ONE of the most successful and influential songwriters to emerge amid the incense and flowery shirts of the 1960s was Ray Davies.

With his band The Kinks, Davies and his brother Dave, made some of the influential albums of all time, whose touch still reaches artists today.

Bands such as Blur took Kinks' songs and riffs throughout the 1990s and a Kinks cover crops up in the charts every now and again.

The brothers notoriously fell out early on but the Kinks were a going concern into the 1980s and even re-formed for a performance at the Glastonbury Festival in the late 1990s.

But by then (the 80s) The Kinks were producing dire, almost heavy metal like rock and played tortured versions of old classics in the same style. It is the band's material from the 1960s, especially their first eight albums, which people remember and new fans find every day.

The Davies' were from a large impoverished family, a fact which heavily influenced their lyrical occupation with the fading aristocracy of the time.

The band dressed themselves in pseudo regal garb with heavy psychedelic overtones and sang ironic ditties bemoaning the loss of the British Empire, while songs like Walter featured damning indictments of a social system which kept men and women in grey, humdrum lives.

Ray Davies' autobiography X-Ray tells The Kinks story well, so well in fact the singer-guitarist penned a live show around the book called Storyteller, and it is from that his current live performance is drawn, plus songs from a forthcoming solo album.

Like a host of 60s and 70s stars, Davies can't stand his old band, preferring instead a backing band of session musicians who play rhythm for his performances of classic Kinks' songs.

Ray Davies plays the Colston Hall, Bristol, on October 8 at 7.30pm. Tickets are £17, £15 from 0117 922 3686. For more information surf to www.raydavies.com