The Kinks Choral Collection

It’s got an album cover by William Blake and features close harmony singing by middle-aged English people over the quintessentially English tunes of former Kink Ray Davies. It should be a perfect combination – a picnic basket of eccentric Englishness. Instead it sounds like something that was thrown together at an “ideas meeting” by an A&R man who used to work for Saatchi and Saatchi, and rushed through over a Saturday morning while croaky old Ray was still asleep.
There’s just not much thought put into the merging of these two musical worlds – one is just strewn carelessly on top of the other. ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Days’, ‘All Day And All Of The Night’, are all classics, but slapping a choir over some cheesy session musicians does not an iconoclastic new sound make. For fans of The Kinks it’s like calling around to a wise, scuzzy old hippy friend only to find him answering the door smoking a pipe, wearing a smoking jacket, and speaking like the Queen.