Bassist Pete Quaife, a co-founder of British group the Kinks, has died at age 66.

BBC News reported Friday that the musician had been undergoing kidney dialysis over the past decade, but could not confirm the exact cause of death. Reports say he died in Denmark on Thursday.

Quaife left the group in 1969. He could be heard on the band's early hits such as All Day, You Really Got Me, All of the Night and Dedicated Follower of Fashion.

The bassist said he left because he was unhappy and couldn't deal with the infighting between brothers, and band members, Ray and Dave Davies.

However, he still remained proud of his work with the band, especially its Village Green Preservation Society album.

"For me it represents the only real album made by the Kinks ... in which we all contributed something," he told Jukebox Magazine in 2006.British pop group the Kinks in 1965, left to right clockwise, Mick Avory, Pete Quaife, Dave Davies and singer Ray Davies. Quaife quit the band in 1969, unhappy with the bickering between the Davies brothers. (Keystone/Getty Images)

Quaife met the Davies brothers while in music class in school in Muswell Hill, England. The three were soon jamming and in 1961, they played their first gig at a school dance.

Soon, the band — known both as the Ray Davies Quartet and the Pete Quaife Quintet — was playing events around its town, and in 1963, with a new name, it was signed by Pyre Records.

You Really Got Me, the band's third single, blasted to the top of the charts in 1964 and the Kinks became part of the 1960s British Invasion.

'Felt like a session man'

Despite the success, Quaife says he never felt his band members respected him. "I felt like a session man most the time," he recalled in a 2005 interview with Rolling Stone. "[Ray] was a control freak."

He also loathed the constant bickering between the brothers: "Behind closed doors it was like the [World Wrestling Federation]."

After quitting, and being replaced by John Dalton, Quaife formed another band, Mapleoak, which never took off the way the Kinks did.

Mapleoak was a country rock band that included Canadian musicians. Quaife quit the band a year later and retired from music.

In the 1980s, he moved to Ontario and earned his living as a graphic artist, and later moved to Denmark.

He was diagnosed with renal failure in 1998.

The original Kinks members did reunite in a one-off concert in 1981 in Toronto and then again in 1990 when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.