John Gosling, keyboard player who joined the Kinks as they made it big in America – obituary

John Gosling, the musician, who has died aged 75, spent the 1970s as the Kinks’ keyboard player, adding a new dimension to the guitar-based sound that had been the backbone of their 1960s hits; he deftly augmented the eccentric visions of the leader and main songwriter Ray Davies, and was central to the band establishing a new fanbase in the US.

John Gosling was born in Paignton, Devon, on February 6 1948. His first instrument was a harmonium, a Christmas present: “I spent the entire holiday playing carols and making up tunes,” he recalled. “I then dismantled it to see how it worked and never managed to reassemble it.”

He formed his first band, the Challengers, with a friend after they heard the Kinks perform Long Tall Sally on the BBC radio show Saturday Club. He and his bandmates made their own instruments, and he recalled travelling to rehearsals at a local school on a motorbike with his bass and amp in a sidecar.

He went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music and was appointed organist of St Andrew’s church in Stoke Newington. At the same time he had a band, Hard Rain, which played blues songs and, as the band’s name suggests, Bob Dylan covers – as well as contributing to his version of the Magnificat which also incorporated church organ and choir.

Then in 1970 he was invited to contribute keyboards to a song the Kinks were working on that recounted an assignation with a transwoman (not first-hand experience, Ray Davies insisted) and was inspired by the anything-goes culture of Sixties Soho.

He immediately felt at home – “Dave [Davies] handed me a beer from a crate in the middle of the room when I walked in and there was no starry behaviour” – and within a few weeks Gosling was performing Lola on Top of the Pops. A few months later he was back again, this time in a gorilla suit, miming at the piano to Apeman.

His first album with the band was Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, a satire on the pop industry, released in November 1970 and met with universal acclaim, but his own favourite of the 10 albums he made was Muswell Hillbillies (1971), an extended paean to the working-class of the north London area where the Davies brothers had grown up.

For the first couple of years recording sessions were “creative and fun”, he recalled. “Ray always had an image of the finished song in his head, and would convey to me the idea of the keyboard style he was after, either by playing riffs or indicating ‘classical’, ‘bar-room’ or ‘Jerry Lee’.”

But things changed, he said, when the band opened their own studio, Konk, in Hornsey, down the road from Muswell Hill, giving them unlimited recording time  –  which in pop and rock music can be a distinctly mixed blessing. “Ray rarely seemed happy with anything,” Gosling recalled. “We took forever over every track until we eventually ran out of ideas.”

Similarly, life on the road, with several successful and riotous tours of America, was, at first, enjoyable– “until it became obvious that some of us weren’t enjoying it much at all”. The Kinks were a legendarily fractious outfit, and though Gosling initially got on well with his colleagues – with his flowing locks they nicknamed him John the Baptist – he found the constant disputes wearing, and in 1978, after making the Misfits album, he and bassist Andy Pyle departed.

The pair formed a shortlived band, Network, then Gosling went on to teach music and open a music shop in Berkhamsted. In 1994, he formed the band Kast Off Kinks with former colleagues Mick Avory, Jim Rodford and John Dalton, playing with them until retiring in 2008.

John Gosling was married to Theresa, who survives him.

John Gosling, born February 6 1948, died August 4 2023