‘Sunny Afternoon’: How The Kinks captured the politicised side of hippiedom
The burgeoning ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967 and its precipitating years can often evoke apolitical scenes of stereotypical ‘peace and love’ idealism and generic hippie bohemianism. While there’s certainly some truth to such tie-died reminiscence in the popular consciousness of that turbulent decade of major social upheaval, not everybody was grooving along to The Youngblood’s banal optimism of ‘Get Together’.
That’s not to say there wasn’t serious political merit to abandoning the rigid social conformities straight-jacketed by a class system still stuck in the Victorian era and playing the bongos in Hyde Park. But perhaps with the passage of times and the contemporary cynism we now live in, the years of 1966 and ’67 are perceived unfairly as toothless compared to the dramatic tumult that awaited the latter end of the 1960s.
There are albums in those 24 months that anticipate the storm that followed the calm. While Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was cementing itself as the totemic, cultural relic of its time, over in New York could be found the acerbic, back-alley tales of heroin and S&M found on The Velvet Underground & Nico, Love’s societal anxiety’s over the darker side of the era’s counter-culture on their seminal Forever Changes, and Frank Zappa’s satirical attack of the flower power generation on his early records with The Mothers of Invention. One such band that were also imbuing their work slowly with political commentary was The Kinks.
The British take on the expanding frontiers of pop and rock was much more grounded in the locale and milieu of the country at its pivotal transition, a social clash between the mini-skirt and the bowler hat indeed ushering major inter-generational frissons, but the records that soundtracked the ‘Swinging Sixties’ were often anchored in quainter anglo-eccentricities over their fellow revolutionaries across the Atlantic, whether it was Paul McCartney’s unabashed music-hall nostalgia on the whimsical ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ or Small Faces’ cockney knees-up on ‘Lazy Sunday’. Even Pink Floyd’s debut LP, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was a reference to the British literature classic The Wind in the Willows.
A gem from this era is The Kinks’ classic ‘Sunny Afternoon’. The lead single off 1966 album Face to Face, this cut marked an important transition away from the band’s earlier garage rock toward a more colourful and baroque exercise in psychedelic pop. Its languid presentation hides an impeccable songcraft, with one of songwriter Ray Davies’ most infectious hooks at the centre of its breezy deception.
Inspired by the tax policies of Harold Wilson’s Labour government, Davies imbibed this slice of English hippiedom with a subtle political critique, surprisingly at odds with the ‘groovy’ values of his peers. Inventing a character to hide his ire at his taxed income, Davies stated, “The only way I could interpret how I felt was through a dusty, fallen aristocrat who had come from old money as opposed to the wealth I had created for myself.”
Deploying such class tropes as a low-level member of the gentry bemoaning his idle luxury is as succinct a statement of English social order as a pop number can get, despite the song’s protagonist serving as an alter-ego of sorts. Sharing a similar theme with The Beatles’ ‘Taxman’ penned by George Harrison, Davies manages to avoid Harrison’s bitter lyrical whine (albeit with a riff to die for) with the subversive use of character, which he’d use in future classics like ‘Lola’, or the titular character of Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire).
With a smart subversion hiding behind its bright melody, The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’ is a timeless document of 1960s Britain and its coy suffusion of political commentary that hid dimensions of social critique amid its beguiling pop.
