Saturday was Ray Davies‘ 70th birthday, and I’m very sorry for not even sending my congrats on air. But I always tend to forget about birthdays. Someone wrote this in the LA Times, and it might give you some ideas about your contribution to a lazy afternoon. „All the Kinks did, with Davies in command as frontman, predominant songwriter, producer and arranger, was create the warmest, funniest, most varied and keenly intelligent body of work in the rock canon. Sort of. (…) All Ray Davies wanted to do was follow where his endlessly idiosyncratic imagination could take him, while the Kinks provided the broad palette of styles, colors and rocking intensities he needed to render musical pictures scaled to life’s daily realities. (…) His characters are never heroic. They have everyday frustrations and everyday enjoyments. Multiple Kinks songs herald and chuckle over the quiet pleasures of picnics and tea time. When Davies delves into his own psyche, a listener hears him coping with loneliness and loss and disconnection from family and friends, but also struggling to find enough heart and encouragement to snap out of a funk and move forward. (…) It’s mainly by mood, method and implication, rather than by declaration and exhortation, that Kinks fans have learned from their non-transcendent hero that our best chances lie in humor and a simple refusal to give in to the temptation of just giving up. No one has written more songs about how hard it can be simply to get out of bed and face another day, but Davies’ characters almost always find a way to do it.“ (Mike Boehm)