The Sundays were the dream-pop greats who disappeared without trace
Share:
Thirty-five years after the release of their debut album, which housed their seminal break-up song ‘Here’s Where the Story Ends’, the band behind a number of pretty, ethereal earworms still inspire adoration – and questions over their decision to drop out of the limelight three records into their career, writes Adam White.
![[Ethereal: Harriet Wheeler of The Sundays performs in Brussels in 1990]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/17/15/GettyImages-1327645891.jpg)
The Sundays seemed to vanish just before Christmas in 1997. That day, on 11 December, a 900-strong crowd in Islington’s Union Chapel stood unaware that they were witnessing the final public performance by one of the Nineties’ dreamiest of pop groups. The band’s mercurial frontwoman Harriet Wheeler, her auburn hair piled atop her head, lilted through a run of pretty earworms that sounded like The Smiths if they were fronted by Bjork. Then, after two encores, Wheeler and her bandmates – bassist Paul Brindley, drummer Patrick Hannan, and her partner and future husband, guitarist David Gavurin – threw up their hands, smiled, and left. Never, at least in pop terms, to be seen again.
A few months later, the dance duo Tin Tin Out covered the group’s “Here’s Where the Story Ends”, a melancholy ballad about lost love that hadn’t quite propelled The Sundays to British chart glory in 1990. They draped the track in synthy chugging and replaced Wheeler with a woman with musical theatre vocals and Anthea Turner’s haircut. It flew to No 1 in the radio airplay charts. If ever there was a sign that The Sundays didn’t quite belong in the musical conversation of 1998, with its Britpop aggro and Woolworths-shelf club hits, it was this.
