AT their peak in the 1960s, the Kinks were banned from entering the United States for nearly five years because of their riotous behaviour.

Forty years later, American television advertisers are paying the veteran rockers £6m to use their songs to sell washing powder, computers and pills. It is the biggest such deal for a British band.

Ray Davies, their songwriter, who once tried to kill himself while dressed as a clown, is said to be “truly surprised” by their commercial success.

The Kinks are following a trail blazed by the Rolling Stones when they charged Microsoft £2.3m to use Start Me Up in the launch of the Windows 95 system.

Many veteran British rockers have since followed the Stones’ example, from Led Zeppelin, who leased the thunderous Rock & Roll to Cadillac, to the Cure, whose more delicate Pictures of You was used by Hewlett-Packard to promote digital photography.

These deals were for a single song, however. Sanctuary, the Kinks’ US music publisher, has found an unexpectedly large market for songs written over 30 years ago by Davies, who at 61 is more popular than ever in America.

All Day and All of the Night will be used by Procter & Gamble to boost sales of Tide detergent. I’m Not Like Everybody Else and Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy will feature in campaigns to promote, respectively, IBM computers and medicines sold by Abbott Laboratories. Lola, a song about a Soho transsexual, will promote La La, a company which allows subscribers to swap CDs by post.

The Kinks, who are credited with inventing the “guitar power chord” on You Really Got Me in 1964, were not always so popular. They were denied entry visas to America from 1965 to 1969 after Danish reports alleged that Ray Davies’s brother Dave had incited a crowd to tear apart a Copenhagen ballroom.

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