FRICTION NYC

I can’t believe that it’s been ten years since the release of Radiohead’s OK Computer. I can clearly remember the day I bought the record from The Wall (remember that place?) and drove around endlessly listening to the album, which eventually became the soundtrack of my summer. When I think of Paris, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t Montmartre or Champs-Élysées or the Eiffel Tower or the Seine, it’s Radiohead (and warm Heineken’s on the Metro). My Walkman, loaded with OK Computer was glued to my hip during my first foray into foreign lands and it seemed everywhere I looked, there was a video of “Paranoid Android” playing on a TV.

As the summer of 1997 came to a close and another school year commenced, The Sundays “Summertime” (released at the most inopportune time) began streaming across the airwaves and provided a cure for my summer hangover. Like most music of the time, I discovered the band on Matt Pinfield’s 120 Minutes (click that link for a full list of videos played on the show since 1986). Harriet Wheeler was both physically and vocally mesmerizing in the video for “Summertime” complete with its fruit stand scenery. The breezy and jangly guitars of the single made the perfect backdrop for Wheeler’s sweet ethereal vocals, “Its you and me in the summertime/We’ll be hand in hand down in the park/With a squeeze and a sigh and that twinkle in your eye.”

The Sundays formed ten years prior to the release of 1997’s Static & Silence in London with a lineup consisting of Wheeler and guitarist David Gavurin, before the addition of bassist Paul Brindlye and drummer Patrick Hannan. Influenced by dream-pop bands like the Cocteau Twins, the quartet released the 1989 single “Can’t Be Sure” which received John Peel’s stamp of approval.

The band followed up a year later with their debut full-length Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. With Reading’s single, “Here’s Where the Story Ends,” the band saw mainstream success in both the U.S. and U.K. The album is a abundant dose of light and airy dream pop in which Wheeler lends her helium-pitched vocals to Gavurin’s shimmering guitar creating an expansive sound. Due to Rough Trade’s going out of business in 1991, the record was out of print in the U.K. from until 1996, when the band signed with Parlophone and it was reissued (allmusic). Wheeler and crew returned in 1992 with the long-player Blind, which didn’t really expand on the band’s sound too much but was received well among fans.

In 1997, after a five-year hiatus, during which time Wheeler and Gavurin got married and had a child, The Sundays resurfaced with Static & Silence and the hit single “Summertime.” This was my first introduction to the band which coincidentally was the group’s last recorded output and has since been dormant. Check out the inspiring “Hideous Towns” from Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic below.

[MP3]: The Sundays  ”Hideous Towns”

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