It doesn’t get much more cutesy indie-pop than Confetti. If it does, Sunday Records probably released the records involved. As well as several Confetti singles, they also put out releases by the Fat Tulips, Strawberry Story and Po! in their early days. The American-based label, whose postal address situates them in the excellently-named Rolling Meadows, Illinois, were in the early nineties the USA’s go-to imprint for UK indie-pop, before developing further to put out work by all kinds of international popsters (with a slight emphasis on the American and Australian).
Bizarrely, one of Sunday’s early releases was a now somewhat sought-after flexidisc by Slowdive, collecting two perky, tweeish tracks, ‘Beach Song’ and ‘Take Me Down’, on a richly blue-coloured disc in an appallingly minimal sleeve. I guess that Slowdive were right on the very edge of the twee/indie-pop scene at the time, but I doubt Sunday would’ve expected them to go on to sign to Creation and become, in a small way, legendary.
This record’s sleeve highlights one of the odder habits of early-90s indie-pop, the use of extraordinarily faint colours when having a single-colour sleeve printed. I’ve got a lot of records whose cover imagery is barely visible because of this trait; the pop (music) psychologist in me might suggest that this reflects the timid nature of the music within, and the idea of a secret world available only to those ‘in the know’. Or… maybe it was just cheaper to print this way, who knows.
Upon retrieving this record from my shelves and examining the inserts within the sleeve, I see that it may actually be called the Sea Anemon EP, rather than ‘Whatever Became Of Alice And Jane’, which is the title of the lead track. A chink in my otherwise faultless recording of details in my ‘My Records’ spreadsheet? No! Surely not! I blame that printing – it’s almost impossible to make out the EP title on that front cover. Darned indie-popsters!