‘I Go To Sleep’: the 1965 song that Ray Davies didn’t want The Kinks to record
Whether you’re talking about ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, or ‘Dead End Street’, The Kinks had a distinctive, individualistic sound during their 1960s heyday. It was the sound of youthful rebellion, rock euphoria, and a celebration of their working-class roots – attributes which are hauntingly omitted from Ray Davies’ 1965 song ‘I Go To Sleep’.
Even the most dedicated of Kinks fans could be forgiven for never having encountered ‘I Go To Sleep’, given the fact that the band never actually recorded the song. Nevertheless, the offbeat Davies effort has been covered on a multitude of occasions, spanning the spectrum from Cher to The Pretenders, and is rightly hailed among the songwriter’s greatest efforts, particularly during his mid-1960s period.
To deduce why The Kinks didn’t record the song, and the root of its harrowing out-of-character sound, we must delve behind-the-scenes in Davies’ personal life. Despite being the frontman of one of the biggest rock bands in Britain, the songwriter wasn’t living the archetypal rockstar life you might expect from a 21-year-old with newfound riches and stardom.
While the rest of London’s music scene was frequenting all-night dances, experimenting with newly introduced drugs, and generally embodying the spirit of the swinging sixties, Ray Davies was about to start a family.
In late spring of 1965, Davies’ then-wife, Rasa Didzpetris, was expecting the couple’s first child. During a time when it wasn’t overly normal for expecting fathers to be in the delivery room with their partners, a rather pensive Davies was pacing around his parents’ house in Fortis Green, waiting for news. Inevitably, this soon led to the songwriter sitting at a piano, letting his creative juices flow as a means of distraction from the existential panic of becoming a father.
Over the course of that impromptu writing session, meant as a distraction more than anything, Davies captured the anguish, fear, and unbridled adoration of becoming a parent in the song ‘I Go To Sleep’. In his anxious, likely sleep-deprived state, Davies recorded the song, solo, the very next day at Regent Sound in the centre of London. However, realising how different it was from the material he was creating for The Kinks at the time, he didn’t see much point in presenting it to the rest of the band.
Presumably, the fast-paced lifestyle of the rock outfit, coupled with the stress of being a new parent, soon took over, and the song largely slipped away from Davies’ consciousness. However, it did stick in the mind of the songwriter’s publisher, who, during the band’s inaugural tour of the United States, got Peggy Lee to record a version of the song.
There began a series of ‘I Go To Sleep’ covers, the most recent notable example being Anika’s haunting, gothic rendering from back in 2010. Punk protégés The Stranglers did well out of the song, too, with their 1981 version breaking into the top ten, thus reaffirming the lasting power of Ray Davies’ songwriting.
It wasn’t until the late 1990s, however, that the songwriter’s own version finally became available to the masses, via a reissue of Kinda Kinks. Had it been released during its day, the song would have stood among the songwriter’s strongest efforts. As it stands now, though, ‘I Go To Sleep’ is one of Ray Davies’ most enchanting, vulnerable works, deserving of far more attention than it is often afforded.
