VOX November 1994

        The Sundays              
        -----------              
      
1990 was the year of The Sundays, proclaimed VOX in January 1991.
The band had topped John Peels  'Festive 50' with 'Can't Be Sure', survived
two tours of America, a mobbing in Japan and a gush of critical acclaim for
their debut album, Reading, Writing And Arithmetic. And then........silence.
Not so much as a seven-inch spot on 'Going Live' or a public sighting in the
U.K. It took more than two years before the band re-emerged with their second
album 'Blind', only to disappear from sight again.

 "We were never going to be teen idols or at the forefront of pop", reflects
 guitarist Dave Gavurin, who, two years on from 'Blind', would rather not
 speculate on the release date of their third LP. "We are pathetically slow
 about what we do, but thats just the way we are."
 "Even if we wanted to whip up everything into a froth, we wouldn't have been
 able to," chips in The Sundays' silver tonsilled vocalist, Harriet Wheeler.
 "The hardest thing was to say no, to shun the publicity, but we reckoned
 people would get sick of us. A band like Oasis, for example, will probably
 have to play the publicity machine pretty hard. It may work really well for
 them; it certainly would not have worked for us. If that means people forget
 us in the mean time, then that's tough shit on us".

    Nevertheless, a resurgence of interest may well be forced upon them, with
the inclusion of the great 'lost' single "Here's Where The Story Ends" on the
soundtrack to 'Blown Away'. What if the soundtrack catapulted them back into
the public eye, as happened to The Proclaimers last year?
  "We've got mixed feelings about it being released as a single," muses Dave.
  "When the first album came out, we didn't release a single, as we were 
  already trying to play ourselves down......"
  "People were saying it would go Top Ten," interjects Harriet. "And we were
  just crapping ourselves."
  "I think at that point we were getting a bit phased by it all," continues
  Dave. "But now it's a bit of a shame that people didn't get to hear it as 
  a single."

Both Sundays concede, however, that what the public really needs is new 
material. They talk of several songs "on the boil", of trying to finish the
dozen songs that are written and joke about releasing their next album to
coincide with the millennium. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that in America
the band are signed to Geffen, The Stone Roses' label.
 "At least not having a release date prevents all that 'are they or aren't they'
 fuss that has surrounded the Roses," says Dave. "We don't want to put out 
 anything as a stop-gap. We feel that we sort of fucked up on the production
 of our albums so far, so we want to be totally satisfied this time. Of 
 course," he adds, "our main ambition is to get our album out before The Stone
 Roses."


Transcribed by:
Paul Coultish 30 January 1996
tec94039@mech.port.ac.uk