"Sunny Afternoon" (Ray Davies)

Ray Davies: "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. I 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."

Jonathan Cott.  “The Kinks’ Ray Davies Talks.” Rolling Stone (10 November 1969): https://www.kindakinks.net/misc/articles/rs69.html
Ray Davies: I was suffering some sort of illness or breakdown or whatever you want to call it. I wrote Sunny Afternoon while still recovering at home. I’d bought a white upright piano and started playing these descending chords. Someone once said to me, "Never write in a minor key", but I always do. The day I recorded it I had a really bad cold. I did it in one take and when I heard it back I said, "No, let me do it properly," but the session was out of time. So that was the vocal. I heard it again the other day. I was 22 but I sound like someone about 40 who’s been through the mill. I really hang on some of the notes. A joyous song, though, even if it’s suppressed joy. I had real fun writing that. "I’ve got a big fat mama." My mother was quite large. But that also alludes to the government, the British Empire, Empire trying to break people. And they’re still doing it… [sighs] How are we going to get out of this fucking mess?
Q Magazine. "Face to Face with Ray Davies." Q Magazine (29 November 2016): https://www.pressreader.com/uk/q-uk/20161129/283519385486701 (accessed December 2017).
Ray Davies: Pye Records was a great company for us at the time... They broke us and I don't think anybody else could have done it because then it was a really young company and people were very go ahead and they'd take chances. I made "Sunny Afternoon" at ten in the morning, finished cutting it at one o'clock in the cutting room, took it up to the Managing Director [Louis Benjamin], played it to him and he said, "What do you want?" I said, "Get it out in two weeks..." I don't think I could have done that at any other company but Pye at the time. (271)
Johnny Rogan. Ray Davies: A Complicated Life. London: The Bodley Head, 2015.
Ray Davies: See, that's where I've differed from my contemporaries, and why I didn't always feel in tune with them. I wrote "Sunny Afternoon" when I was 21 years old, and I wrote it so my granddad could sing it. I didn't write it to make my parents angry.
Hay, Carla. “Well Respected Man.”  Music Connection (10 November 1996): https://www.kindakinks.net/misc/articles/wrman.html (accessed December 2017).