Sleepwalker: The Kinks' Hidden Gem

Welcome to the first 2025 episode (and 13th overall) of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast — a.k.a. the podcast in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond. And this time out, our subject is one of the great British bands of all time: The Kinks!

Rather than talk about one of the band’s widely acknowledged classics like 1968’s The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society or 1969’s Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire), we’re discussing a Kinks album that’s largely underappreciated: 1977’s Sleepwalker.

Recorded in the summer and fall of 1976 at Konk, the band’s new London recording studio, Sleepwalker was a marked departure from the band’s previous four releases for RCA Records, a run of theatrical concept albums that had done little to expand The Kinks’ fanbase. Now signed by Clive Davis to Arista Records, the band ditched the horn players and backing singers that had cluttered up their most recent projects and recast themselves as an FM radio-oriented mainstream rock act. The resulting album contained nine excellent Ray Davies songs that required no backstory, including the US radio hits “Sleepwalker” and “Juke Box Music,” and made it all the way to #21 on the Billboard 200 — the band’s highest placement on that chart since 1965.

Indeed, Sleepwalker ushered in what would become The Kinks’ most commercially successful era, at least in the United States, a period which would see them graduating from theaters to basketball arenas and achieving the only Gold albums of their career. But though it received very positive reviews at the time of its release — and Dan ranked it at #5 last year on his list of favorite Kinks albums — Sleepwalker tends to be viewed far less favorably by current critics, perhaps precisely because it served as the opening salvo of their “arena rock” era, which saw Ray Davies often sacrificing his personal brand of wit and nuance in favor of strident anthems built to reach a stadium’s back row.

But Dan insists that Sleepwalker’s reputation shouldn’t be sullied by the more bombastic aspects of 1979’s Low Budget and 1981’s Give The People What They Want, and that it actually contains some of Ray Davies’ finest songwriting. Then again, The Kinks are Dan’s all-time favorite band; Tony loves the band as well — as you can see in the above photo, he even busted out his “Ray Davies wig” for this episode — but he’d never actually heard Sleepwalker until a week or two before we recorded this episode. Will he agree with Dan and marvel at the album’s subtle and underappreciated brilliance? Or will he be completely appalled by its smooth, FM-ready grooves, which sound nothing like the punk records that changed his life in 1977?

If you’ve never heard Sleepwalker, or haven’t given it a listen in ages, you can find it on all the usual streaming sites. BMG also released a remastered 180g vinyl version of the album late last year — though as we mention on the podcast, it’s still easy to find original copies of the LP for just a few dollars.

But one track we discuss that isn’t included on Sleepwalker or with most reissues of the album is “Prince of the Punks”. Released in November 1977 as the B-side of The Kinks’ holiday classic “Father Christmas,” the song initially took shape in 1976 during the Sleepwalker sessions. As we explain in the podcast, “POTP” was both a nasty swipe at pub rocker Tom Robinson and a “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”-type lampoon of the London punk scene circa 1977 — a scene whose music, ironically, owed plenty to The Kinks’ raw early singles. If you haven’t heard the song, it’s here on YouTube:

As always, this CROSSED CHANNELS episode is only available in full for paid subscribers of Jagged Time Lapse and Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith, though a short preview of the episode is available for all to listen to. To hear this episode in full, along with all of our previous CROSSED CHANNELS episodes, just sign up for a paid subscription to one (or both!) of our Substacks.

And if you’d like to download a copy of our groovy theme song, “Blue Diamond Fire” by Dan’s solo project The Corinthian Columns, it’s available here on Bandcamp:

We’d like to express our deepest thanks to those of you who continue to support our work — and we’re always happy to hear from you in the comments section, so don’t be shy about chiming in. Our next episode (on a certain Chicago soul great) will be up in February! Cheers!...