Ray found life without the band far harder to handle. In his new book Americana, he presents himself as creatively lost and traumatised without them. Ray tells me his third marriage “evaporated” in 1998. By 2004, he was trying to make a new start in New Orleans; but the shooting evidently put paid to that. “I was, I think, in the second week out of hospital,” Ray remembers. “Dave phoned me up. He was playing the Hard Rock Café in Florida. I said, ‘You can get a flight, it’s only 45 minutes away.’ He said, ‘Aww, I don’t wanna go, you’ll be OK.’”

“Yeah, I called him up,” Dave remembers. “We were going to Orlando to do a show, and I called him in New Orleans in the hospital, and I felt terrible for him. And he asked if I was going to come down there, and I said I couldn’t, because I’m trying to fucking make a living. Is that callous of me? And then I’m thinking of the emotional drain of it. I’ve supported his ideas and his music, and our music, all my life. And there comes a point where you think, I can’t fucking do it any more. The survival instinct kicks in.”

Five months later, Dave suffered a stroke. After a spell in hospital, he optimistically chose to convalesce at his brother’s. Surprisingly, Ray admits now he was comforted by his brother’s presence under his roof. “I’m an insomniac, but when Dave and his girlfriend stayed with me, I felt I could sleep properly, because I love sleeping with a relative in the house,” Ray says wistfully. “It was the way I was brought up. But his girlfriend had this pet rabbit she insisted on keeping in the house. I bought her a rabbit hutch and everything. That’s what broke us up.”

“He was in a mess and I was in a mess,” Dave acknowledges today. “I don’t think we helped each other by spending that time together. After about three weeks, he was saying, ‘I can’t ever work with you again.’ He wanted me to jump right in and support him with mixing some old tracks, and I just did not have the emotional energy to deal with him.”

“I can’t help but equate this in cinematic terms,” says Ray, amused in retrospect at the thought of the brothers still battling when they could barely move. “There’s a movie with two gunfighters, Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott [Ride The High Country], and they’re both dying and they’re still trying to kill one another. It’s a bit like that. It never stops. And Dave will like this equation. It’s like the character in Ben-Hur, when Ben-Hur beats Messala in the chariot race. I think Messala’s last words that he delivered on this earth were: ‘It goes on. It goes on, Judah!’ Hatred even after death. It gets a bit like that with us.”

“I had to get out,” says Dave, who shudders at the memory. “I had to get out somewhere where I could see trees and animals, and hear lovely music. To heal myself. Me moving to Devon acted as a buffer to having to deal with him, because he’s impossible. I didn’t really speak to him about anything significant after that for quite a few years.”

Nine, in fact: essentially, the period of Ray’s solo career to date – Other People’s Lives (2006) and Working Man’s Café (2007), and a brace of Kinks reworkings, The Kinks Choral Collection (2009) and See My Friends (2010), a Top 20 album with collaborators including Springsteen, Metallica and Mumford & Sons. All the while, Dave stayed in Devon. “It’s a wonderful place to live and be yourself,” he explains. Dave regained his guitar abilities just a few years after the stroke and released two albums, 2007’s Fractured Mindz, and Two Worlds (2010), an ambient piece with his son Russell recorded under the name The Aschere Project. But it took a lot longer to find his confidence. Concerts were announced, then abruptly cancelled as Dave’s blood pressure rocketed and his doctor advised him against playing live. He only met Ray at family events and business meetings. “When I made See My Friends, I may have reached out on email for him to collaborate,” Ray says of one failed attempt to offer an olive branch to his brother. “I think he said he wasn’t sharp enough, at that point.”