The one thing that nags at me about "Taxman" is that it isn't all that likable. At the end of the day, it's a rich man's whinge over not being able to horde more of their cash. (Oh, must I have to pay for those damn nurses?!?) The same ought to be true of The Kinks' lone Canadian chart topper "Sunny Afternoon" but pop's original wise ass, Mr. Slappable Face himself Ray Davies actually wrote something which sends up the leisured class while also displaying the slightest bit of empathy for them.
While the Merseybeat boom took off and then promptly faded, the London-area groups were quietly improving. Few would've guessed that the same band who did rough and tough hits like "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" would be the same quartet who would eventually become synonymous with kitchen-sink dramas, wit and Englishness while assembling one of the sturdiest back catalogs in all of pop. The turning point had been "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" which practically defined sixties' Swinging London while at the same time taking the piss out of it. This would become a Kinks hallmark.
Ray Davies' brand of cheeky cynicism reached its zenith on The Kinks' first album masterpiece Face to Face. A fourteen-track affair loaded with zany character studies — only on the rather mean-spirited "Session Man" does Davies' shtick begin to grate — it isn't as fondly remembered as some of their subsequent albums (especially their 1968 flop-disguised-as-a-classic The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, a work that "Sunny Afternoon" anticipates) but it is probably their finest work in terms of quality tunes all packed in. (Well, it's either that or follow-up Something Else...or maybe the cockney country music of Muswell Hillbillies. The point is, they made a lot of great albums; the idea that The Kinks were mainly a singles band is absurd)
While "Sunny Afternoon" is the centrepiece of Face to Face (even if they chose to bury it on the album's second side as its penultimate track), one of its other more commercial-sounding tracks is "Dandy", a character sketch of a wealthy young man with little going on in his life beyond scoring as many women as his member can handle. His conquests are detailed but there's this growing fear that others are moving on with their lives while he's stuck in his rut. Though things aren't going especially well for him, this Dandy is sent off with a reassured "you're all right". Listeners ought to despise him but one of Davies' skills as a songwriter is to bring out the charm and humanity in losers and arseholes so as to become far more than mere caricatures. ("Dandy" wasn't released as a single in the UK or North America but it performed well in parts of Europe, even hitting number one in Germany. It ended up being gifted to a British Invasion act I'm not very fond of; more on that in the next week or so)
The character in "Dandy" could easily be the same miserable chap in "Sunny Afternoon", only with several years of bad decisions separating the two. He's no longer happy-go-lucky, just a sad old miser from the moneyed aristocracy languishing from the taxman having "taken all [his] dough". No doubt born independently wealthy, he's never had to work a day in his life and he's not about to start now. Look up the word 'entitlement' in one of those picture dictionaries that everyone seems to think are commonplace and you might find his photo (though there's little doubt in my mind that he would happily rail against others for being far too 'entitled').
Yet there's more to it than shitting on rich people. While he sits there in abject misery, he's in the sunshine, "sipping on an ice-cold beer": this dandy isn't aware that there's a world around him for him to appreciate. To be able to lounge around in the summer air with a drink sounds pretty good to a lot of us. What Davies is presenting us with is the old adage that 'money cannot buy happiness' but put in a way that isn't cliched nor heavy-handed. Wallowing yet unaware that he is in the middle of a very pleasant day: the rich just don't appreciate what they've got, do they folks?
The descending piano chords imply a certain dread on the part of his nibs but at the same time, Davies' delivery is so relaxed that it sounds like it's just another day for him. It's as if the dandy wakes up every morning in his admittedly crumbling estate and figures that this going to be the day when it finally collapses all around him. He gets up at eleven in the morning, has a simple breakfast of tea, toast, marmalade and bloody marys and then just kind of lays back and waits for the inevitable - an inevitable that never comes. Had this character been around in 2025, he'd be perpetually online, ranting on social media and/or his sad little YouTube channel about how "you can't say anything anymore" and "how political correctness has gone mad" (he'd be so out of touch that he would assume that these are still hot takes rather than hackneyed and tired); stuck in the sixties, however, all he can do is lick his wounds and enjoy his life - even if he's taking no pleasure in it himself.
Though not as immediate as "You Really Got Me", doesn't pull at the heartstrings like "Waterloo Sunset" and isn't nearly as endearing as "Lola", "Sunny Afternoon" has become a Kinks signature, arguably surpassing those three songs, along with many more exceptional Ray Davies compositions. When it came to giving a name to The Kinks' jukebox musical, any number of their songs could've been picked including two I just mentioned (it's difficult to imagine they would've gone with Lola). But "Sunny Afternoon" is about the duality of success and failure, about having it all yet knowing there's far more to life, about fretting over what one doesn't have while failing to appreciate what is right under their nose. How can you get more Kinks than taking the mickey out of the wealthy? By acknowledging that we're all that way. Great as "Taxman" is, "Sunny Afternoon" is everything it is and more. Davies may not have been Lennon or McCartney but he could more than hold his own against George Harrison.
Score: 10
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