Crazy On The Weekend (2025 Remaster) (RSD 25)

Originally released in 1998 on Independiente Records, the record was a Top 10 Album Of The Year in MOJO and Top 15 in Uncut magazines at the time. This is the sole studio album from Burton-on-Trent based Sunhouse, Crazy On The Weekend captured the melodic beauty and gritty yet affecting soul that made the group so beloved despite only existing for a matter of years.

Working with producer John Reynolds (who also played drums on the original sessions and has remastered the album for this release). Sunhouse always recorded outside regular studios, creating Crazy On The Weekend in Reynolds’ Notting Hill home which added a unique atmosphere to these recordings. Built around the band’s warm acoustics and subtly impassioned vocals, gentle washes of strings, deep resonating organs and, on closing track Hard Sun, backing vocals from Sinéad O’Connor, added a golden glow to Sunhouse’s already moving songs.

Late singer Gavin Clark would go on to work with UNKLE and form the band Clayhill, but Crazy On The Weekend represents one of his most fully formed artistic expressions, as Sunhouse created an album that, though acclaimed on release in 1998, has subsequently become something of an overlooked masterpiece. During a period when he worked at Alton Towers, Gavin Clark met film director Shane Meadows, and the pair became firm friends. This later led to Meadows asking him to score his directorial debut, Small Time. Sunhouse were formed to fulfil this request, with Gavin putting together a band that included guitarist Paul Bacon and bass player Robert Brooks who would go on to play on Crazy On The Weekend.

Meadows then asked the band to contribute to the soundtrack for his first feature film, 1997’s acclaimed Twenty-Four Seven, with the band submitting Monkey Dead which then appeared on Crazy On The Weekend the following year. Meadows would make short film The Living Room in 2009 about Clark and later led the tributes to the singer-songwriter after he passed away in February 2015 aged just 46, saying: “Anyone who knows his work, knows his pain, anyone who met him, will never forget him and for those that saw him play live, his voice remains tattooed in their heart… I know I will never meet anyone like him again.”

The Living Room – A Film by Shane Meadows

The solo album Clark had been working on at the time of his death, was released posthumously as The Evangelist in October 2015 with the recordings being completed by his UNKLE collaborators James Griffiths and Pablo Clements and featured guest appearances from Warren Ellis and Ludovico Einaudi. Crazy On The Weekend remains a central tenant of this rare, candid yet magnetic talent’s artistic legacy and Rough Trade Records are honoured to be bringing this underrated yet truly affecting album back to vinyl.

Following his work on the reissue, Sunhouse’s Rob Brooks declared: “With the social media revolution and the likes of 6 Music just around the corner, I genuinely think that if this album had been released two years later, it would have ended up in the record collections of most people who know their music. However, a classic album enjoyed by the few is still a classic album. It’s prophetic, poetic, and sublime and something of which I am hugely proud. Enjoy this wonderful record in all of its remastered glory and share with us, as you drop the needle onto the vinyl, the joy of reliving a most treasured memory.”