The Sundays — Reading, Writing and Arithmetic: a voice that caught me in an instant, and "Can't Be Sure"

The Sundays' Reading, Writing and Arithmetic (1990).

Entry ten of the From the Shelf series.

A beautiful voice and shimmering guitars. The moment the needle dropped, I was caught.

I found it while writing reviews

I came to this record around the age of twenty. It was right when I had a job writing music reviews — a stretch I touched on in the Richard Ashcroft entry. To write about a record as a whole, I'd listen again and again, open the liner notes, trace my way back through the earlier albums. The Sundays were there, somewhere in all that time.

To be honest, I can't really remember why I picked it up. The sleeve was the kind I'd normally never reach for — a monochrome field of fossil-like spiral shells, packed edge to edge. The second album, Blind (1992), has a cover that's a touch eerier still; the two feel almost like sisters. And yet my fingers reached for it anyway. By the time the record had finished, it had quietly become one I couldn't let go of.

Four of them, a married couple at the core

The Sundays are built around vocalist Harriet Wheeler and guitarist David Gavurin. The two met at Bristol University and started the band in 1988. After moving to London they added bassist Paul Brindley and drummer Patrick Hannan to make a four-piece. Wheeler and Gavurin later married, in 1995.

Reading, Writing and Arithmetic is their debut (1990). An indie debut, and still it climbed to number four on the UK chart. Listen now and it carries itself like anything but a first record.

Why I was drawn to this band is no mystery to me. Chorus-soaked, dewy-fresh guitars. Deep reverb. And a voice of transparent clarity. Gavurin's guitar shimmers in a way that recalls Johnny Marr of The Smiths, only paler, more like watercolour. And over the top, Wheeler's voice rises straight up. The line is thin, but it has a spine. Even now, the first few seconds change the air in the room.

Of all the records by women-fronted bands from abroad, this is probably the one I've loved and played the most.

How to listen — track three, "Can't Be Sure"

My favourite is the third track, "Can't Be Sure."

It came out a year ahead of the album, in 1989, as their debut single. It only reached number forty-five on the chart, yet it was voted number one in John Peel's Festive Fifty that year. Never a big hit, but it lodged itself deep in the people who heard it — and that feel still makes complete sense to me.

A pale, slightly strange little song, its video opening on fruit and a spinning top. Nothing builds to anything grand, and yet you catch yourself playing it over and over. For me, it's always been the way into this album.

That said, this one also suits being played all the way through more than picked at track by track. Once "Can't Be Sure" has caught you, go back to the top and let all ten tracks run through. The whole record carries on like a single pale watercolour.

The memory of that sound is still alive

To my ear, this music keeps the scent of late-eighties neo-acoustic — gleaming guitars and a song sung straight. That texture, I think, has been handed down across the decades.

Where I felt it most strongly was with Pale Waves. When I heard their fourth album, Smitten (2024), The Sundays came back to me in an instant. Ah — that sound is still alive, I thought, and I was simply glad. Pale Waves, and their elders The 1975, belong to the same Manchester / Dirty Hit lineage. The shimmer The Sundays made over thirty years ago is still breathing inside today's young bands. Knowing that alone makes this old debut a little more dear to me.

The air of The Million Dollar Hotel

A personal impression: the air of this album lines up almost exactly with a film that floored me at the time — The Million Dollar Hotel (2000, from a story by U2's Bono). That mix of loneliness and beauty. I love U2's work too, so somewhere down the line I expect I'll write about one of their records.

Back when I wrote music reviews, putting what I loved into words made me love it more deeply. Taking records off the shelf one by one to write about them now is, I think, part of the same thread. Drop the needle, and the twenty-year-old me comes back, riding in on that transparent voice.

Next disc — undecided. I'll open the closet, see what catches my eye, and bring another one out.

Pick another one off the shelf

See The Sundays — Reading, Writing and Arithmetic on Amazon (JP)

That's entry ten of the From the Shelf series.