The Kinks: “Sunny Afternoon”

In a Rolling Stone interview on November 10, 1969, Ray Davies said, “Sunny Afternoon was made very quickly, in the morning, it was one of our most atmospheric sessions. I still like to keep tapes of the few minutes before the final take, things that happen before the session. Maybe it’s superstitious, but I believe if I had done things differently – if I had walked around the studio or gone out – it wouldn’t have turned out that way. The bass player went off and started playing funny little classical things on the bass, more like a lead guitar: and Nicky Hopkins, who was playing piano on that session, was playing “Liza” – we always used to play that song – little things like that helped us get into the feeling of the song.

At the time I wrote Sunny Afternoon I couldn’t listen to anything. “I was only playing The Greatest Hits of Frank Sinatra and Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm – I just liked it’s whole presence, I was playing the Bringing It All Back Home LP along with my Frank Sinatra and Glenn Miller and Bach – it was a strange time. We thought they all helped one another, they went into the chromatic part that’s in the back of the song. I once made a drawing of my voice on ‘Sunny Afternoon.’ It was a leaf with a very thick outline – a big blob in the background – the leaf just cutting through it.”

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Lyrics to “Sunny Afternoon”

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