Sunday Supplement pt 5: Gloomy Sunday - The Associates

It is too. Gloomy, I mean. As a Sunday, it reminds me of a summer in Troon when I was nineteen. Or any age post-fourteen maybe. Windy. Threat of rain at all times. Colder than it ought to be, or at least colder than you remember mid-July being when you were younger than fourteen. You know, when the apples were sweet and the summers were long. Those imaginary, illusory summers of your youth… Well, you get the idea.

I expect summers were the same on the east coast of Scotland as well. Sundays too. Certainly this track from The Associates’ Sulk set would seem to suggest so. Though for all I know it was written in London, so meh. Gloomy Sunday’s are geographically neutral after all, so it’s not as though it really matters.

Everett found a copy of Sulk recently and wrote about it on his Record Rummage blog. He suggests that “The Associates at their best were like Soft Cell minus the romance and great tunes and hunky tattoos and love for a pithy putdown, and at their worst like a seafaring version of Haircut 100” which seems a little harsh. I always found them quite seductively glamorous. Like a couple of poor make-do-and-menders having a ball in a sequin factory. Kids from the council estates stealing Peacock feathers, dreaming of stardust and kissing moonbeams with kiskadees.

'Gloomy Sunday' - The Associates

Comments

[Phil Wilson]

Gloomy Sunday was definitely not written in London! It is and old and, supposedly, cursed song - linked to suicides and general misery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloomy_Sunday

[alistair]

Thanks for this Phil! At the risk of sounding like an uneducated oik (nothing surprising about that really) I will admit that I was not aware of 'Gloomy Sunday' from any source other than The Associates. And since I seldom bother looking at credits I'd just kind of assumed it was an original. As you do. As I do.

Google tells me it is Hungarian and that Billie Holiday recorded it. Now I like Holiday as much as the next person (not as much as i like holidays though) but hmmmm, I cannot say I am overly familiar with her recording. If at all. Does this make me a philistine?

Wikipedia also says that, erm, like a million other people have recorded versions. I havent knowingly heard any of them. Not even Sarah Brightman's. The curse didnt work on her, then...

[Jerry]

re: Sarah Brightman. ...oh, didn't it?

Incidentally, I also thought that I was being harsh on Sulk, reading back. I think I partly changed my opinion last time it got reissued on CD. Or perhaps when I examined my fondness for Wild Beasts. Or perhaps because I haven't actually listened to The Associates for quite a while now and maybe the distance is making me fonder (although I can hear 'Party Fears Two' racing through my head right now, which is quite disorientating cos I'm actually listening to Flipper followed by the Mary Chain).