Here is some more good news: The Kinks are getting this reunion thing into full swing, starting with a new album. Dave Davies is doing better after his stroke, and the band’s taking it nice and slow. Quoth Ray Davies: “It depends if there’s good music. We want good new music. I’d like to do it as a more collaborative thing than we used to do.” Hmm. Cool, I guess. I admire the pragmatism, but let’s stick to your 60s/early 70s definition of “good music” because the rest of the Kinks’ oeuvre? Problematic. And, no, I will not seriously entertain any arguments about the 80s output being overlooked or misunderstood. This is the band that wrote “Big Sky” and “Waterloo Sunset” and “I Need You”. They could have done so much better.

Regardless, a new Kinks album and a tour? I’ll bite.

At the bottom of this BBC article (I’m all kissy-face with them today!), Ray Davies talks about a collaborative album wherein he will pair up, Duets-style, with such luminaries as Snow Patrol (the whole band?), and the guy from Razorlight, which is exciting news to just about nobody who isn’t located in the UK. He does say he wants to recruit Chuck Berry:

I’ve never met the man but he was one of my heroes as a lyricist,” he said. We’ll see how it works out – a mixture of Snow Patrol and Chuck Berry. It should be an interesting record.”

More of that, please! Let’s keep the guys from the Razorlights of the world out of it.

The Kinks start work on comeback [BBC]