Ray Davies Reinterprets the Kinks on 'Choral Collection'

There were a couple of guiding factors when Ray Davies decided to re-cast several Kinks pop gems for 'The Kinks Choral Collection.' For one thing, he didn't want to rehash the iconic British band's hits just for the sake of it. "The first rule was not to try and rerecord the Kinks' material. I wanted to interpret the songs in a new way," Davies tells Spinner. "The challenge was not to make it karaoke," he adds with a giggle.

On the other hand, as the singer re-imagined songs such as 'Waterloo Sunset' and 'Victoria' using a 65-piece choir with his backing band, there was the danger for the songs to become overblown into pseudo classical works. "I wanted the band. I wanted it to rock and have elements of the originals," he says. "Like, 'All Day and All of the Night,' you can't do that without a back beat. But I wanted to incorporate other elements, too. There are some tracks, like 'See My Friends,' where I eliminated the band and just did it a cappella with the choir. That works to a degree. It's about incorporating it and not making it pretentious, not pretending to do classical music."

The idea for the choral setting follows on from a commissioned piece Davies did 10 years ago for an arts festival in Norwich, where he used a symphony orchestra and a 100-piece choir. Then, two years ago, he was asked to perform at the BBC's Electric Proms in London. "I thought it would be nice to do some Kinks songs and incorporate a choir. We did about five or six songs. It was the big hit of the season there. Then a record company came along and asked me to record it. That's it. Simple."

'The Kinks Choral Collection' will be released Nov. 10 by Decca Records.