WAY Down went all the way up to number one on August 30 1977, a posthumous spike after the death of The King was announced on August 16. It camped there for five weeks and Elvis has remained on the throne – his last day’s resting place at Gracelands – ever since.

The albums have continued to pile up, still taking care of business whether marking anniversaries or subjecting the ghost of Presley’s voice to the lush stylings of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on If I Can Dream at the behest of his widow Priscilla. The tribute acts have piled up too, the Elvish always matching the latterday girth, sideburns and rhinestone glitter of the Viva Las Vegas days, never his sleek peak.

It was those Seventies' days, the weighed-down, peanut-buttered, bloated concert years that kept Elvis out of the studio and away from Gracelands, until RCA’s craving for new recordings led to the decision in 1976 to take the company’s mobile recording facility to Elvis’s “den”, otherwise known as The Jungle Room, on account of its garish décor.

From the Jungle emerged the incongruously jaunty Way Down, fellow hit single Moody Blue and Hurt (not the Nine Inch Nails song so hauntingly covered by an ailing Johnny Cash), alongside a slew of familiar standards, Solitaire, Danny Boy, He’ll Have To Go and I’ll Never Fall In Love Again among them, given the Elvis gospel and soul stamp.

To post-modern ears, they may sound as heavy with cheese as a mozzarella and more mozzarella pizza, but the best of this work with the TCB band and regular producer Felton Jarvis still thrills, from Bitter They Are, Harder They Fall to Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain. Inevitably, Disc One closes with The Last Farewell, which the album had turned out to be.

In The Jungle Room presents the original masters alongside a second disc of outtakes, newly mixed alternate takes for this 40th anniversary edition that rounds up the pork scratchings, the false starts, the studio banter and even the Gracelands phone ringing.