Incredibly Huge News!
No, no, not the silly North Korean nuclear test….Ray Davies has a new solo album coming out next month!
The Kinks Choral Collection, recorded together with the Crouch End Festival Chorus, consists of a number of Kinks’ Klassics rerecorded with full choir backing. The CD will be out on Decca Records in the UK in June. The American release is scheduled for September. The vital details, plus a promotional video, are available on Ray’s website.
The album grows out of Ray’s 2007 joint appearance with the choir on the BBC Electric Proms festival. That concert was broadcast as an amazing television special, and now they’ve gone back into the studio to do things properly. The highlight of the 2007 concert was the astonishing take on “Shangri-la,” the brilliant cornerstone song of the 1969 album, Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.
Here are Ray and the choir performing the song in that 2007 concert. As an added bonus, at 4:41 you can see my friend Olga, the world’s #1 Kinks fan (I’m #762). Enjoy –
