“The little idiot”: Dave Davies hits back at Moby calling Lola “unevolved” and “transphobic”

It may be 56 years old this year but it seems The Kinks’ Lola can still stir up strong emotions.

Over the weekend, Moby was interviewed as part of the Guardian’s Honest Playlist feature and mentioned the band’s 1970 hit as one of the ‘songs he can no longer listen to’.

Talking about the song, he said: “(It) came up on a Spotify playlist, and I thought the lyrics were gross and transphobic. I like their early music, but I was really taken aback at how unevolved the lyrics are."

The Kinks lead singer and main lyricist, Ray Davies, wrote the words, but now his brother Dave has leapt to the defence of Lola. Calling Moby “the little idiot”, he said: “I am highly insulted that MOBY would accuse my brother of being ‘unevolved’ or transphobic in any way.”

And to back him up, Davies quoted a statement about the song by Jayne County, the US punk singer who was a groundbreaking presence for trans participation in music in the 1970s.

County wrote: “When I heard the song I was both thrilled and amazed that the Kinks would be singing a song about a trans person and wondered if anyone else had picked up on it! Who was cool or hip enough to realize what The Kinks we're singing about!”

“Lola will always be one of those songs that for me 'broke the ice' so to speak! A song that breaks down barriers and brings a used to be, hush, hush subject to the forefront and makes it sound perfectly natural to be singing a song about a 'girl' named Lola!

"I don't think the radio stations picked up on the subject matter but a lot of the fans did and that's what really matters... Being Trans myself this will always be a very special song to me.”

Context, of course, is everything in music. Lola was written at a time when trans women’s only presence in popular culture was as the butt of jokes on comedy shows. Though lines like ‘I’m glad I’m a man and so is Lola’ wouldn’t pass muster in 2026, the character in the song accepts Lola and merely reflects that “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls/ it’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world except for Lola”.

It should be remembered, too, that back then, The Kinks had half a foot in the LGBTQ community anyway. Five years previously, they had released See My Friends, a song about a young man unsure of his sexual identity. And Dave Davies himself had a bisexual affair in the 1960s, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. In modern terms, the Kinks would have probably been thought of as ‘allies’.