looks better than it sounds

a review of sunday girl (not the blondie song) i did for the fly:

Sunday Girl
The Garage, London
06/02/2011

Her namesake may be a first class pop song by Blondie but Sunday Girlhas picked synth over guitar and is more like Ladyhawke than Debbie Harry. Actually, she looks more like Mischa Barton from The OC doing a Chanel advert, but her music is supposed to be the focus tonight, so the details of her modelling/blogging/London Fashion Week DJing career can wait.

Taking the headline slot upstairs at The Garage on, funnily enough, a Sunday, she has a tough act to follow. The small crowd are still catching their breath after a hauntingly beautiful acoustic set by Emma’s Imagination, so when 22-year-old Jade Williams – Sunday Girl is a nickname from her days as a weekend assistant in a pet shop apparently – appears with a pair of unnaturally good-looking male guitarists wearing Italian suits, the crowd are caught off guard. The stage is decorated too, with a couple of carefully lit vintage display cases containing mounted butterflies, making the show look more like a Hugo Boss advert than a gig. But there is (a bit) more to it than just pretty faces. The band launch into a punchy guitar-backed synth feast and William’s soft, almost slurred, vocals lazily float above the music.

Opening track ’24 Hours’ is quickly followed by Sunday Girl’s Diplo-produced first single ‘Four Floors’, as the band charge through a short set with barely a moment for a “hello” or “thanks”. Her latest single – a cover of Laura Branigan‘s spooky 80s power ballad ‘Self Control’ – is quickly recognised by the crowd, but sadly falls rather flat being nowhere near as good as the original version. Sounding like a less-quirky Alison Goldfrapp means that Sunday Girl is not a bad musician and is actually quite pleasant to listen to live. But she blends in far too easily with the growing bunch of fashion-conscious female-lead pop acts doing the rounds right now. Her “scruffy Chanel” chic may have got her voted Company magazine’s ’19th coolest girl’ but for now she’s struggling to match that musically.

i live among the creatures of the night

laura branigan: highly likely to make you go a bit ‘kate bush’ on the dancefloor. even if you don’t remember it precisely you probably enjoyed listening to the soothing tones of ‘self control’ on steve wright in the afternoon at an early age in the 1980s. if you were lucky enough to do so the song would have imprinted itself on the back of your head, remaining there to this day, lurking, ready to provoke swirling arm movements and dramatic singing should you hear the chorus played at a disco.

this 1984 synth soap opera is everything a good 80s pop video should be and more. LB also sang ‘gloria’ as featured in the wonderfilm that is flashdance, thus making her officially all sorts of cool.

so, the news is that ‘self control’ has been covered by sunday girl, rather well, actually. i’m going to her gig on friday 21 jan at the nest in d-d-d-dalston. i live among the creatures of the night…

sunday girl’s previous releases ‘stop hey’ and ‘four floors’ while not as good are equally as en trend (i.e. pure synth pop with a pretty face and an acceptably lo-fi posh voice) so i’m sure she will be famous soon, or at the very least won’t look out of place in e8.