It's gray and raining outside... it has been all day. It's kind of chilly spring rain, without that smell of earth yet 'cause it's still too cold. For some reason it's days like this that get me digging for my Sundays cds, (though this one I've appeared to have lost... never fear... farqwart has remedied this for me, like so many other things, so I could do my write up.) I can't tell you why the Sundays come out to be played on rainy days, because I was introduced to them during the dog days of summer, after my senior year in high school. I took my nasty math classes in July to avoid the hell of taking them at university. Of course, these classes were a special kind of hell of their own, but it was concentrated hell, from seven until ten in the morning for a month- that was a feat in and of itself, I can assure you. I am not a morning person and me pondering arithmetic in the morning is not a pretty thing.
I met a raven-haired pisces vixen in my class whom I immediately fell in love with from across the room. She, in her black and white striped stockings and vintage dress, complete with a pixie haircut, smote me in one roll of the eyes. We immediately hit it off and we were inseperable all summer. Such a character... from the time until she was sixteen until she was twenty she wore nothing but pink. She had a blue pacer named 'Groverpacer', and she had chucked everything and moved to New York where she'd been for the past two years living on tuna fish and saltine crackers and working at Macy's. We'd go to class in the morning, cruise the second hand stores and eat lunch, and go do our homework and flirt with the math tutor in the afternoon. Yes. We needed that much help. She was still a virgin, but she'd had toe sex, which, as we all know, doesn't count. She'd finally decided to come back home to Kansas to go to school. We had the same taste in boys, though she liked hers much paler than I. She was the coolest chick I'd ever met. She introduced me to sushi. She introduced me to red lipstick. And yes indeed, she introduced me to the Sundays.
Reading, Writing and Arithmetic was released in 1989 from Rough Trade Records, the same label as The Smiths (they too hail from Manchester). Harriet Wheeler has a voice that is innocent, if distant, yet ethereal and powerful, as compared to later work on Static and Silence, where she gains a much more emotional, warm roundness to her voice, (maybe it was motherhood that made the difference, as she and David have since had a child). She turns the phrases of the Sundays' lyrics with such charm. They also have this very ironic and satirical 'voice' to their songs, such as I kicked a boy...They were, at the time, compared to 10,000 Maniacs and Cocteau Twins and had a great deal of critical success and moderate commercial success. Here's where the story ends had moderate success as a single. Their sound is very basic, with little accompanying strings or other instruments save acoustic guitar, low tone electric, bass and drums. The acoustic guitar strums the foundation pretty much on every track, with floating electric guitar licks on top, giving them this weirdly grounded yet lilting sound... they're one of those groups with an immediately identifiable sound.
oh I never should have said
the books that you read
were all I loved you for ...
and did you know desire's a terrible thing, the worst that I can find...
and did you know desire's a terrible thing, but I rely on mine...
did you know desire's a terrible thing, it makes the world go blind...
but if desire, desire's a terrible thing you know that I really don't mind...