FEATURE:
Here’s Where the Story Begins
The Sundays’ Reading, Writing and Arithmetic at Thirty-Five
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IN 2020…
I celebrated thirty years of The Sundays’ debut album Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. I am returning to it for its thirty-fifth anniversary. I am going to bring in some features and reviews for this classic album. Even though it was released in the U.S. in April 1990, it came out on 15th January here. The ‘Reading’ in the title is not reading…as in reading a book. It is the town in Berkshire. The Sundays’ hometown. Standout tracks like Here's Where the Story Ends and Can’t Be Sure have endured to this day. The band’s third and final album, Static & Silence, was released in 1997. However, their debut is still the standout. Before getting to a feature, I want to begin with a review from the BBC:
“Nearly 20 years ago, with Madchester at the height of its popular appeal, a band about as far removed from The Happy Mondays as it was possible to be briefly rivalled Bez, Shaun and friends as the new darlings of the independent music scene. With the release of their debut album Reading, Writing And Arithmetic, The Sundays received a flurry of euphoric reviews comparing the London quartet to The Smiths, and it's fair to say that David Gavurin builds his songs around the same peculiarly British melancholy yet achingly pretty guitar jangle immortalised by Johnny Marr.
But the most distinctive ingredient about the Sundays was always Harriet Wheeler's voice, which positions the group as a kind of missing link between the ethereal soundscapes of the Cocteau Twins and the more chart-friendly indie-pop of The Cranberries. Like Liz Fraser and Dolores O'Riordan, Wheeler's vocals transfer effortlessly from a fragile whisper to a passionate shriek, taking often simple melodies and leading them on a merry dance across her whole impressive range.
The two best known tracks on Reading, Writing And Arithmetic are the singles Can't Be Sure and Here's Where The Story Ends, and two decades later these remain the best examples of The Sundays' appeal with their instant, breezy hooks and delicate, shuffling rhythms. The rest of the album is a little less immediate, but gradually tracks like Hideous Towns and I Kicked A Boy work their way insidiously inside your head, with Wheeler's angelic, almost hypnotic voice leading the charm offensive.
The Sundays never again recaptured the heights of their debut record, fading slowly into obscurity as the world they inhabited gave way to the brash, confident swagger of Britpop. While Reading, Writing And Arithmetic is perhaps a little too fey and lightweight to warrant true classic status, it is nevertheless a sweet, beguiling piece of work that is utterly of its time, yet still fresh and enjoyable today”.
Just prior to getting to a feature from 2010, I want to start with this feature from Classic Pop published in 2022. Even though they had the genius guitar twang of The Smiths and the ethereal splendour of the Cocteau Twins, the Berkshire band were definitely not one who played the Pop game:
“The Sundays were pretty rubbish at being pop stars. No glitzy aspirational image, barely did interviews, low-key videos, and a less-than-showy live show… Only thing is: The Sundays made near-celestial pop music. In a career that never reached its promise, they released only three albums: this, their 1990 debut; 1992’s Blind and Static & Silence five years later. After that, The Sundays simply stopped.
Of course, whether The Sundays were ‘pop’ very much depends on one’s definition. The Sundays weren’t even that popular: only one Top 20 single, Summertime, from their swansong album and they were barely recognisable as stars, other than to those who adored them. But they were very ‘pop’ in that alternative/indie way, and one of the most melodically beautiful bands of their era.
When they emerged in 1988-89, indie pop and UK pop in general – was undergoing something of a spin around. Guardians of the student galaxy, The Smiths, had recently split. On the rise were a much more hedonistic indie bunch in the shape of nascent ‘Madchester’ bands Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses.
Mainstream pop was sweating to the sounds of early house and the Hi-NRG puppets of Stock Aitken Waterman, and even Paul Weller had gone all Italiano sophisticate (white jeans, anyone?). Dance culture was very much back in.
By contrast, The Sundays sounded like something still lurking in the darker days of 1984 and anti-Maggie resentment/escapism. As writer/broadcaster Stuart Maconie notes in his 2013 book, The People’s Songs: The Story Of Modern Britain In 50 Records: “Indie offered a different narrative to the one that is generally seen as the story of the 1980s: vintage clothes, old records, bedsits, Penguin Modern Classics, black and white movies, instead of the Champagne, Filofaxes and outsize mobile phones of Thatcher’s children.” Spot on.
Although a four-piece, The Sundays were essentially the work of a partnership, both professional and personal.
David Gavurin met Harriet Wheeler at Bristol University and soon became intertwined. He was reading Romantic Languages; she, English Literature. So, if The Sundays were an archetypal ‘student band’ that’s because they were, indeed, archetypal students.
The Sundays’ rise was remarkably rapid. The foursome formed in 1988 and just a month after their first gig they’d debuted at Camden indie sanctuary The Falcon to sky-high praise.
Melody Maker’s reviewer Chris Roberts described the band as “the best thing I’ve ever heard”, and comparisons to the Cocteau Twins, Smiths and Sugarcubes were duly made. Before you could shout “black cardigans!”, a label bidding war for The Sundays was raging.
The thing is, The Sundays didn’t really have enough songs for an album at this point. In one of their extremely rare public utterances, a Melody Maker interview to promote the release of Reading, Writing And Arithmetic… in January 1990, they explained how they were almost devoid of ambition beyond the noise they made.
Gavurin concurred that although they liked playing live, writing songs was, in reality, their only goal. “If we hadn’t been so bloody lucky enough with getting all those reviews right at the start, I could imagine a situation where we wouldn’t have stuck at this for bloody ages.”
“Bloody ages?” They were just 18 months old as a band. Wheeler notably said there was “never a time I wanted to be incredibly famous or in a pop group” although she did confess to pretending to be Michael Jackson as a girl: “which took quite a leap of faith.”
After that London debut (the band had moved to the capital), The Sundays were destined for an indie big-hitter: 4AD, home of the Cocteau Twins, or Rough Trade, previous home of The Smiths. Naturally. 4AD were in pole-position until owner Ivo Watts-Russell foolishly asked Gavurin and Wheeler to think carefully about which label to sign with. They bluntly answered: Rough Trade.
In Neil Taylor’s 2010 book, An Intimate History Of Rough Trade, Gavurin argued – possibly joked – that The Sundays chose to sign to Rough Trade because “it was near our flat.” When the band first met RT’s co-directors Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee, who had only joined the company in 1987, immediate impressions were positive.
Lee had previously been a member of John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd, was married to Gareth Sager of The Pop Group, and had a solid knowledge of Rough Trade’s post-punk modus operandi. In the book, Gavurin is quoted as saying: “What appealed to us about the two of them was that they seemed incredibly straightforward… For us, Rough Trade was this immensely cool and significant label, yet there was no arrogance about them. They basically came over as a couple of unassuming music fans.”
“The Sundays were very particular about making decisions,” Jeannette Lee tells Classic Pop. “They wanted to talk in great detail about everything before they decided who to sign for – what the singles would be, the artwork… Maybe what Ivo Watts-Russell asked them was 4AD’s downfall. After that, I made a mental note never to use that tactic when trying to sign a band!”
Perhaps tellingly, The Sundays chose previous Smiths sleeve designer Jo Slee and decided their own touring schedule. Debut single Can’t Be Sure, backed with I Kicked A Boy, was released in January 1989 and – as was in “the indie rules” of the day – the BBC’s John Peel was an early champion. The single only peaked at No.45 in the UK chart, but that was a pretty good result for a label such as Rough Trade.
Still, The Sundays were happy at the record label. “The culture seemed to be one of openness and co-operation,” continued Gavurin in Taylor’s book, “and we got on well with everyone there. We used to walk down Caledonia Road, and it became a sort of home-from-home.”
Lee remembers it as simply fun.
“They knew what they were doing was good. But they were very careful not to seem smug or overly confident. They’re both self-deprecating and you can hear that in the words. They’re both the funniest people, and we had such a laugh making that record. Obviously, they are a couple but they’re a very good working couple as well. A very solid double act.”
Rumours that the album took a year to record are wide of the mark, though. “Oh, no, that would never have been the plan,” adds Jeannette Lee. “They were particular, they are slow. But only because they wanted to be very certain about what they put out. Some people just record and fling something out and see what happens. Not The Sundays. They are perfectionists.”
In a 2014 email interview with American Way, Gavurin and Wheeler explained of Reading, Writing And Arithmetic, “As writers, the odd thing is that you’re as likely to think back to the place where the songs were actually composed as to any location or situation that inspired their creation. So in the case of Can’t Be Sure and Here’s Where The Story Ends in particular, these songs transport us to the minuscule boiler room attached to the equally cramped rented flat we were living in before our careers took off.
“At the time, despite the industrial noise of the hot-water system and the frequent burglaries, this felt like the perfect writing environment, and virtually all of what ended up on our first album originated there. Not very poetic, but there you have it!”
The album sold well but, regrettably, trouble was ahead. Rough Trade’s financial strife with their distribution arm meant The Sundays, who had only just appointed a manager, soon had to leave to realise even the ambition of another record. “We had long-term hopes with them, obviously,” says Lee.
“We were very close and had talked a lot about the second album. But between that first record being released and the second, that’s when all Rough Trade’s distribution problems occurred. I just remember one day David saying, ‘Let’s not talk about the second album at the moment because there’s a problem we need to look at’.
“I realised we were going to lose them. No hard feelings at all, they had no choice really, but it was heartbreaking.”
The Sundays moved to Parlophone, and followed up with Blind (1992). And, after a long hiatus due to children, Static & Silence (1997). But then they simply stopped making records. They do still write, but said to American Way: “First, let’s see if the music we’re currently writing ever sees the light of day.”
Settled down with 20-something children, and with a reliable heating system, maybe they’ve now just run out of things to write about.
A shame, maybe, but it’s worth revisiting Gavurin’s interview words from 1990: “Non-events are almost sneered at,” he mused. “You don’t see big movies about non-events…”.
In 2010, to mark its twentieth anniversary, Iain Moffat was writing for The Quietus. It is revealing and illuminating reading his words about this seismic debut. I don’t think its influence can be overstated. As Moffat writes, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic was the first classic of the 1990s:
“The first great album of this decade is something that looks likely to be up for debate for some time yet, but there was a time when things were rather more clear-cut; specifically, thirty years ago. Of course, to really appreciate the impact of the Sundays, it’s instructive to look back ever so slightly earlier, to a time that, for a significant sector of the music press readership, was something of an annus horribilis some time before that phrase had really developed much cultural currency, namely 1988. This, you’ll recall, was when the still-going journeyman phase of Johnny Marr’s career really began in earnest, when the notion of things as post-Housemartins referred to their dissolution rather than their figurehead status, and when the indie charts were overrun by – wah! – house music and – double wah! – Kylie Minogue. Yes, we know, but it was a far more purist age. Anyway, imagine the collective sigh of relief when Camden started regularly playing host to a band who could actually be the Smiths and the Cocteaus IN THE SAME SONG. Come to think of it, that’d be quite the sight to behold even now…
Needless to say, the obligatory A&R bunfight ensued, followed by a solitary single that went on to top by a whisker the most top-end-classic-heavy (at least since punk) of John Peel’s Festive 50s and then a for-the-time substantial hiatus that led to this being arguably the most salivatingly-anticipated album of its era. Little wonder it was so adored back then, but what’s perhaps surprising is the potency it retains even stripped of all that context. This, it must be said, is down most of all to one salient point: nothing at all wrong with the rhythm section, of course (in fact, drummer Patch Hannan would go on to appear on one of the decade’s most underrated albums, theaudience’s splendid debut), but the Sundays’ charm has survived chiefly because they were helmed by two thoroughly stellar talents.
Harriet Wheeler’s voice is a genuine one-off, giddy and effortlessly gymnastic without ever losing sight of the humanistic warmth at its core – the crystalline prettiness she brings to ‘You’re Not The Only One I Know’ lends it a gorgeous quality brilliantly at odds with the mundane minutiae of the lyrics, while her hurtling from punchy gurgles to stage-whispery confiding makes ‘Skin & Bones’ a terrifically arresting opening. Conversely, David Gavurin is one of the great overlooked guitarists of the entire canon; he might display shameless debts to more familiar figures at times (the aforementioned Marr on ‘A Certain Someone’, James Honeyman-Scott on ‘I Kicked A Boy’), but there’s a passion and a very real sense of release to his excursions in spangle’n’jangle that make for listening that’s much more bewitching that any mere xeroxing could be.
What’s also especially striking – and, given the title, wholly appropriate – is just how strong a reflection of student-age life this is, which, on reflection, is a rarer gift than might initially be assumed (consider, if you will, how much easier it is to rattle off lists of artists whose oeuvres correlate with adolescent experiences or properly grown-up concerns). At times, this can be remarkably specific – the excellent ‘I Won’ is perhaps the only song to ever build itself around flatshare politics – but it also captures the sensation of a life spent in preparation for a rather daunting sense of possibility. ‘Hideous Towns’ best expresses the intimidation this entails ("never went to Rome / I took the first bus home" etc), but it rears its head repeatedly, Wheeler at one point taking solace in the thought that "there’s no harm in voicing your doubts" and, on ‘Can’t Be Sure’, reflecting with perhaps an overly optimistic confidence that absolute conviction in what lies ahead is bound to emerge. Eventually.
On top of this, there’s a fearless smartness in abundance here that it’s all too frequently been reasonable to contend has been the great casualty of indie’s exodus from the ghetto. The Sundays were never as prone to flourishes as, say, Wild Beasts, but there’s a similar enthusiasm for language, punning on the militaristic aspect of the phrase "Salvation Army", opting for more poetic turns of phrase when lesser artists would have unthinkingly travelled a far more prosaic path ("it’s that little souvenir of a terrible year that makes my eyes feel sore," for instance, is a lovely touch), and coming out with throwaway jewels and joltingly organic observations at regular intervals – it’s difficult to think of anyone else, even back then, whose finest hour in ‘My Finest Hour’ would be simply "finding a pound in the underground", and even listening now lines like "fit the flowers in the bottle of fake cologne" leap out as inspired and uniquely evocative.
Admittedly, these are heights that would never be repeated; a second single apparently couldn’t be plucked from this because the band had no more songs that they could’ve put on the B-side (an issue reminiscent, in a curious parallel, of a certain New York band, also on Rough Trade, who could be said to have kick-started the decade that followed), second album Blind didn’t feature on anybody’s best-of-’92 lists, and the marked improvements of Static & Silence (containing their Newman and Baddiel theme a full four years after the fact) got somewhat swallowed up as the indie implosion began gathering pace, and, while a formal split’s never taken place, there’s been no activity to speak of since. Moreover, this sets down a blueprint that would be followed with spectacularly diminishing returns by the Cranberries, which we’re sure they’d rather not dwell on”.
Tomorrow, it will be thirty-five years since The Sundays released one of the most important debut albums of the 1990s. Its legacy and influence being felt to this very day. I listened to the album not long after it came out and have loved it ever since. Even if The Sundays burned brightly briefly, with Reading, Writing And Arithmetic, they most certainly…
LEFT their mark.