Ray Davies
It’s difficult to believe that it’s over 4 decades since The Kinks released their first chart-topping single, the Ray Davies composition “You Really Got Me”. It marked the beginning of one of the most eventful careers in pop music history, and as the decades have ticked past it has become increasingly clear that Davies has earned his place among the elite handful of rock’s greatest songwriters, up there with Lennon & McCartney, Jagger & Richards and the Ramones.
But resting on his laurels are the furthest things from his mind. He’s currently feeling energised by a fresh wave of inspiration, and is laying plans for a variety of new projects – a stage musical to follow up 2008’s Come Dancing, an album of collaborations with other artists, and perhaps a return to his 1998 choral composition, Flatlands, which he never finished to his own satisfaction.
"I'm a writer, and I want to write more," Davies declared. "Being creative fires me up. I like to think that what I do with my song writing encourages other people to be creative, not to write songs that would please Simon Cowell.”
Now the curtain rises on his debut album for Decca, The Kinks Choral Collection, on which he has hand-picked a selection of songs from his compendious repertoire and arranged them for rock band and choir. And not just any old choir. Davies fans will be aware that, wherever else his career has taken him, he has always remained rooted in his native north London. Therefore the only logical choice for this Muswell Hillbilly boy’s new album was the Crouch End Festival Chorus.
"With a song like “Waterloo Sunset”, I feel as if the people I wrote it for are singing it, and that's what's interesting," he says. "I know some of the singers in the choir, though not all, but as a group I imagine them all living in north London, and they are my subject matter as well as the people singing it. There's some sort of symmetry there."
The disc was recorded locally too, with the sessions divided between Davies' own Konk studios in Crouch End and Air Lyndhurst in not-too-distant Hampstead.
"The choir was recorded in the big room at Air Lyndhurst, which everybody thought would be the best place," he explains, pulling up a chair in one of Konk’s control rooms. "Perhaps we could have been more adventurous and found a church, but then you have to bring in all your own equipment and microphones. Anyway Lyndhurst is a lovely-sounding room, for the choir at least."
Connoisseurs will relish the choice of material (though you don’t have to be a connoisseur to appreciate the disc’s timeless song writing and rich breadth of sound). The songs include several of Davies' finest road-tested classics, including “Days”, “Waterloo Sunset”, “You Really Got Me” and “All Day And All Of The Night”, and also explore some of the more fascinating tributaries of his career. “Working Man’s Café” was the title track of his 2007 solo album, a potent reminder that unlike the long list of yesterday’s acts making a comeback, Davies has never been away. “Victoria” and “Shangri-La” originally appeared on The Kinks' 1969 concept album Arthur, where Davies examined the battered, impoverished state of post-war Britain, and there's a suite of songs from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, Davies' homage to an idyllic and nostalgic England, originally released in 1968. Though not a bestseller at the time, Village Green is now regarded by many as Davies’ masterpiece.
The seed of the new album was planted when Davies was asked to perform at the BBC Electric Proms at the Roundhouse in 2007, around the time of the release of Working Man’s Cafe. He’d first met choirmaster David Temple when he conducted the 80-piece choir used in Davies’ “Flatlands” piece (a commission from the Norwich and Norfolk Festival). He bumped into Temple again in Highgate, where he was conducting the Crouch End Chorus in a local church, and hit upon the idea of using the Chorus for his Electric Proms appearance. This worked so well that they reunited for two performances at the Hampton Court Festival last summer, and then inevitably the discussion turned to capturing Davies and choir on disc.
“There was no agonizing over the choice of songs,” Davies reports, “though there were a few problems with scheduling everybody to be in the same place at the same time. But we went into the studio for three or four days last December and started getting some tracks down.”
Davies had his own conception of how each song would work with the choir, but Temple played a vital role in shaping and interpreting his wishes.
“My first brief to David and Steve Markwick, regarding the arranging, was ‘I don’t want this to be (a) a karaoke record or (b) a sing-along with backing vocals’. I wanted the arrangements to be ambitious and for the pieces to be interesting to sing, but I didn’t want it to sound like Messiaen or something like that, which wouldn’t lend itself to my style of music. Something David taught me very early on was that a choir sounds great when it’s a choir, and there’s a certain kind of ambience you have to retain. Otherwise it’ll just sound like a doowop group.”
The finished tracks display an ingenious palette of choral techniques, from the tricky tempo changes and contrasting parts of “Shangri-La” to the minimalist, Steve Reich-like “ah-ah-ah” sounds in “You Really Got Me”. One of the most instantly striking efforts is the acapella treatment of “See My Friends”. The Kinks’ original recording was a Top 10 hit in 1965, and was hailed as being one of the first pop records to use an Indian raga, perhaps inspiring George Harrison’s Indian-influenced pieces “Love You To” and “Within You Without You”. Here, the song is recast as a gospel hymn, with the choir’s intense, ethereal performance hugely magnifying the impact of Davies’ life-after-death lyrics.
“I started ‘See My Friends’ with a band, but I arranged it after we finished recording it,” he recalls. “In other words, I cut it up in the studio after it was recorded. It sounds brilliant! I’m really pleased with it, because it’s an acapella version.”
Elsewhere, Davies uses a conventional backing band – bass, drums, two keyboards and two guitars, with himself playing one of the guitars – plus the choir. The challenge was to ensure that the qualities of both were given full value without the electric band overshadowing the non-amplified singers, though a tune like “Celluloid Heroes” lends itself so naturally to the choral treatment that it’s hard to imagine it was ever planned any other way.
“It was tricky to combine conventional rock instruments with very sensitive choral sounds, and making them sound unified, but I hope it works,” Davies reflects. “The whole thing with music of this sort is it’s meant to have very quiet moments and really loud moments. We use that to really good effect on ‘All Day And All Of The Night’, and particularly ‘You Really Got Me’ because I wanted the choir to be ambitious and work harder on that.”
The latter song was originally based on a brutally simple guitar riff. In this new version, the riff remains, but the Chorus add a wealth of vocal counterpoints and rhythmic shifts.
“It could have been a no-brainer,” adds Davies, “but it’s actually turned out to be quite complex.”
The selection of six songs from the Village Green album is testament to how highly he regards that particular album, though he admits that some of the songs are not well known.
“One of the things David Temple is good at is explaining the background of a piece of music to the choir,” he notes approvingly. “I saw him doing this when he was rehearsing an Elgar piece a year or so ago, and he did a similar thing here. He explained what inspired the Village Green songs, so even if people weren’t familiar with the song he was good at making them understand what they were singing about. People can’t just sing the notes; they’ve got to be connected with the material.”
Whether you own the entire Kinks catalogue on vinyl or you’re a newcomer to Davies-world, there’s plenty to explore and admire in the Village Green songs. “Do You Remember Walter?” is a poignant memoir of a vanished childhood world, set to a dreamy lilting rhythm and tinted with Parisian-sounding accordion. In “Village Green”, the Chorus enacts the role of the parish choir in the “church with the steeple down by the village green”, as Davies sings with touching artlessness. Brisker and brighter is “Johnny Thunder”, which its author describes as “one of the songs I’m most pleased with. I haven’t tried to achieve anything great with the choir or the band, it just works really well together. Sometimes simplicity is good.”
Taken as a whole, The Kinks Collection is a compelling survey of the work of a great British songwriter, while casting fresh and unexpected light on some of his key compositions.
“I think these songs fit together really well as a record,” Davies says. “I couldn’t re-record anything unless I could bring something new to it, and I think I certainly have.”
But resting on his laurels are the furthest things from his mind. He’s currently feeling energised by a fresh wave of inspiration, and is laying plans for a variety of new projects – a stage musical to follow up 2008’s Come Dancing, an album of collaborations with other artists, and perhaps a return to his 1998 choral composition, Flatlands, which he never finished to his own satisfaction.
"I'm a writer, and I want to write more," Davies declared. "Being creative fires me up. I like to think that what I do with my song writing encourages other people to be creative, not to write songs that would please Simon Cowell.”
Now the curtain rises on his debut album for Decca, The Kinks Choral Collection, on which he has hand-picked a selection of songs from his compendious repertoire and arranged them for rock band and choir. And not just any old choir. Davies fans will be aware that, wherever else his career has taken him, he has always remained rooted in his native north London. Therefore the only logical choice for this Muswell Hillbilly boy’s new album was the Crouch End Festival Chorus.
"With a song like “Waterloo Sunset”, I feel as if the people I wrote it for are singing it, and that's what's interesting," he says. "I know some of the singers in the choir, though not all, but as a group I imagine them all living in north London, and they are my subject matter as well as the people singing it. There's some sort of symmetry there."
The disc was recorded locally too, with the sessions divided between Davies' own Konk studios in Crouch End and Air Lyndhurst in not-too-distant Hampstead.
"The choir was recorded in the big room at Air Lyndhurst, which everybody thought would be the best place," he explains, pulling up a chair in one of Konk’s control rooms. "Perhaps we could have been more adventurous and found a church, but then you have to bring in all your own equipment and microphones. Anyway Lyndhurst is a lovely-sounding room, for the choir at least."
Connoisseurs will relish the choice of material (though you don’t have to be a connoisseur to appreciate the disc’s timeless song writing and rich breadth of sound). The songs include several of Davies' finest road-tested classics, including “Days”, “Waterloo Sunset”, “You Really Got Me” and “All Day And All Of The Night”, and also explore some of the more fascinating tributaries of his career. “Working Man’s Café” was the title track of his 2007 solo album, a potent reminder that unlike the long list of yesterday’s acts making a comeback, Davies has never been away. “Victoria” and “Shangri-La” originally appeared on The Kinks' 1969 concept album Arthur, where Davies examined the battered, impoverished state of post-war Britain, and there's a suite of songs from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, Davies' homage to an idyllic and nostalgic England, originally released in 1968. Though not a bestseller at the time, Village Green is now regarded by many as Davies’ masterpiece.
The seed of the new album was planted when Davies was asked to perform at the BBC Electric Proms at the Roundhouse in 2007, around the time of the release of Working Man’s Cafe. He’d first met choirmaster David Temple when he conducted the 80-piece choir used in Davies’ “Flatlands” piece (a commission from the Norwich and Norfolk Festival). He bumped into Temple again in Highgate, where he was conducting the Crouch End Chorus in a local church, and hit upon the idea of using the Chorus for his Electric Proms appearance. This worked so well that they reunited for two performances at the Hampton Court Festival last summer, and then inevitably the discussion turned to capturing Davies and choir on disc.
“There was no agonizing over the choice of songs,” Davies reports, “though there were a few problems with scheduling everybody to be in the same place at the same time. But we went into the studio for three or four days last December and started getting some tracks down.”
Davies had his own conception of how each song would work with the choir, but Temple played a vital role in shaping and interpreting his wishes.
“My first brief to David and Steve Markwick, regarding the arranging, was ‘I don’t want this to be (a) a karaoke record or (b) a sing-along with backing vocals’. I wanted the arrangements to be ambitious and for the pieces to be interesting to sing, but I didn’t want it to sound like Messiaen or something like that, which wouldn’t lend itself to my style of music. Something David taught me very early on was that a choir sounds great when it’s a choir, and there’s a certain kind of ambience you have to retain. Otherwise it’ll just sound like a doowop group.”
The finished tracks display an ingenious palette of choral techniques, from the tricky tempo changes and contrasting parts of “Shangri-La” to the minimalist, Steve Reich-like “ah-ah-ah” sounds in “You Really Got Me”. One of the most instantly striking efforts is the acapella treatment of “See My Friends”. The Kinks’ original recording was a Top 10 hit in 1965, and was hailed as being one of the first pop records to use an Indian raga, perhaps inspiring George Harrison’s Indian-influenced pieces “Love You To” and “Within You Without You”. Here, the song is recast as a gospel hymn, with the choir’s intense, ethereal performance hugely magnifying the impact of Davies’ life-after-death lyrics.
“I started ‘See My Friends’ with a band, but I arranged it after we finished recording it,” he recalls. “In other words, I cut it up in the studio after it was recorded. It sounds brilliant! I’m really pleased with it, because it’s an acapella version.”
Elsewhere, Davies uses a conventional backing band – bass, drums, two keyboards and two guitars, with himself playing one of the guitars – plus the choir. The challenge was to ensure that the qualities of both were given full value without the electric band overshadowing the non-amplified singers, though a tune like “Celluloid Heroes” lends itself so naturally to the choral treatment that it’s hard to imagine it was ever planned any other way.
“It was tricky to combine conventional rock instruments with very sensitive choral sounds, and making them sound unified, but I hope it works,” Davies reflects. “The whole thing with music of this sort is it’s meant to have very quiet moments and really loud moments. We use that to really good effect on ‘All Day And All Of The Night’, and particularly ‘You Really Got Me’ because I wanted the choir to be ambitious and work harder on that.”
The latter song was originally based on a brutally simple guitar riff. In this new version, the riff remains, but the Chorus add a wealth of vocal counterpoints and rhythmic shifts.
“It could have been a no-brainer,” adds Davies, “but it’s actually turned out to be quite complex.”
The selection of six songs from the Village Green album is testament to how highly he regards that particular album, though he admits that some of the songs are not well known.
“One of the things David Temple is good at is explaining the background of a piece of music to the choir,” he notes approvingly. “I saw him doing this when he was rehearsing an Elgar piece a year or so ago, and he did a similar thing here. He explained what inspired the Village Green songs, so even if people weren’t familiar with the song he was good at making them understand what they were singing about. People can’t just sing the notes; they’ve got to be connected with the material.”
Whether you own the entire Kinks catalogue on vinyl or you’re a newcomer to Davies-world, there’s plenty to explore and admire in the Village Green songs. “Do You Remember Walter?” is a poignant memoir of a vanished childhood world, set to a dreamy lilting rhythm and tinted with Parisian-sounding accordion. In “Village Green”, the Chorus enacts the role of the parish choir in the “church with the steeple down by the village green”, as Davies sings with touching artlessness. Brisker and brighter is “Johnny Thunder”, which its author describes as “one of the songs I’m most pleased with. I haven’t tried to achieve anything great with the choir or the band, it just works really well together. Sometimes simplicity is good.”
Taken as a whole, The Kinks Collection is a compelling survey of the work of a great British songwriter, while casting fresh and unexpected light on some of his key compositions.
“I think these songs fit together really well as a record,” Davies says. “I couldn’t re-record anything unless I could bring something new to it, and I think I certainly have.”
