The Sundays - Here's Where The Story Ends

 

The sweet spot of my nostalgia is really the '90s, or more to the point, something like 1988 to about 1999. In that period, I aged from 23 to 33, and that sounds about right in terms of how nostalgia fixes itself onto one's twenties. My failing, if I can call it that, was that even as I was experiencing it, I felt a sense of nostalgia about what I was experiencing, something described once by Fredric Jameson as 'nostalgia for the present.' Ever since I was a young boy, I've had an acute sense of the passing of time, that its inexorable, unstoppable, and irreversible qualities gave it a particular bittersweet taste; a kind of big tragedy, perhaps even a farce in the grand vista of life. I'm not sure I had the words to describe this feeling at the time but I remember feeling aware of 'The Past' as an object of lament and loss, even when I was about ten or eleven. I have a memory of reading Neil Young's quote in Decade's liner notes (supposedly from Bob Dylan): "Now that the past is gone," which seemed to distill all those tensions into a pithy quote.

I don't have any particular memory of the Sundays' "Here's Where the Story Ends" but I do definitely remember listening to it in 1990. The music gently evoked the Smiths but not in any kind of gratuitous way but rather more as homage and affectation. That year, especially, was a year of confusion for me. I wouldn't say turmoil (which was 1991) but still not stable. My academic future was in doubt, my girlfriend was interested in others, and I did a lot of drugs. But I did have a very active social life with people whose names I've mostly forgotten. And I absorbed a galaxy worth of new music from every corner of the universe. But even then, the Sundays' track seemed to perfectly soundtrack the feeling that something was ending (as it was) and that "a terrible year" was either just gone, or happening, or around the corner.

I'm sure the fact that the voice was a woman's was an important factor - a waif-like English woman who seemed to inhabit a landscape produced by a Cure-damaged sensibility. In other words, someone, if she was real, I might have had a crush on, or at least been interested to talk to at a party.