It can't be easy being a music legend. Ray Davies admits he finds the logistics of his career tedious and time-consuming.

"If you're going to ask me what has changed since I first started out in this business, it's the incredible amount of admin I have to do," he says. "So many emails, but less real dialogue less communication!"

Formerly The Kinks' lead singer and rhythm guitarist, and the man behind Sixties classics like Waterloo Sunset, Lola, You Really Got Me and Dedicated Follower Of Fashion among others, Ray is currently promoting his first solo studio album, Other People's Lives.

Scheduled to be released early next year, it is a widely-anticipated record from an artist with more than four decades of prolific songwriting behind him.

At the peak of his career in Swinging London, life was a blur. Now at least there is some semblance of control.

"It's all an illusion of course," Rays says. "You've still got people telling you what to do. I'm supposed to be this person who knows eveything but I'm still innocent. In fact I know less."

"But back then we didn't know where we were from one day to the next," Ray admits.

"Once when I was living in a bedsit with my wife at the time and we had a little baby, a car arrived to pick me up. I went out with my day bag and they told me I was going to America for three weeks. So I had to go back inside and grab a few more clothes.

"It was like that all the time. I didn't know what was happening. People turned up in cars and took you away."

This three week tour of America was the last The Kinks were to see of the country for some time, however. Their antics famously resulted in them getting a five-year ban from entering the country it was 1969 by the time they were allowed back in.

"It was mostly the union people getting worked up about the British Invasion," says Ray.

"We were going over there making lots of money and supposedly taking work away from Americans.

"We were cheeky, North London guys, getting up peoples' noses, falling out with booking agents, fighting over billing.

"It was innocent bravado really. My brother Dave was 17. It was youthful exuberance and stupidity."

The Kinks' sense of humour may have got them into trouble but it gave their music its comical edge.

"I felt very strongly about things but there's too much seriousness in the world so I try to write with humour," says Ray.

"It's still a struggle to write but it's the new stuff that keeps me going.

"This album has been an epic. It took me three years to make. It took me a year to recover after I was shot in New Orleans so that put the album back a year."

But Ray isn't complaining.

"It's been a phenomenal life. I'm quite proud of it in my own quiet way."

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