When I was small I believed in Santa Claus, though I knew it was my dad..."). It's a typical example of one of the band's signature styles: total Englishness, but a bit dark and a bit funny. And hopefully that'll also be the template for Julien Temple's You've Really Got Me, currently being prepared by the director in cahoots with Kinks main man Ray Davies.
The film will focus on the band's formation and influences, as well as the infamously fractious relationship between Ray and his brother Dave: "love/hate sibling rivalry is the core," Temple told Screen Daily.
No cast details yet, or indeed a script: Davies and Temple are hammering out the narrative direction and the tone before writing starts. But Temple is fairly clear that he wants the music in the film to be played as-live by the actors, like in Walk the Line and Control. It makes things "believable and real, while miming is problematic," says Temple.
Temple famously made the Sex Pistols movie The Great Rock N Roll Swindle and its much later counterpoint The Filth and the Fury, plus The Future is Unwritten, about Clash frontman Joe Strummer. Iconoclastic rock bands then, are nothing new for the director, and The Kinks should be in safe hands here (even if Temple did also bring us Absolute Beginners and Earth Girls Are Easy).
Random Kinks-related movie trivia of the day: Dave Davies is godfather to John Carpenter's son.