The Comedy of Errors: Po! - Sunday Never Comes Around (2 May 1992)

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The brilliance of Po! is that they walk the tightrope between charm and twee and never seem to fall onto the wrong side of the line.  Their sound may, to the lazily cynical, come across like the worst of the Peel show: jangly, twinkly, too lightly melodic - but it cuts deep and does it gorgeously.  There’s experience in Ruth Miller’s vocals and writing that gives Po!’s light touch arrangements a sense of steel about them and rewards further listening.  I have already raved about Look for the Holes, one of the great post-breakup songs and while Sunday Never Comes Around doesn’t scale those heights, it succeeds in capturing a mood of longing for someone who can’t be there and frustration at the conundrum of time passing so quickly when lovers are together and standing still when they are apart.  It is, in many respects, a perfect song for long-distance lovers and there are many periods in my life when I could really have benefitted from knowing this song.  I would have held it like a comfort blanket while waiting to journey to places as diverse as Lampeter, Uxbridge, Farnham and Henly-in-Arden in order to hook up with girlfriends who fate had placed 5 or 6 hours away from Falmouth.

Po! pretty much ran their own show by releasing their material through their own Rutland Records label, but I think they could have been bigger.  Unfortunately, they sound too close to The Sundays and in the desperate state that mainstream British music was in in the early 90s, you needed to be far beefier than Po! were to enjoy the potential acclaim of Top of the Pops, daytime Radio 1 and magazine covers.  I can’t help feeling that the wider public at large were cheated by not getting to know this lovely band better.  However, it fell to Dubstar to take Po!’s sense of reflective, regretful romanticism, sprinkle it with beats, synths and a similarly sweet voiced/pragmatic minded vocalist in order to give the mass audience the calming therapy they needed for wounded hearts and impatient minds.



Videos courtesy of Leicester Music (Po!) and Dubstar.