The Kinks – ‘Sunny Afternoon’

18 July 1966

England’s mythical summer of 1966, when London swung and the years-of-hurt counter still said zero, seemed to involve a good deal of pop-star whinge about paying tax, what with the first line of The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and the opening track of The Beatles’ Revolver. Alas, we in Ireland couldn’t help; our tax haven status was still decades away, and at the time we were far too busy deporting our young and abusing our vulnerable.

If ‘Sunny Afternoon’ is indeed meant to be satirical, I’m having trouble seeing who exactly is at the pointy end of it. Our tax-dodging, drunkeness-and-cruelty-dispensing narrator seems blissfully happy sipping at his ice-cold beer in the sun-kissed garden of his stately home, troublesome taxman and tale-telling girlfriend now out of his hair, his main concern now being how to “sail away” and duck the rest of his responsibilities. Underlining all this is the track’s open-air music-hall (music garden?) soundscape: big loose-limbed acoustic guitar chords; Ray Davies’ languid delivery; comedy-effect quacking at the end of each mid-section. I can like ‘Sunny Afternoon’ if I skim over the lyrics and take it as breezily as the narrator does.

As if tax avoidance and domestic cruelty weren’t bad enough, the tale of a man who lives in a house, a very big house in the country should ring some further alarm bells. Yes, ‘Sunny Afternoon’ is the sound of Davies inventing the sour observational strand of ’90s Britpop. There’s moral culpability for you!