Melody Maker, October 24, 1992
An Interview with The Sundays

When "Reading Writing and Arithmetic" first charmed the souls of 
sensitive individuals everywhere, the world was a different place. 
Manchester rules, the Soviet Union was intact, and people still took 
Morrissey seriously. Three years on, everything's changed. Except The 
Sundays, of course, whose long awaited second album, "Blind", is a thing 
of typical sombre beauty. Andrew Mueller reports.

The Sundays, a north London four piece based around a north London 
couple (who make records about as twee as life) are back you'll have 
noticed. Those of you who think that birthday's, great Test matches, 
Riccardo Patrese Grand Prix wins and transfixing infatuations in general 
would be just as implausibly thrilling if they happened every week can 
go ahead and consider this to be a problem if you like. What actually 
matters is that "Blind" , The Sundays' second album, is a thing of great 
and laudable - and here's a word you haven't heard a lot of this year - 
grace. Can we we still say that ? The gorgeously meandering tunes and 
words on "Blind" have this way of complementing each other almost 
subliminally, like ballroom dancers in blindfolds. I don't put it like 
that when they turn up. They'd only laugh.

Actually, its a while before I get a chance. For a start Harriet and 
David are late, which I am predisposed to thinking is kind of cute, all 
things considered. Secondly, when you interview The Sundays, you bring 
something to the party, or else. After an hour or several, they'll know 
more about you than your parents. There is nothing that will distract 
the pair of them, David especially, into pursuing any stray tangent, 
however fleetingly offered, to a conclusion. Today, for example, they've 
arrived in this salubrious Islingtion pub to find their interrogator 
reading the first volume of Shelby Foote's history of the US Civil War. 
So we're almost into the dregs of the first round before David will 
accept that McClellan was perhaps more than necessarily cautious, that 
only Jackson's incomprehensible idleness during the Sevens Days stopped 
the Rebels winning it in 1862, and that Lincoln was an insufferable 
meddler. With desperation rapidly setting in, I manage to observe - 
while David draws breath - that they've just been on a promotional trip 
to America.

 "Yes," says David, quickly, like he says everything. "They think we're 
cute little English people."
Don't you ever - warming to a theme, see - feel the same about them ? 
Wouldn't you like America better if it was just a pointless little 
European principality where you could go and have a good laugh without 
having to worry about that these people run the world ?
"Ah, well, that's interesting. Because I think that for whatever reason 
- and I think it comes across in the music occasionally - British people 
have this sort of arrogance about Britain. I think what makes Britain 
interesting is its declining importance, accompanied by the continued 
self-belief of the British."
A phone rings.
"That'll be Morrissey," says Harriet, to mild uproar.
So, erm, then - the hack sees a straw and then lunges - how important 
is, um, being, not to put too fine a point on it, English, to you, then, 
eh what ?
David shoots me a priceless look. "Car, that's a bit of a seamless link, 
Andrew."
Well, I had to do something. We'll end up having a conversation if we're 
not careful.

They've been asked about the Englishness thing a thousand times before, 
of course, and at least once before by me. But that's okay, because I 
was in Australia at the time and hence thought their implied heritage at 
least as exotic, as ooh, rain. They answered then, as they do now, that 
they're English by default, by virtue of the fact that they're not 
American, Spanish, middle Aztec. Whatever. The other thing they've been 
asked a thousand times is, where have they been ? Why so long ? When 
"Reading Writing and Arithmetic" strummed the heartstrings of a 
generation all those, well, months ago, Berlin had a wall, Happy Mondays 
had hits, Dennis had Rula. Clearly, it's a question that Harriet and 
David are going to be sick of hearing. Fiendishly cleverly, I address 
this issue by asking them how sick they are of hearing it.
"I think," decides Harriet, "we find it a bit wearing, eventually. I 
mean, no one's said to Neneh Cherry, `Where have you been for three 
years, goddammit ?', But then no one's said `Goddammit' to us either, 
so".
Was it that you wanted to just hang back and live a bit, to have some 
experiences worth writing about ?
"There wasn't much time for that, in fact. I don't think we feel like we 
write from that kind of inspiration anyway. I don't think we feel like 
we need to experience as such to translate into music. It just 
translates itself somehow onto a tape and feeds off itself. The lyrics 
come afterwards, from us knocking them about and taking the music from 
the music that's come into being. There, that was very concise, wasn't 
it ?"
What they did on their holiday was: toured the world a couple of times, 
got quite big in America, watched their label go bust, went looking for 
another deal, managing themselves the whole time, moved house, wrote a 
brilliant album, 11 deep cuts of bittersweet ennui. Try it yourselves 
sometime, see how fast you can do it. 

"Blind" is such a great record because if manages to deal with ordinary 
feelings with extraordinary eloquence. Somewhere, somehow, almost 
uniquely in their field. Harriet and David have grasped the fact that 
our lives aren't, in the glare of reality, the grand emotional 
melodramas that we like to think they are. That the only feeling that 
really hangs with us constantly, is a vague, barely definable 
discontent, a grey mist of dissatisfaction. "Blind is an album that 
understands that however much we may all fancy overselves as hamlets, 
agonizing centre-stage over earth-jarring dilemmas and catastrophes that 
would destroy a lesser person, the company we truly keep, day to day, is 
that of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. That we're bit players anguishing 
over ultimate irrelevancies. 

"Blind" is real life as wry poetry. It's also one of the saddest albums 
I've ever heard. There is a duet of astonishment at this suggestion.
"No one else has said that," says David.
"I hope you mean that in a nice way," Reproves Harriet.
"But," continues David, "sad  doesn't have to mean miserable, does it ? 
Because miserable sounds a bit grumpy."
Oh, no. I didn't mean like you were stamping your feet or anything.
"Well, touching then," offers David, regarding me as though I'd just 
announced my imminent accession to the throne of Romania. "How about 
that ?"
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I'm trying to get at the pervading 
atmosphere of unhappiness and bewilderment. Or bewildered unhappiness, 
really.
"Well," he says, laughing again, "as you can see, we're two very unhappy 
and bewildered people."
Ah, but you must be, surely. Your favourite lyrical devices are I-don't-
knows and I-don't-understands. You use more question marks than 
fullstops. You know what I mean.
"I think" announces Harriet, eventually, "that bewilderment might not be 
totally out of context, if we talk about the lyrics. But I think we 
feel, and have felt before, that there's a musical thread that can tap 
into those - poignant. I guess - halfway happy, halfway sad ...em..."
David to the rescue.
"The way we've brought up is to get on, to achieve, to do something with 
our lives. And if you, through, drink or music or whatever, are kind of 
released from the restrictions that your normal life places on you, 
there's a sense of being drawn to those feelings which are sad, but 
somehow... rich."

The last track on "Blind" is a song called `Medicine". It's a gutting 
evocation of  of loneliness, disillusionment and bitter self-loathing 
that combines Harriet's golden voice, careworn, but glorious, with 
David's guitar knelling where it usually chooses to chime. Aside from 
being easily my favourite song of the current calendar, it's about as 
grim a finale as could be imagined. Not content with the parade or 
wretched imponderables that we've already been presented with, we get a 
reminder - "Don't go imagining that time is medicine".
Bloody hell, kick a chap while he's down.
David and Harriet laugh again.
"At one stage," begins David, seeing a bright illustration of his band's 
ethos beaming from the end of the tunnel, "that lyric, though I can't 
remember exactly how it was phrased, was going to say that time did heal 
all wounds. But that's often the way when we write. We don't start off 
with a set view of what it's going to be, and often there'll be a point 
where it could go either way. In the same way, you can think at 
different points every day, let alone your life, that time will or won't 
change things. And I don't think it's a cop-out to have one. It can't be 
that simple, because life can't be pinned down like that."
Would you agree that you're being more ambiguous this time out ? You 
told more stories on "Reading...", that did things rather than felt 
them. There's not a lot of finding pounds on the underground going on on 
"Blind".
"No," agrees Harriet. "Very few and far between."
"Ah," leaps David, "but did you think that was an up moment ?"
In itself, yes. Coupled with the qualifier, "The finest hour I've ever 
known was...", no.
"That's brilliant though. I thinks that's a band could ever hope for, 
that their music won't be pinned down to I-can-only-play-it-when-I'm-
happy or I-can-only-play-when-I'm-sad. Because then you just become and 
item that people can use conveniently to slot into their moods. And you 
want it to have its own life, that can work on people in different ways 
at different times."
So does it upset you if I say that I can't ever imagine listening to 
"Blind" when I'm happy ?
"I suppose it should do, really, shouldn't it. But I don't know what's 
inside your head apart from a big boggly brain. But obviously everybody 
thinks in different ways, and if you find it depressing, fine."
A shrug, a swift gulp of lager.
"Just cheer up, for gawd's sake."

There's more of course. When David and/or Harriet get one, there always 
is. When I rang David from Sydney in the (southern) summer of 1990, and 
interview scheduled for half and hour ran to nearly two. The last time 
I'd bumped into them, after Throwing Muses' blistering Town and Country 
show, David had launched into a lengthy, highly drunken and barely 
comprehensible tirade about just about everything ever. The night before 
the interview, David had called to work out where we should meet. Even 
this apparently basic task involved nigh on 30 minutes of scattergun 
conversation.

And so we drove off for a curry, cab it down to the Underworld to catch 
swaggering glamourpusses Catwalk, rope in anyone interesting who's 
passing (Tony Halliday and Alan Moulder give up after the first three 
places we try are shut, the jessies), and head up Camden High Road to a 
highly dubious drag club. As an upshot of the above, David and I have an 
animated disagreement about the Death Of Text, I win The Heroines' 
guitarist a pink plastic whistle on a string via an improbable coin-
operated game, and Harriet owes me 20 pounds.

So they're back, and "Blind" is an album that will see through you, 
through us all, with a withering clarity. It occurs, though, this far 
down the page, that the above few hundred words may have painted our 
heroes in unfairly dark shades, cast them unfairly as born-again doom-
mongers. In order to avoid doing them this grace disservice, I'll leave 
you with the following exchange, recorded earlier, as the most 
representative I can find of what of I know of their characters. 
We're talking about the words on the first album.
David: "We had lots of letter about, you know, `So Harriet, did you 
actually kick a boy?' And in fact that way my line, as it were."
Harriet: "Did you ? I don't believe I ever asked you."
David: "No, Or if I did, it was probably a late tackle."


Transcribed by: 
gks@mod.dsto.gov.au (Grant Schwarz)