Pete Quaife has died.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/7854791/Pete-Quaife.htmlPete Quaife, who died on June 24 aged 66, was a founder member of The Kinks and played bass guitar on their biggest hits, including You Really Got Me, All Day and All of the Night and Dedicated Follower of Fashion; in the early 1970s he abandoned the music scene to make his living as a graphic artist.
Peter Alexander Greenlaw Quaife was born on December 31 1943 at Tavistock, Devon, and was brought up at Muswell Hill in north London, where he attended William Grimshaw School. A fellow pupil was Ray Davies, and together they formed The Kinks, also recruiting Ray's brother Dave. They played their first gig at a school dance, covering songs by the Ventures, the Shadows and Duane Eddy, then appeared at various venues around London before landing a record contract in 1963.
Fame arrived with their third single, the hard-driving, proto-heavy metal track You Really Got Me, which was released in 1964 and went to No 1 in Britain and No 7 in the United States.
In 1966, after being seriously injured in a car accident, Quaife was briefly replaced on bass by John Dalton. But he can be heard on albums such as Something Else By The Kinks and The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society ("the high point of my career", Quaife later said), and he contributed to some of the material on Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). He also sang vocals on the single Waterloo Sunset (1967), which reached No 2 in the British charts.
In April 1969 Quaife left the band for good, to be replaced by Dalton. "The band was fighting all the time and I was getting sick of it," Quaife said in 1998. "I wanted to run as fast as I could in the other direction. I just couldn't take the constant brawling amongst everybody any more."
He added: "I remember, early on, that the Stones and us were about of equal popularity. I knew one of us would emerge as number two behind the Beatles. There was no way either us or the Stones were going to surpass the Beatles. The Kinks knew that. But we did have a chance to surpass the Stones if we worked as a collaborative unit and cut out the b******* and fighting... Mick [Avory, the drummer] and I felt like session men most of the time. Like it could have been anybody in the studio there playing bass and drums."
After leaving The Kinks, Quaife formed his own country/rock group, Maple Oak. Their first single, Son of a Gun, made little impact on its release in 1970, and Quaife gave up his musical career and moved to Denmark. By 1980 he was living at Belleville, in Ontario, Canada, where he worked as an airbrush artist and as the political cartoonist for a weekly newspaper. In Belleville he adopted the surname Kinnes to avoid being traced in the telephone directory by fans. He also took up classical guitar and played bass with a local church group.
His only subsequent performance with The Kinks was at a concert in Toronto in 1981, although he later made occasional appearances with The Kast Off Kinks, most of whose members had been members of the band in its various incarnations.
After being treated for kidney failure in the late 1990s, Quaife published a book of cartoons entitled The Lighter Side of Dialysis. In 2005 he returned to live in Denmark.
Pete Quaife was twice married, and had one daughter.
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