Sundays - Tranquille domeniche d’autunno

It isn't really easy (or perhaps, paradoxically, it's all too easy?) to tell the story of the Sundays. There's precious little information about the English band, just as there are few events that punctuate their artistic journey, which lasted (so to speak) just seven years and unfolded almost entirely far from the dazzling lights of success, the spotlight and celebrity typical of pop iconography. Less than a decade of activity, just three albums recorded for a total of a little over two hours of music spread across a mere 34 (often gorgeous) songs (to which, for the record, should be added a handful of unreleased tracks that appeared on a couple of now extremely rare and hard-to-find cd singles): this is the essential curriculum of a band now largely forgotten by the wider public but one that, we must confess, we miss enormously. We miss their ability to craft delightful indie-pop songs, delicately tinged with folk and firmly rooted in the fertile "C-86/Sarah Records" tradition, which has given so many gems to every sensitive devotee of the most ethereal, dreamy melody. Fortunately, as a testament to so much lost grace, we still have those three albums, that handful of songs, a few music videos that already seem to belong to a bygone era, and images - often grainy - of a pretty, slightly chubby-cheeked girl, sometimes smiling, sometimes faintly sulky.

The girl's name is Harriet Wheeler. Born in 1963, in the mid-80s she was studying literature at the University of Bristol while nurturing a great love of music. After a brief stint in an obscure and now-forgotten indie-pop band called Jim Jiminee, Harriet met young guitarist David Gavurin - one of those classic encounters that change your life: between Harriet and David a partnership was born that would prove hugely significant, both artistically and personally. The two began writing songs together and brought bassist Paul Brindley and drummer Patrick Hannan (brother of Nick, a member of Jim Jiminee) into the adventure of forming a new band. With the addition of the rhythm section, the Sundays effectively came into being, and in 1988 they began cutting their teeth playing London clubs and catching the attention of record labels. The new band was signed by Rough Trade, for whom, in the early months of 1989, they recorded a single that achieved considerable success and paved the way for an album that finally saw the light of day in January 1990, after roughly a year in the making.

Reading, Writing And Arithmetic, produced by the band together with Ray Shulman (formerly the bassist of Gentle Giant and later a well-regarded producer), is the Sundays' debut album and also the English band's masterpiece. It's an impressively concise record, one whose brevity reflects not a lack of ideas but an admirable restraint and gift for economy - a quality already hinted at in the stripped-back artwork, built around a single monochrome image with an abstract feel and a faintly unsettling mood (it's hard to tell whether the photo shows spirals carved into stone or fossils). The Sundays' music is folk-tinged indie-pop, dreamy and gentle - we might almost call it autumnal in its delicate melancholy, often softened by flashes of distinctly English humour, with Harriet Wheeler's fresh, silvery voice soaring above a rhythm section that never overplays its hand, while David Gavurin's guitar weaves patterns that are consistently original and never predictable. The band's inspirations seem to be the guitar-pop of the Smiths and the ethereal, suspended atmospheres of the Cocteau Twins.

Reading, Writing And Arithmetic is a classically perfect record: less than 40 minutes of music without a single superfluous or wasted second. The collection opens with the remarkable "Skin & Bones", David Gavurin's guitar sketching a vaguely folk-inflected jingle-jangle while Harriet Wheeler's voice soars to relate the hard-won realisation that, deep down, all of us are nothing more than "flesh and blood" (“There’s something, just something I’ve found/ It’s that we’re just flesh and blood/ And we’re nothing much more”). The album's second track, "Here's Where The Story Ends", chosen as the single, climbed to a strong position on the UK charts and gave the whole record excellent momentum. The song is unquestionably one of the high points of the collection and, probably, of the Sundays' entire output: catchy yet never trite, it's a delightfully flowing ballad with a bitter, disillusioned lyric describing the sad fallout of a terrible year ("It's that little souvenir of a terrible year which makes my eyes feel sore./ Oh, I never should have said, the books that you read were all I loved you for").

The tracklist continues without ever faltering, moving from the lively "Can't Be Sure", which beautifully interweaves Harriet's voice with David Gavurin's guitar and the rhythm section of Brindley and Hannan, to the more introspective "I Won" ("I won the war in the sitting room, I won the war but it cost me/ I won the war and I feel proud, but God only knows why it's hard to get to sleep in my house"), before arriving at the brisk and witty "Hideous Towns" ("Hideous towns make me throw up"), one of the album's masterpieces alongside the following, magnificent "You're Not The Only One", a sort of quirky, ironic declaration of love sung by Harriet in a dreamy voice ("You're not the only one that I know and I'm far too proud to talk to you any day"). Also excellent is the lively seventh track, "A Certain Someone", with its funny, capricious lyric ("Yeah, if I could have anything in the world for free, I wouldn't share it with anyone else but me/ except perhaps a certain someone"), in which, once again, the perfect blend of Wheeler's voice, Gavurin's guitar and the rhythm section of Brindley and Hannan creates a texture remarkable for its elegance, charm and - no bad thing at all - sheer catchiness.

The ironic undertones return in the lyrics of the short folk ballad "I Kicked A Boy", which describes a complicated love affair ("When the weather's fine, when it's sunny outside, think about the time I kicked a boy 'til he cried/ Oh, I could've been wrong, but I don't think I was, he's such a child"), and again in the following "My Finest Hour" (“The finest hour that I’ve ever known was finding a pound on the Underground/ We are who we are, what do the others know?/ But poetry is not for me, so show me the way to go home”), yet another "perfect" ballad on a collection that's astonishing for the consistently high quality of every composition.

Reading, Writing And Arithmetic achieved solid success with both critics and audiences, its simple, dreamy, supremely elegant indie-pop running completely against the grain of a year that saw, in rock circles, the crowning of shoegaze psychedelia and the definitive rise of the harsh (yet always, in some way, utterly romantic) rhythms of Seattle grunge.

At this point, with the record industry rubbing its hands in anticipation of the definitive commercial breakthrough of a band that, thanks to the single "Here's Where The Story Ends", had made its way onto the charts and into MTV rotation, Harriet and co. had other plans in mind - decidedly less lucrative ones, as one could already sense from the album that followed.

Blind, produced by the band together with Dave Anderson, hit record shops in the autumn of 1992, two and a half years after the release of their debut. The Sundays had been forced to change labels after Rough Trade's collapse, moving over to Parlophone. Their music, however, hadn't changed all that much: Harriet and co. chose to stick with their dreamy, guitar-driven indie-pop. This time, though, the irony scattered through the debut tracks is absent, the moods are darker and more introverted (as can already be gleaned from the bleak, unsettling cover image - a naked, armless doll immersed in darkness), and the folk influences of the first album are apparently set aside in favour of a greater focus on the dream-pop of the Cocteau Twins and the electric guitars of the shoegaze scene that, in those very years, with bands like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Catherine Wheel, Chapterhouse, Ride and Lush, was offering up its finest work.

References to the music of the Cocteau Twins are plainly evident right from the opening track, "I Feel", with David Gavurin's distorted electric guitar lending fresh acidic, psychedelic shadings to a song that's very beautiful but carries a sad, embittered lyric (“I was dreaming and I’m tired of everyone, here’s hoping that you’ll go now, so long, leave me alone/ …/ I feel fine, don’t wake me up yet cause I feel tired, don’t be like that/ We don’t need to work any more now, open that ground up and slip down”). Echoes of the Cocteau Twins also come through clearly on the dreamy "Goodbye", one of the collection's finest tracks, which, despite its "open", airy melody, doesn't shy away from decidedly melancholy notes in its lyrics (“I vow that it’s goodbye. I vow that it’s goodbye and God bless/ …/ Oh, well, give me an easy life and a peaceful death, yeah”).

The tracklist continues with three short tracks: "Life & Soul" is little more than a bleak, shadowy interlude with distinctly "gothic" colourings; the mood remains melancholy but less oppressive on "More", where Harriet describes a cathartic soaking in the rain ("And it rained down on me and it seemed to get into me/ it poured down over me, I'm wet through but I still want more"), while on the following "On Earth" the "ghost" of Elizabeth Fraser still lingers. The Cocteau Twins (but also echoes of the psychedelia of David Roback's Mazzy Star) can likewise be heard in David Gavurin's acidic guitar and Harriet Wheeler's dreamy vocals on the sixth track, "God Made Me", a sort of embittered meditation on the existence of God and human free will ("God made me, that's what they told me before, who knows what they'll say today?/ Because God made me for his sins, imagine my eyes when I first saw we can do what we want").

"Love", the seventh track on the record, is also the most immediate, catchy and, frankly, throwaway, which is probably why it was chosen as the single, going on to enjoy great success and helping push the album towards solid sales figures. Relaxed atmospheres with a vaguely shoegaze ripple run through "What Do You Think?", while the next two tracks, "24 Hours" and "Blood On My Hand", are among the most introverted, reflective and probably underwhelming of the collection. The lovely "Medicine" offers a bit more spark, and despite its airy, languid mood, doesn't shy away from a melancholy, disillusioned lyric ("Now I know it's hopeless and I realize it's nowhere, hell here on my own").

Ultimately, Blind is a dark, introverted record, with a few gothic and even shoegaze touches, moving in fits and starts along a path quite different from the sparkling, crystalline melodies of the debut. A good record, certainly, but a clear step back from a predecessor that was nothing short of dazzling. The album still does reasonably well, and the Sundays set off on a world tour to promote it, before finally enjoying a well-earned break, during which Harriet Wheeler and David Gavurin decide to get married. The couple will go on to have two children.

The Sundays' third and final album doesn't arrive until September 1997, a full five years after its predecessor, and that long wait alone makes clear how little interest Harriet and co. have in the commercial logic that rules the lucrative world of chart-topping pop. The band's new work, again released on Parlophone, is titled Static & Silence, produced by the Wheeler-Gavurin duo, and from its beautiful cover alone (a huge moon suspended in the quiet of an approaching dusk) you can already tell that the gloom of Blind has been set aside, along with the shoegaze-tinged electric edges that defined that record: the Sundays return decisively to folk and to the relaxed moods of their debut. This time, though, the instrumentation is richer and more varied, drawing on contributions from several additional musicians: Dave Anderson and Kev Jamieson (already known as the former leaders of Jim Jiminee) on piano and Hammond organ, Martin Ditcham and Dave Pulfreman on percussion, Audrey Riley on strings and Martin Green on horns.

The manifesto of this new direction is undoubtedly the lovely, lively "Summertime", chosen as the single and met with solid success. The melody is open and pleasant, with Martin Green's horns lending it extra freshness and air, and a romantic, playful lyric that's a far cry from the gloom of Blind ("And it's you and me in the summertime, we'll be hand in hand down in the park/ With a squeeze and a sigh and that twinkle in your eye and all the sunshine banishes the dark"). Romance is also the theme of the delicate "Homeward", which seems to tell of the pain of a lost love ("You've stolen my heart and it hurts me to remember now where'll I go to living alone?/ And a butterfly in the wind is drifting like I do"), while the following track, tellingly titled "Folk Song", in its calm, slow unfolding, seems almost to echo the Joni Mitchell of "Blue". Audrey Riley's strings and a decidedly more electric feel enrich the driving "She", which at times seems to evoke the alt-country of Canada's Cowboy Junkies, as does the ethereal, dreamy "When I'm Thinking Of You", with its beautiful "impressionistic" lyric concealing yet another romantic declaration of love (“Over the rooftops, a plane in the sky, beat of a bass drum, cars passing me by/ Under a bridge dark then back into light, a river of raincoats and a forest of faces/ Still for a moment then red into green, slow shuffling shoes whisper sight unseen/ Row upon row of houses return an empty stare, let me daydream for a little while longer/ Ah, hope I’ll never wake when I’m thinking about you”). Martin Green's horns again take the spotlight on the brief "I Can't Wait", while David Gavurin's electric guitar gives "Another Flavour" extra grit and substance.

After the brooding, pained moods of "Leave This City" (“Drive wherever the roads will take you to, down beside a river, frozen brown/ January days and their scarecrow trees, so cold, feel your ears burn/ See you walking, see you talking/ Feel the city inside you, ooh, leave this city behind you”) and the pleasantly melancholy reflections of the gentle, quiet "In Your Eyes" and "Cry", the album (and the Sundays' story) closes with "Monochrome", a smooth ballad that once again seems to echo the elegant folk of Joni Mitchell, and whose lyric contains references to the album's title and to the moon pictured on its cover ("They're bringing the moon right down to our sitting room, static and silence and a monochrome vision").

Static & Silence is a good record, with a refined, relaxed mood. Even though it occasionally indulges in melancholy, reflective lyrics, the Sundays manage to shake off the dark mood that had perhaps weighed down Blind, though they come nowhere close to recapturing the glory of their unmatchable debut, Reading, Writing And Arithmetic.

At this point, with the same simplicity poured into the grooves of their records, once again proving themselves light years removed from the glittering world of pop stardom, Harriet Wheeler and David Gavurin choose to leave the music world behind and devote themselves to their small family. And so the story of the Sundays comes to a definitive close: all that remains of the English band are three exceedingly elegant albums, a handful of wonderful songs we simply cannot forget, and a few slightly grainy images of a pretty, sometimes faintly sulky girl who, we like to think, wherever she may be today, busy with the small, great things that fill our everyday lives with wonder, still looks back on those long-gone days when she seriously risked (though never truly believed) becoming a pop star. And perhaps, at the thought, a gentle smile lights up her face.

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