Kinks brothers reunite — is this a sign?

So are the Kinks back together or did the Davies brothers, hanging out before a gig, bash their way through a song together because, well, what the heck, maybe it’d be fun?

Poor guys. For years, nearly any interview they do has to inevitably wind up to the big R question. Have you talked to Ray? Is Dave willing to play with the drummer? A tour? A new record? A film?

Then here comes Ray, in his pea coat and clutching a bottle of water, showing up on Friday night at younger brother Dave’s show at Islington Assembly Hall in London and proceeding to sing the song that may have invented punk rock, 1964’s You Really Got Me.

Kinks fans naturally went nuts.

Sitting in the States, watching the performance on YouTube, I couldn’t figure out what to think.

Part of me wishes the guys could just get on with it. If Mike Love and Brian Wilson can share a stage, if the Eagles, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the Police ... you get the point. Is it really that hard to play a short tour together, give the people what they want, and then you can spend the next eight years walking to the store, in peace, when you need a quart of milk?

I am biased, of course, having spent a couple of years making an independent documentary, Do It Again, driven by the foolish notion I might be able to drive the Davies brothers to get back together. In the end, I seemed to annoy Ray, who decided, after a backstage conversation and several proposals, to pretend we’d never met. He blocked our film from a commercial release. (It eventually had a run on public television.)

Dave broke my heart during an interview we filmed one afternoon in England.

“I think Ray was probably happy,” he told me in an interview near the end of the documentary, “for a whole three years in his life, and that was from the age of zero to three, when I wasn’t there, and I think I kind of rained on his parade a bit ... I think sadly, it never went away.”

So now they’ve done a song together on stage, the first Davies brother duet since a final Kinks gig in 1996. The performance will not make things easier. There will surely be more discussions, more debates and more hope.

Whatever the boys decide to do, I’m not going to get too excited. They don’t owe any of us anything. And anytime I want to argue otherwise, I simply walk over to my Dual 1219, place side one of Something Else on the platter and wait for David Watts to kick in.