“So Dave, how do I slash the amp?”: Dave Davies shows you the proper way to slash an amp to achieve his Kinks tone

Back in the ‘60s, the Kinks were tonal pioneers, playing their rock n’ roll with so much aggression that many have hailed them as a pivotal precursor to heavy metal. How they achieved that sound has gone down as the stuff of legend.

On their 1964 hit, You Really Got Me, famously covered by Van Halen 14 years later, guitarist Dave Davies achieved a hairy, distorted guitar tone that propelled the track. But he didn't have the luxury of using overdrive pedals at that time. Instead, he slashed the speaker cone of his amplifier to give it such a gritty sound, and he’s now shown how to do it firsthand.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4, John Robb (of post-punk bands the Membranes and Goldblade) asks, “So Dave, how do I slash the amp?” with a scalpel in his grip.

In response, Davies takes the blade, flips the open-back combo amp in front of him around, and wounds the bottom left of the speaker cone. He makes light work of it, too. It’s over in a matter of seconds.

“And that’s basically it,” he says, before grabbing a Fender Stratocaster and strumming a few newly distorted chords.

Rumors about how the band got that unique sound ran amok. I distinctly remember being told the amp was damaged after falling off the back of a truck while I was still a teen.

Speaking to Guitar World last year, Davies confirmed the razor blade story – slicing a green Elpico amp, which was later wired up to a Vox AC30 for extra volume – to be true.

“Well, yes, we did do that,” Davies proudly told Guitar World last year when asked about such a landmark moment in rock history. “And we did it without any pedals. It just happened, you know? It was really spontaneous. You Really Got Me was a great song, and it remains a great song. And it really had a great attitude for the time.”

Asked what drove him to do it, he quipped, “If I knew, I’d tell you! I came up with it one afternoon, and that sound came about. It was like a piece of magic.”

Jimi Hendrix is said to have told Davies that the riff he pummeled out of that sliced-open amp was a “landmark” moment in rock history. He paved the way for Tony Iommi to invent heavy metal proper five years later. However, there are other claimants to the genre's inception, too.