The Sundays were the dream-pop greats who disappeared without trace
The Sundays seemed to vanish just before Christmas in 1997. That day, on 11 December, a 900-strong crowd in Islington’s Union Chapel stood unaware that they were witnessing the final public performance by one of the Nineties’ dreamiest of pop groups. The band’s mercurial frontwoman Harriet Wheeler, her auburn hair piled atop her head, lilted through a run of pretty earworms that sounded like The Smiths if they were fronted by Bjork. Then, after two encores, Wheeler and her bandmates – bassist Paul Brindley, drummer Patrick Hannan, and her partner and future husband, guitarist David Gavurin – threw up their hands, smiled, and left. Never, at least in pop terms, to be seen again.
A few months later, the dance duo Tin Tin Out covered the group’s “Here’s Where the Story Ends”, a melancholy ballad about lost love that hadn’t quite propelled The Sundays to British chart glory in 1990. They draped the track in synthy chugging and replaced Wheeler with a woman with musical theatre vocals and Anthea Turner’s haircut. It flew to No 1 in the radio airplay charts. If ever there was a sign that The Sundays didn’t quite belong in the musical conversation of 1998, with its Britpop aggro and Woolworths-shelf club hits, it was this.
Today, The Sundays remain a mystery, a cult time capsule with three albums to their name, a chunky, distressed wardrobe that looks wonderful on a Pinterest board, and an army of young fans (musician Lauren Mayberry and the pop group MUNA have cited them as influences, while the 24-year-old bedroom pop artist Beabadoobee has repeatedly covered them). Their disappearance, too, has sparked one of the most enduring armchair-detective digital manhunts that doesn’t involve a dead body. “Harriet Wheeler, where are you?” asks a Twitter account that’s been somewhat fruitlessly speaking to the universe since 2020.
The reasons for all this detective work lie in Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, the band’s first album, which was released 35 years ago this week. A lush collection of autumnal pop, it hops along on spry basslines and jangly guitar melodies, Wheeler’s ethereal vocals seeming to run and run with no destination in mind. Lyrics fade in and out until they’re borderline unintelligible, then snap back into focus – it’s as if she’s Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins halfway through elocution lessons.
Gavurin once said this was deliberate. “The mood of the music determines the diction of the lyrics,” he told The New York Times in 1990. “We don’t tell structured stories or have specific matter that can be unlocked with a magic key. Our lyrics are more a jumble of personal impressions.” You can just about make out themes, though. Often Wheeler is defiant and headstrong, embracing singleness, street-smarts, the faith that everything will work out in the end. But then she pivots, sits sad and alone, picking up the pieces of a twentysomething freakout. “I won the war and I feel proud,” she sings on “I Won”. “But I don’t know why it’s hard to get to sleep in my house.”
Wheeler and Gavurin met while studying at Bristol University in the mid-Eighties, she the daughter of an architect, he the son of an accountant. Reviewing one of their gigs in 1993, The Independent wrote that The Sundays had found a fanbase in student circles, and it’s no real surprise why, their earliest tracks steeped in the pain of young adulthood. These are songs that drift and meander and bristle with confusion – they feel juvenile in the best way, emotions raw and bruises still showing. “It’s that little souvenir of a terrible year / Which makes my eyes feel sore,” goes “Here’s Where the Story Ends”. “Oh, I never should have said the books that you read were all I loved you for.”
Even before we had a single out, we were on the cover of music magazines. There was quite a lot of pressure on our shoulders
David Gavurin, in 1997
If anything might explain why The Sundays were so short-lived, it’s the speed with which they came together. An early gig in 1988 was attended by a number of music journalists and record label representatives, and a bidding war ensued to sign them. A mere year and a half passed between their very first performance as a band and the release of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. “Even before we had a single out, we were on the cover of music magazines,” Gavurin said in 1997. “There was quite a lot of pressure on our shoulders.”
Wheeler, meanwhile, told an early interviewer that The Sundays was, more or less, an odd accident. “There was never a time I wanted to be incredibly famous or in a pop group,” she said. Perhaps the band’s album and single artwork was a further clue: not once do the band actually appear on them. Instead they present abstract images of ammonite fossils, ladybirds and pears.
Still, they were too good to be ignored. Reading, Writing and Arithmetic was a hit, reaching No 7 in the UK album charts, and “Here’s Where the Story Ends” earned regular rotation on US college radio. A second album, the darker hued Blind, followed in 1992. On it was their staggeringly gorgeous cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses”, which would end up soundtracking two pivotal moments in Nineties teen entertainment: Reese Witherspoon being brought to orgasm on a rollercoaster (sure!) in her 1996 thriller Fear, and Buffy and Angel’s slow dance at the high school prom. If you missed The Sundays the first time around, your fandom probably started as a result of one of those.
Static & Silence, released in 1997, would prove to be the group’s last act. It feels like a different Sundays record. Wheeler’s voice is deeper and more solemn. There are trombones and funk synths on the breezy lead single “Summertime”, and a beefier sound overall, sparse dream-pop traded for stadium-friendly soft-rock. The band, now with Wheeler and Gavurin’s first child along for the ride, toured the world with it. Then they called time.
Over the years, many have congregated online to swap tales of seeing the band live and ponder their current whereabouts. There have been sightings of Wheeler doing her shopping in north London supermarkets – or, perhaps, sightings of one of the many young women emulating her style today. Who is to say? David Baddiel, a friend of Wheeler and Gavurin’s, once claimed they’ve never stopped recording, giving credence to the popular urban legend that they’re sitting on years of unreleased tracks. One journalist, for Long Reads, managed to get his hands on the pair’s home address in 2019 and briefly pondered door-stepping them, before thinking better of it.
It leaves the group one of those rare Nineties acts, who had hit albums and major press traction at the time, with minimal online presence in the present day. Beyond Reddit threads asking what happened to them, they are largely confined to their music, the handheld concert footage that’s been posted on YouTube, and defunct fansites bearing lengthy apologies for a lack of updates. There’s a bit of magic to that, though. The Sundays are a band always awaiting discovery, made for the next young person to stumble upon their records and think their words were written specifically for them. And that it’ll be their cry of “Harriet Wheeler, where are you?” that might finally be answered.