This is a bit of a weird one. While recently doing some shopping in ASDA, for a laugh I was having a rummage through the cheapo CD rack. The cheapo CD rack is in effect a massive pop graveyard stacked full records that were once hugely popular, but no one wants anymore. There are usually loads of Coldplay, George Michael, Linkin Park and Darius CD's with a smattering of Ministry Of Sound dance compilations. Imagine my surprise when, amongst this dross, I stumbled across the great lost indie-pop album of the eighties, The Sundays 1989 debut Reading, Writing And Arithmetic on sale for around £4.

God it seems like such a long time ago. The Tories had been in power for what seemed like decades, The Smiths had been the biggest and most important indie band in Britain but had imploded leaving a trail of bitter infighting and incrimination, the NME was still relevant, the home recorded cassette was the medium of choice and indie was a state of mind and not a label for a shitty disco. Indie-pop existed in that strange period between punk rock and the rise of Britpop, peaking in the late-eighties following the NME's seminal C86 giveaway. This was the stuff that the spotty indie-boys used to dance to down at the Nelson Mandela bar at the local Poly before Oasis turned up to kick sand in their faces and shag their girlfriends.

The Sundays effortlessly crashed into this scene in 1988, arriving more or less fully formed and being signed after only playing two gigs, following a whirlwind romance with the music press. The core of the Sundays was guitarist David Gavurin and his girlfriend, singer Harriet Wheeler, who met when they were both students at Bristol University in the early eighties. The rest of the band was made up of a rhythm section of bassist Paul Brindley and drummer Patrick Hannan. Although they came with the potentially crippling baggage of massive press hype, The Sundays had the luxury of being able to back this up with one of the best debut singles ever, 'Can't Be Sure' which I think originally came out on Rough Trade. The major labels soon came calling and the band signed to the EMI imprint Parlophone for whom Reading, Writing And Arithmetic was recorded. Because of the rapid advance of this band they really didn't have to do their indie-pop apprenticeship of trudging around the numerous UK toilet venues. The closest they came to this was being sent out on a British tour supporting Throwing Muses who were promoting their Hunkpapa album by playing clubs and Student Unions. I caught up with this tour at Leicester University and boy was it a bizarre one. I had never before, or since, seen the bar of a concert venue completely empty while the support band are playing... The Sundays had definitely arrived.

Reading, Writing And Arithmetic was a huge critical and commercial hit. Following the early press interest, the band had been successfully marketed by their record company as "The Smiths for chicks" (my girlfriend at the time was a Smiths nut and she loved the first Sundays album) and it sold by the truckload (I'm sure that everybody of a certain age has got this record tucked away somewhere in their record collection, manly on vinyl - when this record was released this was still the format of choice for the indie funster). The last time I heard this record was about six years ago when it was playing while I was sat in a Diner in Chicago, hanging out with this girl from Texas, who told me that it was a massive college-radio hit in the States as well. The strange thing about this record is that it has almost been erased from history by some kind of Stalinistic indie revisionism. I really can't understand this, although they were "fast tracked" after only playing two gigs and subjected to vast amounts of initial press hype, its not as if the Sundays were a creation of a cynical record company, a "manufactured" band made up of ugly bloke musicians backing a really pretty singer, like Transvision Vamp. This record was never going to receive "Cult Indie Obscurity" kudos either as it was a major label album with a "big name" co-producer (Ray Shulman, who did Eight Legged Groove Machine for the Wonder Stuff amongst others) but Reading, Writing And Arithmetic is a really good record and sixteen years after its initial release it deserves to be reassessed and rediscovered.

Although Harriet Wheeler was the public face of this band, the driving force and main songwriter was always David Gavurin and Reading, Writing And Arithmetic is a total, full-on janglefest with loads of overdubbed guitars. The reference point for this album was always going to be The Smiths and you can hear why there were always plenty of comparisons, as each track is built up by Gavurin with layers of guitars similar to the way Johnny Marr used to assemble his songs. Lyrically, you could also make comparisons, although nowhere near as good as Morrissey's celebration of the mundane, Harriet Wheeler touches on the same themes of urban isolationism, confusion and despair particularly on songs like 'Hideous Towns', 'Here's Where The Story Ends' and 'I Kicked A Boy', but from a female perspective. Again like Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce from The Smiths, the rhythm section is functional, not spectacular, laying down a solid foundation for the guitar and vocals to build on.

It would be unfair to dismiss The Sundays as purely clones of The Smiths as you can detect influences from loads bands from the eighties (listen hard and you can hear bits of The Cocteau Twins, The Cure and quite bizarrely the Scottish punk popsters Altered Images). This is a really great guitar album and the ten songs on this album are as good as almost anything recorded during this period. However it would be foolish to try and claim that it's a as good an album as the Stone Roses debut, Loveless by My Bloody Valentine or anything by The Smiths, the Sundays debut is in no way near as iconic as any of these records, but a lot of British music from this period really did suck and as a body of work Reading, Writing And Arithmetic stands out from the crowd. Although this was an era when the punk DIY ethos still applied and there was a host of little labels releasing strange little pop records, a lot of the indie-pop bands from this decade really were unnecessarily half-arsed and shambolic. For starters there was the unbearably wet Heavenly, the really dreary Wedding Present and I would rather chew my own face off than ever hear Talulah Gosh again. Even a well respected band like Primal Scream were a bit crap at the time (before they mutated into the drug fuelled, swaggering, rock'n'roll monster they are now, their early records really were quite pitiful). To get an idea of the musical state of play during this time, it is worth tracking down the corking Indipop 1 compilation CD (on Mute Records) that the nice people at Rough Trade Shops have lovingly assembled. Amongst the unfeasibly twee rubbish there are plenty of gems, including the classic 'I Could Be In Heaven' from The Flatmates, the very beautiful 'Landmark' by The Field Mice (not as good a song as "Let's Kiss And Make Up", but you can't have everything), the dirty fuzz-rock of 'You Trip Me Up' by The Jesus And Mary Chain and interesting tracks from Felt, Stephen Merritt's sublime The Magnetic Fields, AR Kane, The Marine Girls (featuring Tracey Thorn, who ended up in Everything But The Girl), McCarthy, Lush and a pre-Loveless psych-pop My Bloody Valentine. There are a few surprising omissions (no House Of Love, Ride, Weather Prophets, Stump, The Loft or The Primitives) but on the whole it is a very accurate musical snap-shot of a very odd time. From a period where the lasting legacy seems to be the influence on bands like Belle And Sebastian (if there is one band who exemplify having the twee knob turned up way past eleven, its Belle And Sebastian), the 40 minutes of the Sundays album certainly stands up to close scrutiny.

The massed, intertwining guitars and Harriet Wheeler's keening vocals dominate the opening track 'Skin & Bones'. This song still sounds fantastic today. Because of the simplicity of the songs and the basic guitar, bass and drums instrumentation there is very little here that sounds particularly dated (it is usually the keyboard sounds and horrible busy slap bass that shows up a records eighties origin). Although there are tons of guitars on this album, the record hasn't been overproduced and sounds quite raw. I suppose you could consider this to be a big budget indie album.

'Here's Where The Story Ends' is the first really great song on the album. Driven mainly by acoustic guitars, this is a moody, melodic song about realising that a relationship is just really wrong and it's now the right time to leave. Although 'Here's Where The Story Ends' was released as a single in its own right, it is now possibly better known for being covered by the shitty dance outfit Tin Tin Out. Even though it's a joyous song about escaping from a really rubbish relationship I'm sure that Tin Tin Out didn't get the point by the way they slapped a big thumping house beat on what is a really delicate, poignant song and I'm convinced that the singer didn't understood what she was singing about, as it was emoted all wrong. Some things are just really wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if they were one of those "English as a foreign language" dance outfits that were prevalent during the nineties.

The first single, 'Can't Be Sure' was the song that justified the initial fuss about the band. Layer upon layer of spiralling, chiming guitars build up over a steady tom-tom riff until the track finally peaks with a swirl of guitars and drums. Amongst this beauty is a barbed social commentary on the state of mid eighties consumerism ("You know desires a terrible thing, the worst I can find/you know desires a terrible thing, it makes the world go blind"). This must be one of the best singles released during the eighties and I'm surprised that it has so spectacularly dropped off the radar. I admit that it's not a groundbreaking record but at least it deserves a mention when the influence of the eighties indie scene is so prevalent in loads of current music.

Although 'I Won' has the most "widescreen" production of the tracks here (there is more than a hint of eighties U2 about this one), it still sounds great. This predates the Alanis Morrisette album Bitter Little Pill by about six years and although the ironical Canadian has a much stronger voice, this track would not sound out of place on her debut album. I'm sure that she had a copy of Reading, Writing And Arithmetic in the house and was taking notes.

'Hideous Towns' and 'You're Not The Only One I Know' and 'I Kicked A Boy' are three tracks that could have started the Smiths copyist thing. David Gavurin has blatantly ripped off Johnny Marr's guitar sound and style and lyrically they stylistically owe a debt to Mr Morrissey. Its understandable that Morrissey and Marr would have a massive influence on late eighties guitar bands but these are the tracks that have dated the most as they are firmly stuck in a certain time and space.

I would have said as recently as three years ago that the liquid funk bassline seriously dated 'A Certain Someone', but now that everyone is copping great big chunks of eighties music it sounds strangely contemporary. This is a sharp, funky workout with Harriet Wheeler sounding uncannily like the bleating munchkin from Altered Images, Claire Grogan. Sweet Harriet would not win many awards for her singing voice, but surprisingly it works in most cases and fits perfectly with the music on the mid tempo and slower songs, however on the faster songs she has a tendency to squeal instead of singing. I must admit that her voice got on my tits after a while and that was the main reason why I didn't buy this album at the time (but having since listened to Joanne Newsom's "Elmer Fudd on helium" singing voice, in comparison Harriet Wheeler now sounds like Aretha Franklin!!!!!)

'My Finest Hour' and 'Joy' is the sound of a million student bedsits. Sounding not unlike late period Cocteau Twins (when Liz Frazer stopped speaking in tongues and started singing in English), 'My Finest Hour' celebrates the pleasure of everyday things and lyrically is as twee as fuck ("My finest hour I've ever known was finding a pound on the underground"). 'Joy' is a melancholic close to the album and as the song builds up to its climax Harriet Wheeler is again possessed by the squawking spirit of Claire Grogan.

Although all of Reading, Writing And Arithmetic is consistently pretty good, the first four Gavurin/Wheeler compositions on this record, although not stunningly original, really are quite brilliant and would stand up against anything from the last twenty years. Following this proved to be quite difficult for the Sundays and the "difficult second album", Blind (from around 1993) received a critical mauling and suffered from poor sales. Times had changed, having been taken round the back and been given a good kicking by Nirvana and then finally finished off by the oafish Oasis, the indie pop era had more or less ground to a halt around by the time the second Sundays album came out. The Sundays, never the most high profile band in the first place, then completely disappeared from sight. Maybe Gavurin and Wheeler had the sense to quit while they were ahead avoiding a slow decline onto the toilet circuit that tends to happen when bands don't know when it's the right time to stop. They probably looked after the money that they made in the deal with EMI and didn't spunk it all on drink and drugs, therefore not needing to play out to pay the bills (anyway they would have made a few quid from the cover of 'Here's Where The Story Ends').

Although Reading, Writing And Arithmetic was released as a straight CD reissue in 1996 (no bonus tracks, alternate versions etc), Blind was deleted years ago and no retrospective compilation albums have ever appeared (possibly because they were not the most prolific of bands, there was very little music to release and during the dance music and britpop boom of the mid nineties, bands like the Sundays could not get arrested). For a couple of months in 1988 The Sundays could have signed to absolutely any label they wanted and maybe if they had signed to an indie label at that time their music would have been shown a little more respect and not swallowed up in a industry dominated by trends and sales figures. If they had stayed with Rough Trade there is no doubt they would have also had a little more credibility and maybe there would not have been such a backlash for the second album - however because of the label's precarious financial situation at the time, I would have thought it would have been impossible for the band to have stayed there. Now in a time when mainly cult bands like Slowdive and Chapterhouse are having career retrospective albums released, the record companies are starting realise what gems they have in their vaults (and more importantly they realise that there is still a market for this music), maybe people will get a chance to appreciate how good The Sundays were, but in the meantime we will have to be satisfied with tracking this great lost album down in our local supermarkets. If you do stumble across this record for £4, its well worth picking up. Me, I'm still trying to find a cheap copy of Sandinista! in Tesco.

Chinese Elvis April 2005