The Sundays, "Can't Be Sure"

As I start writing this post I have Rio playing on the turntable, and seven of my daughter’s friends are singing, giggling, and shrieking downstairs. All this has me thinking of the many girls I knew growing up who were in love, jointly and severally, with the members of Duran Duran. I think back on the time a family friend summoned me to examine a vast collage of photos, clipped from Tiger Beat and like periodicals, that she had assembled on her basement floor. Easily sixty square feet of Simon, Nick, and John photos, with Andy and Roger nipping in around the edges.

That was a lot of work, I thought.

In the mid-’80s my friends and I used to spend summer nights hanging out in the half-built houses on our street. After the building crews had finished their shifts and we’d finished dinner, we would meet up and roam around inside these skeletal structures, passing from room to room between the studs of unplastered walls, kicking back in the driver’s seats of the bulldozers and backhoes parked just outside in the dirt. The girls down the road came out, too, to hang with us, but just you try to get them talking about anything but Duran Duran.

This was an epidemic in Ohio, and I expect most anywhere else in America around this time: every girl everywhere positively gushing about these drop-dead gorgeous British rockers in their sharp clothes. All the sighing and swooning and other displays of devotion might have worn us boys out over the four-year peak of Duran Duran’s career, but we weren’t going to fault the band for this. At any given moment, we were just as likely as any of the girls to have their tapes playing on our Walkmen. The songs were great, the videos were mesmerizing, and the players had style. If Simon et al. had the undying love of every girl aged 12 to 18 in the 44484 and beyond, they probably had earned it.

I writing all this because I’ve had my own desperate crushes on rock and pop singers over the years. That’s what this post is about, at least in part, and I figure if I take steps from the jump to both-sides this question, I’ll have inoculated myself against that grim and Puritanical slice of the digital commentariat that stands ready to accuse me of objectifying women.

Or maybe I won’t have, given the First Law of the Internet, which is that if you’re so troubled and reckless as to use digital media to express how you feel, then you can expect to be threatened with rape and murder by the political right and/or shamed into oblivion by the left. Lucky for me, then, that my writing commands next to no attention (see “Here Comes Alice”). It’s that fact, plus the armor of those earlier paragraphs about Duran Duran, that have steeled my nerves to talk to you all today about a certain Harriet Wheeler of Reading, United Kingdom—and more specifically, what she meant to an earlier iteration of me thirty years ago.

To be sure, there were crushes before Harriet. We can thank MTV for these and start with Belinda Carlisle, formerly of the Go-Gos, which you knew, and the Germs—which you didn’t. “Mad About You” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” (Apple Music, Spotify) weren’t exactly great works of art—contrast the Go-Gos’ “Our Lips Are Sealed” (Apple Music, Spotify), which certainly was—but the Belinda Solo Project was perfectly conceived to grab the attention and imagination of a certain class of pubescent Midwestern male.

Aimee Mann’s belittling boyfriend in “Voices Carry” (Apple Music, Spotify) was a clown and a villain, and three minutes was too long to wait for her to call it quits with him. Over four decades I’ve watched that video probably hundreds of times. The climactic moment in Carnegie Hall—“HE SAID, ‘SHUT UP!’ HE SAID ‘SHUT UP!’”—hits me squarely between the eyes every time. He never deserved you, Aimee. And he never will.

There would be crushes after Harriet, too: Curve’s Toni Halliday in my shoegaze days, then Louise Wener from Sleeper, when Britpop landed. But Harriet Wheeler was always The One. So let’s talk about Harriet and her band.

Between 1988 and 1993—that is, the period of time spanning their first two releases, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic and Blind, and supporting tours of the US and UK—the Sundays were the standard-bearers for hyper-English melancholy arpeggiated guitar rock. This was admittedly a very specific niche, but the Smiths had just vacated it, and demand was well in excess of supply. Enter the Sundays to stake their own diffident claim on this space, with their intensely melodic discursions on English country life. And at the mic, front and center, if never fully comfortable there, stood tiny Harriet Wheeler, with her hair pulled up in a bun, wearing a cardigan sweater.¹

The Sundays eschewed Smiths-style city melodrama (“Meet me in the alley by the railway station”), favoring instead the intrigue of closed spaces—a washed-out aesthetic of wallpapered small rooms and still life arrangements. Contrast the cult-retro B-movie stills featuring in the Smiths’ cover art with the natural beauty of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic’s fossils design. Pears, intact (YouTube) and half-eaten (YouTube), are a recurring motif in Sundays videos, I suppose because the light hits them in a certain way, and this makes for a pleasing composition.

In their lyrical content, the Sundays aimed for a wistful and plaintive Romanticism, wherein the singer ultimately aspired to nothing more than an easy life and a peaceful death (Apple Music, Spotify). Harriet might sing about a war won in a sitting room (Apple Music, Spotify), or the time she—justly, she believed—kicked a boy ’til he cried (Apple Music, Spotify). She might join the army, but it’s the Salvation Army, and if it’s the service, it will be the civil service (Apple Music, Spotify). This is as far as her derring-do takes her. And as I look back, it may have been exactly this that made her so appealing to me: while exotic in a certain way (English, with the loveliest accent imaginable), she seemed reachable. If she weren’t already married to her equally lovely guitarist, David Gavurin, an introvert like me might have had a fighting chance with her.

I know Dave Gavurin is lovely because I met him on West 43rd Street in New York, just outside the Academy, after the Sundays’ show there on February 25, 1993. I had taken the train up from Princeton and gone to the show alone, for lack of any college friends who gave a damn about evocative sad-pretty English music. Giving such a damn was not a precondition for entry to the gig, as it turned out. The Sundays had scheduled this tour right in the thick of grunge’s overthrow of alternative rock (see “Burning Farm”). As a result, there were several fans on hand that night who felt compelled, and for that matter entitled, to crowd-surf during decidedly non-rocking songs. One especially noxious offender—he had his shirt off and was in the habit of sitting up and extending his arms over the crowd like a Christ figure—flopped over into the area where I was standing. Nobody was particularly interested in catching him, and when he slammed to the ground, he came up swinging at everybody in his range.

At this point Harriet signaled to her bandmates to stop playing. All right: stop the fucking fighting, she said. We can’t continue playing if you’re going to fucking fight.

The crowd roared its approval, partly because they endorsed her logic, but certainly, too, because it was a novelty to hear the unassuming Harriet Wheeler lobbing F-bombs over a live mic.

On YouTube there are a handful of recordings of shows from the Sundays’ 1993 tour. I looked hard there and elsewhere, including on the Internet Archive, for a recording of that February 25 gig at the Academy, so I could hear again exactly what Harriet said during this incident. Alas, there is no such extant recording. Even so, I am certain I heard at least two of those F-bombs.

After the show, I got to talking to two guys my age who went to school somewhere in Manhattan. They were staking out the side entrance waiting for the band to come out. I remember we talked about music, and about the various imported English magazines we read to keep caught up with developments in the alternative rock America hadn’t yet killed. Select Magazine is a bit pricey for us. We read Q, and so on. Then Dave Gavurin stepped out the side door. He spoke with the three of us for a solid ten minutes, during which time Harriet herself passed by on her way to the tour bus. Eventually he broke off the conversation, but not before taking our names and assuring the three of us that we’d be on the guest list for their next show, also at the Academy, the following night.

I arrived back on campus so consumed with the Sundays that I went directly to Kate—then my girlfriend, now my wife—to reiterate that I loved her dearly and was fully committed to our relationship, subject to this new caveat, that if I had the opportunity, I would leave her for Harriet Wheeler. Without a moment’s hesitation. Nothing about this declaration was sensible, but I’ll note here one especially obnoxious aspect of it, which is that Dave Gavurin’s generosity toward me had only fanned the flames of my desire to cuckold him. Still, love is love. In any case, Kate just rolled her eyes.

The very next day, jihadists tried to blow up the World Trade Center. My parents were in Princeton visiting from Ohio, and they insisted that I not go back into the City that night for my second Sundays show. It would be the definition of hubris to suggest that Kate might have placed a call earlier today to that guy in the Santa hat, putting wheels in motion specifically to ensure that I didn’t reconnect with her chief rival. So I won’t suggest it.

I did catch up with the Sundays again on the same tour, when they played the Agora in Cleveland later that summer. I advised my Ohio gang that if we lingered outside after the gig, we would likely have a chance to meet the band. Yet again Dave greeted his fans warmly, and I reminded him we’d met in New York. (I felt like I needed to explain to him why I hadn’t made it to the second show, after he’d taken the trouble to put me on the set list.) Harriet appeared, and with a Sharpie she signed the back of the tour T-shirt I had bought back in February and was wearing that night. You’ll need to squat down, she said, laughing. Because you’re too fucking tall. Whether these were her exact words, I can’t say. But I specifically remember a third incongruous F-bomb issuing from Harriet Wheeler’s lips in this moment.

I still have that tour T-shirt, and now that I think of it, it had pears on it, too. The band really did love their pears.

If they had really wanted to, the Sundays could have been huge. I know this because another band cribbed heavily off their model and sold 40 million records worldwide. That band was the Cranberries, and their sound and aesthetic was meaningfully distinguishable from the Sundays’ only by the slight Celtic inflection of their instrumentation and Dolores O’Riordan’s voice. And maybe that was just enough to put them over the top.  Maybe the Cranberries tied together the two hanging strands of the Sundays and Sinéad O’Connor, and that closed-off circuit powered their ascent to stratospheric heights. For my part, and as much as I love Dolores’s vocals, I’ll take a song sung by Harriet Wheeler any day.

Track 3 on the Cranberries’ first record is a song called “Sunday” (Apple Music, Spotify). Play it, then play quintessential Sundays track “Here’s Where the Story Ends” (Apple Music, Spotify) and tell me what you think. The obvious similarity, plus the fact that the word “Sunday” appears nowhere in the lyrics of the Cranberries track, leads me to believe that Dolores et al. chose that song’s title as an homage to their forebears from Bristol. I’ve subscribed to this theory for thirty years, and you can’t tell me I’m wrong.

The Sundays song I picked for this post is “Can’t Be Sure” (Apple Music, Spotify). “Here’s Where the Story Ends” was the obvious choice and is nothing less than perfect, but “Can’t Be Sure” was always the one for me. So much so that I wrote a poem about it for a creative writing class in college. A poem about a song: I actually did that. I dug it out of my Dropbox just now. The file’s last-saved date was May 31, 1992—that’s so old I had to use a special MS Word “recover text” function to get it to open. Not as bad a read as I expected, but still I won’t be copying any of it in here. Maybe it’s bonus content for readers who want to pay me a ton of money.

In any case, what I was trying to do then is what I am trying to do now, and that’s to say a legit word or two about what Harriet, the Sundays, and this song mean to me. Not sure I’ve fully delivered, then or now.

I’ll say it again: the Sundays could have been massive. But I think they landed right where they wanted, and needed, to be. Modestly successful, critically well-regarded, writers and performers of some of the loveliest music you’ll ever hear and will always remember. Rumor is Harriet and David still make music together, but it’s up to them whether the rest of us will ever get to hear it. They seem content enough in their retirement, for sure, surfacing only rarely to give an interview and politely deflect inquiries about a reunion. So they’re not exactly the J.D. Salingers of the late 1980s indie rock scene. They’re just content not to be available.

That very feeling—contentment in the present moment—is exactly what I understand “Can’t Be Sure” to be about:

Did you know desire’s a terrible thing? It makes the world go blind. It’s my life, and while I can’t be sure what I want anymore, it will come to me later.

So it seems to me that David and Harriet practice exactly what they preach.

I like to imagine 2023’s version of these two comfortably ensconced in a modestly-sized flat, maybe a summer cottage by the sea. It’s late afternoon and they’re taking tea together, with cut wildflowers on the table between them in a vase.  Sunlight beams diagonally across the kitchen through the slats of their window blinds.  There’s a guitar stood up against the wall in the corner of the room.  Harriet softly hums a tune as she reaches for a piece of sliced pear.  David looks at her, they smile, and here’s where the story ends. [guitar solo to final chord]

---

**EDIT: July 5, 4:40 PM. I was on Facebook a moment ago, and The Algorithm served up a Post-Punk.com post from June 26, wishing Harriet Wheeler a Happy 59th Birthday. I had no idea I’d published this post on Harriet Wheeler’s birthday, and that’s freaking crazy.

1. And a dress, dress, dress she’d been sick on (Apple Music, Spotify).