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SXSW preview: Ray Davies
Ray Davies, former leader of the The Kinks and author of a staggering number of rock anthems, admits even he didn’t like the idea at first.
“I always said one thing I never wanted to do was rerecord those songs like so many oldies artists, because I think they stand up as they were and don’t need to be done that way again,” Davies said by phone recently. “We tried it out first for a BBC concert with the choir and it was a huge success, so the record company said it’d be good to do a whole album that way. At first I didn’t want to but I saw a chance to kind of reinterpret them in a new way and that seemed interesting, so I gave it a shot.”
The reinterpretation Davies speaks of is the material he composed for “The Kinks Choral Collection,” which finds 15 Kinks tracks - “Waterloo Sunset,” “Picture Book” and “See My Friends” among them - rewritten in the tradition of Andrew Loog Oldham’s symphonic reworking of classic songs from The Rolling Stones.
Davies won’t have a full choir with him when he visits Austin this week for a South By Southwest appearance at La Zona Rosa, playing instead with another guitarist until the end of the show when the pop-rock band The 88 will join him for a run through a handful of Kinks songs as they were originally recorded.
“With this your I can do completely different shows, with another guitar player, sometimes with a drummer in as well and every performance brings out new sides to these songs I thought I knew everything about,” Davies said. “Working in that collaborative way brings about a whole new energy, and that’s been one of the best things about doing this.”
Recordings of shows from the tour, especially those with a full choir, give off a loose and often joyous feeling that Davies said translates to whatever configurations wind up on stage.
“The concerts wind up becoming kind of community events by the end, and we’ve got people calling out songs to us during the shows because they want to hear what we’ve done to them,” Davies said. “And then at the end when we bring out The 88 for a full band, they’re so dedicated to the songs and that material sounds amazing with them playing it.”
As excited as Davies is about the choral album, he said there’s not another one in the works and is instead already at work on an album of collaborations that was sparked in part by “Postcard From London,” his recent duet with Chrissie Hynde. Other artists in the loop for that album include Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen and (no kidding) Metallica.
“We just reached out to as many people as we could that there was some sort of relationship with. The song with Chrissie went so well, I wanted to find as many interesting partners to work with as I could.”
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