A guest posting by strangeways
The first thing to do is begin with a disclaimer in so much that memories from almost forty years ago are offered in this ICA. Added to these are some opening assumptions regarding the music press and the ongoing post-mortems that might still be occupying Sundays fans. For these components I’m happy to be thought of as an unreliable narrator.
So let’s imagine it’s 1988 and the then powerful British music weeklies have received an All-Patrols Broadcast consisting of just four words: Find The New Smiths. But, but, but… already Morrissey’s flying high, having quickly lifted himself from the post-split canvas with the well-received LP Viva Hate.
Connected to this: a couple of first-rate singles in Suedehead and especially, for me at least, Everyday is Like Sunday. As both records delivered ace b-sides, collating them could have provided a whole other album (and a couple of years later kind of did via the feted compilation Bona Drag). So for the press and wider media, galloping away on my surely imagined hunt, was the new Smiths actually the old one?
No. Still the search persisted.
Meanwhile there was something brewing in London, via Bristol. Student sweethearts Harriet Wheeler and David Gavurin were writing songs. She, a singer. He, a guitarist. Joining them: drummer Patrick Hannan and bassist Paul Brindley. Collectively, they became the Sundays. With a demo on hand, and after a clutch of gigs, Rough Trade won the signing battle.
The 1989 debut single Can’t Be Sure cast the first spell. And in a really strong year for John Peel’s Festive Fifty – think Pixies, Wedding Present and Stone Roses all on fire, and all with well-liked LPs to flog – Can’t Be Sure topped the annual list almost a full year after its release.
For the album though, a wait of 12 months was imposed. But when it did arrive, that first smash-hit LP Reading, (apparently as in the singer’s Berkshire hometown) Writing and Arithmetic was beautiful, offering a snow globe land of hideous towns and miserable weather, letter-sending and cups of tea. If only Lunn Poly could have flown you there.
Pretty quickly, no end of front covers and features followed. It was a fact then, and remains one now, that in pop and rock a female singer will become the focus. The Sundays were no different. Ostensibly they were led by an uncommonly arresting and photogenic singer – possessive of both a Penguin Classics name and a look as much at home on a perfume billboard in Milan as it would be mucking out the litter trays at a cat shelter in Middlesbrough. Added to this were the kind of handsome and stoic-looking men who in a few years’ time would be pegged ‘Sleeperblokes’: there, but not there.
So, urged into the spotlight across the likes of NME and Melody Maker and Vox, Harriet was demure in Doc Martens and denims, jumble sale jumpers and a tottering, pinned-up, elegant nest of a haircut that you couldn’t put a century to, never mind a decade.
Hopeless romantics – literally hopeless in my experience – were besotted, and I personally know of at least one kitten who was named in Harriet’s honour.
I doubt anyone reading this requires a reminder, but two more albums followed: Blind in 1992 and Static & Silence in 1997. Accompanying these, if you’re talking the UK discography, emerged a reluctant roll call of just three more singles. Close to the end, one of these, Summertime – arriving, perversely, in the early autumn of 1997 – broke into the top 20. The actual grown-up one. And at number 15. One reward was a live-vocal Top of the Pops appearance. Announced via Jayne Middlemiss, there they really were: ‘Our Sundays. Our Harriet. On Top of the Pops!’ Then, after just one more single, in midwinter, and with no ceremony, it ended. The last gig happened on December 11th 1997 at London’s still-operating Union Chapel, a Grade I listed church venue – maybe a fitting location for a band of this name.
Since then, I’d always thought of the Sundays as the least prolific of groups. But in assembling this ICA, I realise I’ve been wrong about this. Those three LPs are actually a perfectly fine output. It’s, what, one every couple-ish of years or so. My mistake has been to keep the count going beyond December 1997 – a hobby akin to pining for a visit from a dead person or a call from a long-gone partner.
All told, 42 songs, including the deepest of cuts, are on offer. If that sounds like a modest total it hasn’t made the playlist – or its sequencing – any simpler or less contentious. And I’m acutely aware there are big and easily identified misses.
Breaking: they wouldn’t of course be ‘the new Smiths’ (as if such a thing was even possible). But with our potted history – imagined or otherwise – out of the way for now, here’s what I settled on.
The Sundays: Petrichor
an Imaginary Compilation Album for the (New) Vinyl Villain
Side 1
1. Goodbye (single – from Blind LP, Parlophone, 1992)
The lead-off, and in fact only, UK single from the Sundays’ second album Blind is a beauty. It’s everything you’d ever want: bright and jangly, dreaming and enticing. And in short order it explodes to deliver a real ‘we’re back’ statement (one that singles-wise was required being that it had been well over three-and-a-half years since debut Can’t Be Sure). Consequently, Goodbye deservedly hit the UK top 30 in advance of the LP doing similarly good business at number 15.
At this point, following Rough Trade’s demise, the band was now signed with the major Parlophone, which makes the non-appearance of a follow-up single all the more curious. It’s recalled that the megastores of the time hosted prominent and vertiginous displays of the Goodbye 12” single (and complementing t-shirts), so Parlophone, to be fair, was doing its bit in this regard. Add to this oddity the promotional opportunity of a 14-date November/December tour that year. Parlophone would surely have been agitating for a second single, so you can only assume the Sundays didn’t fancy it and had negotiated a rare level of control for a group on such a huge label.
Meanwhile, Blind’s lead single for the US market at this time was a different track: Love, issued only as a cassette single would you believe, on DGC.
2. Monochrome (from Static & Silence LP, Parlophone, 1997)
If their LPs present three stages of Sundays, the self-produced and home-studio-spun Static & Silence album concluded with the all-grown-up iteration. But don’t worry, even if sensible shoes and togs now also occupied the wardrobe, they hadn’t fully dashed Docs and cardigans and jumpers.
That said, this third LP was not as instantly earnest and charming as Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, or for the most part as easy to receive as Blind. Instead, for me at least, this record demanded your full attention. Aside from the pop hit opener Summertime, and fellow single Cry, there’s little you can instantly ‘get’ without putting in a bit of effort. The Sundays sound is all there though, sometimes newly augmented by brass and flute, organs and more strings. And there’s even a bit of a rocker courtesy of Another Flavour, my friend Juliette’s favourite Sundays song.
But to Monochrome. It’s the last track on Static & Silence, and it’s set at the early-morning moment of the first moon landing. Miles from that satellite though, the song is maybe located in a different kind of mysterious landscape: suburbia. And it’s there where a pair of young sisters pad downstairs to witness the event on TV, likening the astronauts to two slow puppets dancing on silver ground, and all amid the static and silence of the LP’s name.
3. I Kicked a Boy (B-side of Can’t Be Sure single, Rough Trade, 1989 and also on Reading, Writing and Arithmetic LP, Rough Trade, 1990)
Where’d they learn to do that? I Kicked a Boy makes the cut because it simply couldn’t not. It’s just a brilliant song with a fine line in quotable lyrics, including my favourite ‘I’ve been wondering lately just who’s gonna save me’.
The music is every bit as lovely, and a sprightly guitar chimes so much it can probably tell you the time if you ask it. The band clearly revered the track too, lifting it for LP inclusion from the flipside of the previous year’s Can’t Be Sure single.
4. Summertime (single – from Static & Silence LP, Parlophone, 1997)
Is Summertime typical of the Sundays’ sound? Not really. Not for a band that predominantly feels more autumn/winter. But it’s included here to provide a bit of light and shade – a role it played also on its largely pensive parent LP. If that reads like Summertime’s a grudged pick. It shouldn’t. It’s a great song – the Sundays at their absolute poppiest – and an even greater single.
5. Joy (from Reading, Writing and Arithmetic LP, Rough Trade, 1990)
Best enjoyed ice-cold, Joy is a song with a feeling of brooding finality about it. It’s no wonder it closes the debut album. That it does so with such unexpected tumult is all the better. The whole thing – lyrics, singing and music – is kind of like a cliffhanger or a series-closing TV episode, performing that trick of both satisfying you and leaving you hungry for more.
Side 2
6. I Feel (from Blind LP, Parlophone, 1992)
Blind’s first track sees this most polite and demure of bands – they use words and phrases like ‘oh well’, ‘delighted’, ‘wouldn’t it be such fun’ and ‘I don’t mind telling you’ – just suddenly gatecrash the silence. Prettified by a start/stop structure, I Feel is a terrific opener – and like Goodbye it has a reassuring ‘the Sundays are back’ quality to it, particularly when David Gavurin’s unbridled guitar parts enter the plot.
7. Can’t Be Sure (single – from Reading, Writing and Arithmetic LP, Rough Trade, 1990)
Preceding what would become synonymous intricate guitar work, a few seconds of pitter-patter drums announced the Sundays’ arrival. This is a rasper of a debut single, and it caused – deservedly – quite the stir at the time.
So many years later, and even counting its screeds of memorable lines about weather (bad) and desire (even worse), it’s the let-it-all-go lift on the penultimate word ‘later’, the frantic scramble of guitar and the ‘yeaaaaahhh’ ending that remains the moment-and-a-half to experience.
8. God Made Me (from Blind LP, Parlophone, 1992)
Pipping, at the last moment, More, from the same Blind LP, is God Made Me. Is the song a response to religious indoctrination? A weary line – ‘that’s what they told me before, who know what they’ll say today?’ – that follows the sung title suggests so. And later on there’s maybe an atheist awakening delivered via ‘imagine my eyes when I first saw we can do what we want’. Notable also for offering the world’s greatest-ever sung pronunciation of the word ‘supposed’.
9. My Finest Hour (from Reading, Writing and Arithmetic LP, Rough Trade, 1990)
When Bobby Gillespie – the man at the heart of the muscular, swaggering Velocity Girl – condemned the Sundays as being ‘the opposite of rock ‘n’ roll’, perhaps My Finest Hour was the song that tipped him over the edge.
One of the greatest cuts in the entire Sundays songbook, this shy belter reeks of mothballs and thrift shops, and is so quaint it ought to be kept in a hatbox. The song sighs about, and longs for, a match-up that really should but shan’t. Words are high on self-effacement – ‘my finest hour that I’ve ever known was finding a pound in the underground’ – they run a mile also from anything approaching sophistication or commitment: ‘poetry is not for me, and much as I’d like to stay, oh I just want to go home’. In summation, it all feels not so much the joy of missing out as the fear of things going great.
It follows then that your best china and the good biscuits are called for whenever My Finest Hour is played. It’s peak early Sundays and a candidate for the band’s best track ever, ever, ever.
10. Cry (single – from Static & Silence LP, Parlophone, 1997)
The final Sundays release is a lush and swooning lament. With its references to ‘standing on a platform’, coupled with its central theme of lost love and general glumness, the song feels influenced by the 1945 David Lean film Brief Encounter. The track’s words, including the moving contradiction ‘you’re with me so much, though you’re never with me anymore, and it makes me cry’ could easily pass for an internal monologue from that drama’s buttoned-up housewife Laura. It’s of course at a train stop that her unconsummated extramarital affair with Alec, a doctor, begins, persists and ends, although any steaminess is largely provided by the lovely trains populating the key location of Carnforth station in Lancashire.
I can see that yet again I’ve not addressed the actual song terribly much. But rest assured that with its shimmering strings, plus a dinky mandolin and wistfully-delivered words, Cry makes for a deliberately emotional end to this ICA. And if, as is surely certain, it’s the band’s last canonical statement too, it’s one that’s wholly appropriate.
Extra track
Wild Horses (B-side of Goodbye single, Parlophone, 1992, and LP track – and single – on Blind in USA, 1992, DGC)
Stapled to the end of the US release of Blind, this is a beautiful cover of the Rolling Stones’ 1971 single. In 1993 the Sundays version was itself elevated to a single in the States (again on the leading US format at that time: cassette), and with a video in the can perhaps there was a feeling Wild Horses could have done good business in North America.
It didn’t – Billboard-wise at least – but for my money, it would have been zero surprise if Wild Horses had gone on to satisfy that US penchant for emotionally charged ballads. Adding steel to this assertion, maybe, is the fact that the song popped up in a film (Fear, 1996) and in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer three years after that. Finally, at attention, drinkers: Budweiser slapped it on one of its commercials too.
And here in Britain, had the cover been released, and had it garnered the then crucial patronage of daytime radio, Wild Horses would surely have had a tilt at the top ten. Could it – whisper it – have even been a chart-topper?
I know this has all been a bit ‘if my auntie had wheels she’d be a bicycle’, but I still maintain that with a fair wind behind it, Wild Horses could have done well in either territory.
No matter. It remains a breathtaking cut. As delicate as a cobweb and every bit as intricate, it’s a real head-turner wherever and whenever it’s played.
Hopping mad that not all your favourites made the cut?
Same here. On any other day you’d have been reading about the likes of Here’s Where the Story Ends, You’re Not the Only One I Know, Hideous Towns, More, 24 Hours, and She.
But there it is. And to this day, among an interested cohort – the kind of people who tut at barcodes on postage stamps and go on a downer because nobody really wears a watch anymore – I like to think the Sundays generally, and Harriet specifically, are spoken of in awed, hushed tones. Their very disappearance is, ironically, keeping them front-of-mind and puzzled over like the doomed, unsolvable Lisbon sisters of the Virgin Suicides. Bands, and not just of the indiepop variety, naturally attract the curious, the obsessive and the tenacious of course, so it’s maybe not so big a surprise if the Sundays do remain revered, remembered and sought-out.
But to temper all this bluster it should be noted every person and every pop group maintains the right to disappear. To this end, it’s a fact – and an admirable one – that the band has studiously remained off-grid for almost thirty whole years (and the last twenty or so of those have been hosting the existence of ever-more intrusive iterations of nagging, toddler-class social media).
If the fancy took them, they could do the opposite. Even barring new music, a tour could be built solely on the back of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic – and it’d do very well indeed. But it feels kind of right that this has never happened.
Even on the racks the group is not traditionally anthologised either. In the perhaps fading world of best-of collections – essentially the same product re-imagined then re-released as soon as it’s commercially polite to do so – the closest one gets is the recent (2024/25) re-unleashing of all three albums on vinyl. And if this activity was fanfared anywhere, I didn’t hear a parp, myself. At least those feeling the itch can now maybe swipe up that once-elusive plastic inside those elegant sleeves (and has any other band’s cover art expressed its sound and tone so immaculately? Well, one other maybe).
The only documented public cheep across all this time has come from, of all things, an in-flight magazine (American Airlines’ ‘American Way’), which in 2014 somehow snagged a short interview with Harriet and David. This was conducted, perhaps unsurprisingly, via email.
Although the content of the piece offered little drama, it did at least confirm that the couple continues writing – a tantalising fact that’s been backed up by old pal David Baddiel, although he doubts that any of these labours will ever be heard publicly.
The downer of course is that a couple of discs of currently unknown oddities, plus maybe a gig, would actually be both welcome and entirely justified, But right now, aside from internet-available demos and sessions, plus two live-only tracks, one named Something More, the other titled Turkish – you’ll find recordings of varying audio/visual quality online – for the Sundays completist, the task remains simple.
A bit more indulgence to finish with
Here’s a small, and to be honest inconsequential, Sundays anecdote. Probably it’s of no interest to anyone, really, but here it is regardless.
It’s February 2nd 1990 – a Friday – and the Sundays are to play the Queen Margaret Union, a venue connected with the University of Glasgow. This will be the band’s second visit to the QM in just over a year, having supported Throwing Muses there the previous February.
Attending the gig will be two eighteen year olds – boys – old enough now to fulfil the age restrictions that plagued shows at that time. Keen perhaps to avenge that barring of twelve months ago, a plan has been hatched to visit the union in the afternoon. The scheme is dedicated to maybe hearing the band soundcheck, and as the QM is open for facilities – including a bar, a cafeteria and a laundrette – gaining entry is a snap, even for those unaffiliated with the place.
Quickly, one of the union’s regulars, an older man known by sight to the boys via their weekly attendance at the venue’s indie discos, spies the two lads. They’re stood, like winter urchins facing a bakery’s window, at the doors which lead into the ground-floor space where the group will later perform.
This regular, who may or may not have been connected with something like the students’ representative council, approaches and asks what the boys are up to. The caper is explained. Then, in a flash, this figure enters the performance area revealing for a moment, via a swinging door, that the band is inside. They’re not currently playing music, but the soundcheck is going on.
Encouraged, and gingerly stepping into the space – but maintaining a reverential, terrified, pinned-to-the-wall distance – the boys can now see that this character is speaking with Harriet. She looks across at the pair, and is seen nodding. She approaches and somehow – somehow – the two now find themselves face to face with her. They didn’t curtsey, but it was probably on the cards.
It’s reported after the fact that Harriet, inside that Brutalist building, was every bit as kind and polite as you would hope and dream and pray for. Furthermore it’s been revealed that she was patient to a fault when confronted with a couple of fawning, socially inept twits whose eyes – containing stars where you’d routinely expect pupils – ping-ponged with alarming frequency from the floor to the singer and back. But mainly to the floor.
She also used her magic indie superpowers to assign, correctly and with a pointed finger, the boys’ names, (OK, it’s a 50-50 shot, but still). She’d read these from her own response to a letter the lads had sent her (they’d brought it with them, and handed it to her as a kind of hall pass/permit for diplomatic immunity). That correspondence is currently MIA, unfortunately.
Beyond commenting on the tendency of the Harriet of this era to continually sport earrings styled like tiny padlocks, not a lot more is remembered about the actual and short conversation. But after the event, and after of course the gig itself (attended by one other who stalks this blog), much would have been discussed that day – The Day They Met Harriet Wheeler – and I know for a fact that this memory is still dusted down with quite obnoxious regularity.
Thanks to Sundays Fan Bible…
Most useful in checking out dates and facts for this ICA was the Sundays Fan Bible – an extensive resource of granular-level information. Amid an internet going wrong, it’s the kind of ultra-valuable labour of love that’s deserving of the highest praise.
https://sites.google.com/site/mysundayssite/home
…and thanks to Jim…
…for the platform, and to you for reading (as in the activity, not the town in Berkshire).
strangeways
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 