100 Greatest Songs of the 90’s #34 The Sundays – Here’s Where The Story Ends

Released : 1990

As the underground throbbed to the alien textures of acid-house, hip-hop and Madchester, it was still hardly a surprise that the beginning of the decade would prominently feature music that sounded reminiscent of the one before.

Harriet Wheeler and David Gavurin met at university in Bristol and after recruiting Paul Brindley on bass and drummer Patch Hannan, formed The Sundays during an era in which many were still mourning the recent demise of The Smiths. An ecstatically received session for John Peel broadcast in March 1989 helped to trigger a label bidding war and their debut album Reading, Writing and Arithmetic showcased Wheeler’s voice, an ethereal potion of mist, innocence and velvet that evoked the Cocteau Twins Liz Fraser.

So rushed was the process of subsequently bundling them into the studio however that Gauvrin would later claim they suffered from a lack of ready material, but it hardly showed. Here’s Where The Story Ends was their appeal distilled into less than four minutes, a gossamer light examination of a now severed relationship begun under false pretense, ‘And I never should of said/The books that you read were all I loved you for’, sung Wheeler, a study in guilt and regret. With it’s final note came the premonition that it wouldn’t be long before the eighties would lay before everyone, stone dead.