The BBC banned it, and not for the reason anyone assumes. Australian stations cut a line out of it with an edit so crude the record sounds like it skips. Ray Davies flew 6,000 miles to fix a problem that had nothing to do with any of that.
Here is what “Lola” is about, where the story came from, and which two words nearly cost the band their comeback.
The Short Answer
A young man meets someone in a Soho bar, is attracted to her, and works out during the night that she was not born a woman. He decides he does not mind. Ray Davies wrote it, and when a reporter pressed him in 1970 he said it did not matter what sex Lola was and that he thought she was all right.
The Story Behind the Song
Davies wrote it in April 1970, the first song he finished after taking time out to act in a television film. He has said he struggled with the opening and that the rest arrived easily, and that he knew it would work when he heard his one-year-old daughter singing the chorus around the house.
It was recorded at Morgan Studios in London across April and May, with four or five attempts in different keys before the band settled. John Gosling, who had just auditioned as the band’s pianist, played on it. Pye released the single in the UK on June 12, 1970, with Reprise following in the United States on June 28.
The band had been drifting commercially for two years. Davies has said openly that he was trying to write a hit. The album track “Powerman” had been considered for the single first.
Where did the story come from?
Davies has given a version in which he was asked to dance in a club by a woman he found striking, declined, and watched her leave in a cab with the band’s manager. He has described it as based on a real experience, with the caveat that not every word is true.
Elsewhere he has told it as a night in Paris in which the manager, Robert Wace, spent hours dancing with someone before Davies pointed out the stubble, by which point Wace was too drunk to care. Drummer Mick Avory has offered a third account involving clubs in West London that the band was taken to by an acquaintance.
Davies has also said he did research with drag performers while writing, and has denied the persistent story that the song came from a date with Candy Darling, saying the two had dinner and that he knew she was transgender the whole time.
Why did the BBC ban it?
Product placement. The original recording named Coca-Cola, and BBC Radio had a standing policy against brand names on air. The subject matter was not the objection.
The band was touring America when the news reached them, and the master tapes were in London. Davies flew back after a show in Minnesota, could not get a take he was happy with, returned to the States for a date in Chicago, then flew to London again on June 3, 1970 and finally recorded the replacement. The 6,000-mile round trip produced two words: cherry cola.
He had to do the same thing again months later, when censors decided a word in the follow-up single “Apeman” sounded too much like something else.
Was it banned anywhere else?
Australia, in November 1970, where stations objected to the subject matter itself. Some later put it back on air after removing the closing line with an edit crude enough to sound like a fault in the pressing. Some American stations faded the record before the end for the same reason.
The irony is that the song is not remotely hostile. It is affectionate, and its narrator is the one who ends up confused rather than Lola.
What makes the guitar sound like that?
Two instruments at once. Davies has said he went into a shop on Shaftesbury Avenue wanting a Martin for the record and left with a 1938 Dobro resonator as well, for 150 pounds. He layered the two and compressed them heavily, and that combination is the clanging figure everyone recognizes from the first bar.
His brother Dave has said the music came from him and that Ray added words to it afterward, describing the process as more collaborative than the credits suggest.
How successful was it?
Number two in the UK, number nine on the Billboard Hot 100, and number one in Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and South Africa. Top five across most of western Europe.
The commercial effect on the band was enormous. The success let them sign a new deal with RCA, build their own London studio and take control of their own affairs. Dave Davies said in 1970 that without it the band would have drifted apart within a couple of years.
Why does it still matter?
Because of what it does not do. A 1970 pop single about a man attracted to a trans woman had every option available to it, and it took the one nobody expected: the narrator considers the situation, decides it is fine, and the song ends cheerfully.
Critics noticed at the time. Writing in Creem, Dave Marsh called it the first significantly blatant record of its kind. Rolling Stone has kept it in its list of the greatest songs ever recorded, placing it 386th in the 2021 revision.
What happened to Lola?
She turns up again. The character reappears in the lyrics of the band’s 1981 single “Destroyer,” which recycles the riff from “All Day and All of the Night” and treats the earlier song as history the narrator lived through.
Records from this era survive on choruses far more than on titles, so when you have the tune and none of the details, our song lyrics search closes the gap.