The Kinks Choral Collection Ray Davies

Choral Wallpaper...
The Kinks Choral Collection
Ray Davies & The Crouch End Festival Chorus
Decca

Following up on their first collaboration at 2007‘s Electric Proms, Davies and the 65-strong Crouch End Festival Chorus have gotten together once again to record a cross section of some of The Kinks most celebrated and enduringly popular songs.

Revisiting one’s back catalogue to give it a different gloss is fine in theory. In practice however, whilst Davies and his backing band are on top form, the addition of the chorus brings very little to the table.

Whilst many a choral score is capable of bringing widescreen vistas into the pokiest of material, the arrangements by David Temple, Steve Marwick and Davies himself, seem myopic and lacking ambition.

Never have so many been given so little to do. Cast very much in SingalongaRay mode, they are largely reduced to oohing and ahhing in a way that is as obvious as it is dull.

The Kinks’ 1968 album, The Village Green Preservation Society, has six tracks welded into the "Village Green Medley" and whilst the tunes themselves remain some of Davies’ best work, the choral additions drag rather than lift.

This is especially true of the rockier numbers. The famously graphic intensity of "All Day And All Of The Night" is neutered by the chorus who reduce demotic urgency of the original into a polite request.

Occasionally it works out nicely: "Days" is re-cast in an agreeably ethereal light and an a cappella "See My Friends" has a chilled spectral edge. But as Davies observed in "Celluloid Heroes," “Success walks with hand in hand with failure.”

This review first appeared here.