The Kinks founders Ray and Dave Davies reveal Adelaide connections though their aunt Rose Anning

They are one of the most influential bands on the planet — legendary UK rockers The Kinks. What’s little-known to many is their curious Adelaide connection.

YOU REALLY GOT ME: Kinks guitarist and founding member Dave Davies.

Dave Davies, lead guitarist of The Kinks and one half of the wildest pair of brawling brothers in the history of rock ’n’ roll, still has trouble listening to Rosie Won’t You Please Come Home.

The song, written by brother Ray about their big sister Rose leaving the working-class suburb of Muswell Hill in London and moving to Australia with husband Arthur and their son Terry, still brings a lump to his throat every time he hears it.

Ray and Dave would go on to write and record such classics as Lola, All Day And All Of The Night, You Really Got Me and Waterloo Sunset.

Rose, the oldest of the eight Davies children, was something of a second mother to the much younger Ray and Dave — particularly to Ray — and when she left for the other side of the world the brothers were utterly heartbroken.

Not only did they write and record the plea for their big sister to return to England, they also made an entire concept album, Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), inspired by their feelings.

But what many people don’t realise is that Rose moved to Elizabeth, where she lived as a mother and housewife and made very little fuss about the fact that she was related to rock royalty.

“It was a difficult time for us as a family,” Dave Davies says over the phone from his home in London.

“Growing up in Muswell Hill, we came from a big family. Rose was the oldest out of us eight kids, and we were all in and out of each other’s houses. We were a very close family unit.”

Rosie’s son, Terry, who now lives in Elizabeth East, is Dave and Ray’s nephew — and is very close in age to his uncles.

Rose Anning on the ship to Australia.

According to Dave, Terry felt more like a brother than a nephew.

“We were like brothers, us and Terry,” Dave says. “We bonded just like brothers.”

Muswell Hill, like much of England, was not in the greatest of shape following World War II. London had been extensively bomb­ed, with more than 40,000 people losing their lives.

Rubble and craters were an everyday reality, and the economy was depressed. It’s not hard to see why a young family might be tempted by the messages on TV, at the cinema and in print selling Australia as a vibrant, young country full of sunshine and opportunity.

Famously, it cost just £10 to ship out to the seemingly promised land.

“There were these adverts coming out of the Australian embassy at the time,” Dave says. “It was like, you know (sings opening line from The Kinks song Australia) ‘Opportunities are available in all walks of life in Australia’.” Still, the news of Rose’s planned emigration hit hard. The brothers just didn’t see it coming.

“I don’t think I took it all in at the time and I’m not sure Ray did, either,” Dave says.

“We were so busy getting the band together and touring and recording — we were kind of preoccupied, in a way.”

And not only did the brothers lose their big sister, they also lost Terry — someone Dave thought would play a key role in the future of The Kinks.

“I always thought he was going to be our road manager or somehow part of our sound,” he says.

It’s while relating a story about letters Rosie used to send to their mother, Annie, that Dave becomes quite emotional, his voice breaking over the phone.

It may have happened more than 50 years ago, but the memory is obviously still fresh.

“I remember how people used to communicate with airmail in those days, because it was cheaper than sending a letter,” Dave says.

Rose Anning with her husband Arthur.

“My mum used to always write to Rose and I remember watching my mum read out one of Rose’s replies.

“It said something like, ‘I got on the boat at Southampton and (long pause)’ … I can hardly even say it … ‘I cried all the way to Australia’. That is pretty sad.

“It was a big wrench, the whole thing, but lots of families went through it at that time.”

Dave admits that they would visit Rosie when touring Australia to try to convince her to return, but she remained loyal to the decision she’d made with Arthur all those years ago.

As for Arthur, what did he think about one of Britain’s biggest rock bands writing an album about him?

“To be honest, I’m not sure how he felt about it,” Dave says.

“I loved Arthur, obviously, but the age difference was too much for him to be my pal. I didn’t really get to know him all that well. You know how it goes.

“But his decision (to move to Australia), thinking back, I think we thought it was a strange thing to do, to move to a foreign land like that.

“Nowadays, people don’t think so much about distance, but in those days it was a very emotional event.”

Terry Anning now lives in an aged-care home because of a dodgy ticker, and has no regrets about passing up an opportunity to be part of one of the biggest stories in British rock history.

“I think I’d probably be dead now if I’d stayed behind,” says the 73-year-old, who bears a striking resemblance to his famous uncles.

Rose Anning on the veranda of her Elizabeth home. She died in 2014 aged 90, and the following year Terry took his mum’s ashes back to England for Ray to scatter at his estate in the village of Effingham, a place Rose enjoyed visiting and staying at.

“I had my first heart attack at 40. I don’t think the late nights and rock ’n’ roll lifestyle would have suited me.”

Terry was 17 and helping his uncles on a number of fronts — driving the van, packing gear and even occasionally “strumming away at the bass” — when Rose and Arthur told him they were moving to Adelaide.

“They gave me a choice and I thought about it for a couple of days,” he recalls. “To be honest, I would’ve sooner gone to New Zealand.

“At the time, my job was making sure the equipment was in the van and that we didn’t come back with any stowaways. That kind of thing.

“We had Bedford vans, one with equipment in it and one with guys in it. We opened up the equipment van one night and two girls fell out — they’d hidden out in the back!”

So while things were going pretty well — girls don’t tend to stowaway in the vans of dud bands — Terry chose to accompany his parents to start a new life in Australia.

“I just thought, ‘Well, I don’t know how this band is gonna go’,” he says.

“It was a big risk, and so for a bit of security; I went with Mum and Dad.”

Terry has vivid memories of the month-long boat trip to Australia — visiting friends of his father’s in Mumbai (“a real eye-opener”), climbing Mt Vesuvius near Naples, and calling in at Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

JUST LIKE BROTHERS: Ray Davies, Terry Anning and Dave Davies as children in post-war England.

On arrival at Outer Harbor, the new migrants were warned to “not pay too much attention” to the drive into the city. Had they ignored the advice, they would’ve seen a fairly bleak, scrubby and industrial landscape that was very different to their native Britain.

After a brief stay in a migrant hostel, Arthur, an expert in plastic injection moulding, walked straight into a job at the Kelvinator factory making interiors for refrigerators, while Terry took a position in a surveyor’s office before leaving to work for Stegbar making aluminium window frames.

“We had to find our niche in society and go with it,” Terry says.

“We kept friends with lots of people who came out at the same time, but over the years we’ve moved on.

“I married the girl across the road. Sandra was Australian, born in Millicent. When we got married, I don’t know if Mum approved — she probably did, in the end.

“There were family arguments and there was a period of time we weren’t talking, and because of that I didn’t know that Dad had cancer, cancer of the oesophagus.”

The widowed Rose made regular trips back to the UK for up to three months at a time to see her family, but Terry says she was never tempted to move back.

She had two grandchildren — Terry’s boys Lachlan and Luke — and a new life on the other side of the world.

FAMILY TIES: Terry Anning with pictures of his famous uncles, Ray and Dave Davies, of The Kinks.

She died in 2014 aged 90, and the following year Terry took his mum’s ashes back to England for Ray to scatter at his estate in the village of Effingham, a place Rose enjoyed visiting and staying at.

Terry has never dined out on stories of his famous family, and says only a few people in his home know, but a twinkle does appear in his blue eyes when he remembers the mischief he got up to with his uncles.

“Here’s a funny story,” he says. “The guy next door didn’t like the noise of the band playing in the front parlour. He complained and threatened to get the police on to us. Well, we had this great big amp, a big bass amp, and we stuck it up on the mantelpiece facing towards his house and played one big chord.

“He never complained again. I’m pretty sure we knocked all his ornaments off his mantelpiece!”

But there are two Kinks mysteries Terry can’t answer. Firstly, he says he has no idea who slashed the amplifier speaker to create that trademark Kinks sound that can be heard on early tracks like You Really Got Me.

The Davies brothers have long argued over whose idea it was, or whether it was actually an accident. The end result, though, was one of the first examples of distorted electric guitar and is widely credited with inspiring the punk and metal genres.

“No, I honestly don’t know which one of the brothers first did that,” Terry says.

The other mystery is what became of the reel-to-reel tapes his mother had stashed away, featuring early recordings of the Davies’ brothers jamming at home.

“There was a lot of early stuff of Raymond on the guitar, a lot of the boys banging away,” he says. “When Mum passed away, we had to clean the house out and we couldn’t find them. We looked everywhere.”

Whether Rose gave them away, donated them to charity or just threw them in the bin, nobody knows.

Terry still chats to Ray on the phone from time to time, and still hears his uncles’ music regularly — sometimes in the most unlikely places.

“I even heard a Kinks song on a Best and Less ad the other day,” he says.

IN good news for lovers of The Kinks, the band has rereleased classic record The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, complete with an unreleased new track called Time Song.

The rerelease is to celebrate the record’s 50th anniversary, a fact Dave says feels “strange”.

“It was a unique piece of work that was out of time in a way, out of step,” he says of the distinctly English album that went on to inspire a whole generation of Britpop bands in the ’90s.

“But that’s what gives it its charm, I think. At that time (1968), everyone was talking about getting rid of the old and getting into the new, but life’s not like that. Sometimes we need to keep the things from the past and integrate them with new ideas.”

And in even better news, it appears as if the Davies brothers are now getting along quite well. Well enough, at least, that a Kinks reunion and an album of new material aren’t out of the question.

“We’re gonna try and make it happen,” Dave says.

“We have some new songs and we’re gonna try to do something.”