AMELIA FLETCHER
Amelia Fletcher needs no introduction to fans of indie music. Born January 1st, 1966 in London town, its fitting that she came into the world at the very moment that The Beatles’ ‘Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out’ sat at number one in the UK pop charts. What has followed has been almost four decades of innovation, soppiness, sass and, crucially, brain burrowing melody. The history of British independent rock music is impossible to tell without her influence looming large.
One of my favourite musicians from close to the moment I first heard a recorded note, here’s Amelia to talk ‘Indie Heaven’ through Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Marine Research and beyond…
Well, this is a thrill. Let’s start at the very beginning. Little Amelia Fletcher. What's she like and what does she want to do with her life?
“It kind of depends what age, but basically – like many kids – I just wanted to be famous. I remember wandering around the garden when I was about 13 singing songs from Annie at the top of my voice, just in case a talent scout happened to walk past. We lived in the middle of the countryside, so only the occasional hiker would walk past, but I felt sure one of them could be the person to make me famous! That said, I was always a bit indie too. When I was 10, I got the lead role in a school musical of Samson and Delilah. All was fine until the dress rehearsal when I found out I was supposed to wear a sexy bikini-based outfit. I freaked out and couldn’t do it. Unfortunately, my understudy – who was happy with the outfit – hadn’t actually learnt the songs. So in the end it had to be performed as ‘Samson and the two Delilahs’. She flounced and pouted while I kept all my clothes on and sang the songs.”
You form Talulah Gosh in 1986. Can you tell me a bit about meeting Elizabeth [Price, vocals], because if there’s a better band origin story, I’ve never heard it…
“Ha ha! Well, I’d just started university [studying Economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford], and was feeling mildly depressed because there seemed to be no other students who liked the same obscure indie music as me. But then I went to a gig, and saw this cool-looking girl who was wearing a Pastels badge. I was so relieved that I marched straight up to her and asked her if she wanted to be in a band. She said she had no idea how to play guitar or write songs, but she was up for trying. And Talulah Gosh was born!”
Something that surprised me was that I read Talulah Gosh had meetings with major labels. Obviously you went a different route. A disaster diverted, or a chance to be on Top Of The Pops scuppered?
“It was only really one major label, Magnet, who at that point were most famous for having Darts and Chris Rea. I went to see them, but they were very clear that I would need to give up university and take it seriously. At that stage, Talulah Gosh had no idea what we were doing. We’d written a bunch of songs but we didn’t even know if we could write any more. Our shows were totally crazy. So I boringly decided that sticking with university was the safer option. It probably was the right call, though. We really weren’t ready. It is less likely that we’d have got onto Top Of The Pops - much as this was a long-held dream of mine - and more likely that we’d have ended up being dropped by the label, hacked off with the whole music business, and not have been inspired to start Heavenly.”
I totally associate Talulah Gosh with that whole C86 scene - and yet you weren't even on the NME compilation that bore the name. Were you asked? It’s just bloody rude Amelia!
“I suspect it was mostly just timing. Our first gig was in March 1986, and the cassette came out in June. I’m not sure we’d even recorded anything by June!”
Can you walk me through the decision to call time on Talulah Gosh? Did you know you were going to do Heavenly next - or was music for you coming to an end? I think I'm correct in saying that at a few junctures you've given up music, only to be pulled back in...
“I still feel a bit bad about the decision to end Talulah Gosh, because I – erm – failed to tell the rest of the band. So they only found out that our show at the LSE [London School of Economics] was going to be the last one pretty late on. That was bad of me. There were quite a few factors behind the decision though. The fact that we all wrote songs, and I didn’t really like singing other people’s songs - great as they were! The fact that all the indie folks I knew were getting into house music, and I figured our brand of punkish pop might suddenly seem a whole lot less cool. The fact that I had my final university exams coming up, and needed to focus on revising. At that point, no I didn’t think I would carry on doing music. In fact, I wanted to work in the music industry. I even had a job interview with Rob Dickins, who was head of Warners. I failed to get the job – he said I was too nice!”
So what changed?
“Well, I decided that I did want to make music, but I wanted to be disco diva, in the Yazz or Lisa Stansfield mould. So I used £1500 that my Grandpa had left me to record a disco single, called ‘Can You Keep A Secret?’. I proudly sent it off to a few labels, but only got rejection letters or – worse – a letter saying the label liked it but that I should get in touch again when I’d recorded it more professionally. Which was impossible because that £1500 was all the money I had! In the end my disco single came out, after we’d restarted Heavenly, on Fierce Records. But it was by then intended as an interesting curio, rather than a route to stardom!”
That’s amazing. I never knew that! So how does Heavenly come to be?
“Heavenly ended up really being born out of jealousy. My boyfriend Pete [Momtchiloff, guitar], who had been in Talulah Gosh with me, started a band called The Umbrella Birds with our friend Rob [Pursey, bass], who had also been in Talulah Gosh at the very start. They had another female singer, and I found myself feeling very left out! So I competitively wrote a bunch of my own songs and persuaded them both to restart a band with me too! That was Heavenly.”
Is it true that your pet cat scuppered Heavenly signing to Island Records, thereby opening the door for Pulp to do so instead?
“The facts are true, although I suspect Pulp were always going to win that particular label race. But yes. When I was growing up we had a cat called Jesse, and by the time Heavenly used to practice in my parents’ house, she was pretty old and grumpy. So at the end of each song, we would hear her meowing like crazy outside the door. This was unfortunate, because the only major label A&R guy who was ever interested in signing Heavenly happened to also be called Jesse. He would come along to our shows and try and engage me in sensible discussion, and all I could ever hear was the rest of the band behind me, going, ‘meow, meow, meow, meow’ and laughing. It was doomed.”
Amazing. Heavenly’s keyboard player Cathy Rogers went on to have a successful career making and presenting television. She made Full Metal Challenge! Can you ask her to bring that show back, and did she ever introduce you to co-host Henry Rollins?
“Ha ha! Cathy isn’t making TV anymore. In fact, she is doing a PhD in neuroscience! But those shows are great, aren’t they? Nope, the rest of us never got to meet Henry Rollins. It was an inspired choice though.”
I was always a confused kid who liked indie pop and the harder stuff like punk and hardcore. The first Heavenly record is great, but it's the P.U.N.K. Girl EP in 1995 where I really got on board. I've always thought that's Heavenly 'doing' riot grrrl. Am I right?
“Yes, totally. Although we felt we were riot grrrl, not just ‘doing’ it. In the US, Heavenly were on K Records, based in Olympia, WA. We used to tour over there every summer and ended up being friends with all the people that basically started riot grrrl, and especially Molly Neuman, Alison Wolfe and Erin Smith from Bratmobile. In fact, we arranged for Bratmobile to come to the UK and played with them on tour. We were also very good friends with Huggy Bear, and my brother Mathew [Fletcher] even played drums for them right at the very start, before anything was released. I also drove the equipment to their infamous appearance on The Word, and they got me onstage as well! Later, we were also good friends with Sleater-Kinney. We felt very much part of the whole riot grrrl movement, and it was clearly reflected in our music. But weirdly no one else really saw us as that way. I guess it hard to rebrand yourself as angry young punks when you’ve been singing sweet jangly pop for so long!”
At the same time, on Talulah Gosh's Backwash compilation in 1996, the sleeve notes describe you as 'the big shebang', the implication being that you kickstarted all that stuff. I'm confused. Are you confused?
“Ha ha! Well, that is Candice Pedersen’s theory, and she co-ran K Records. But there does seem to have been a lineage from Talulah Gosh through the Olympia scene, via Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening and Lois Maffeo of Courtney Love - the band, not the person - into those riot grrrl bands. Of course, Talulah Gosh had no idea that time that anyone in the US even had a clue who they were!”
The P.U.N.K. Girl EP is also, in my opinion, the moment the politics in your music - which I do think were an element to your songwriting long before - became direct and less oblique. If I'm right about that, what influenced the shift in tonality?
“What was amazing about riot grrrl is that it made feminism relevant to a new generation. I remember being quite alienated by the concepts of feminism I was confronted with when I was growing up. It all seemed to be about having hairy armpits, and blaming men for pretty much everything. I realise this is a stereotype, but it was the stereotype I had been fed. Of course, Talulah Gosh and Heavenly were definitely feminist in attitude. We would just never have used the F word. In Heavenly, way before riot grrrl started, I got so cross with one journalist for referring to Sarah Records in a derogatory way or putting out ‘effeminate’ music, that I sent him a used tampon in the post. I also sent an aggressive letter to Steven Wells, telling him he was sexist because he only valued masculine traits in music, even music done by women. I obviously touched a nerve, because he sent me a 10-page hand-written attempt at self-justification. I had lots of anger stored up that was basically feminist, but no language to use around it. Riot grrrl gave me that language, and also provided a community of other angry girls to discuss things with.”
Speaking of Sarah… Obviously, Sarah is the greatest record label that isn't Motown and I won't hear a word otherwise. What was it like being on that label? It - from the outside, of course - felt so boundlessly creative, provocative and cool...
“It’s funny because, at the time, Heavenly didn’t consider ourselves a ‘typical’ Sarah band at all. We thought of ourselves as being far more punk and less introspective than the other bands on the label. But we loved Matt [Haynes] and Clare [Wadd], who ran the label, and we totally shared their grassroots ethos of doing everything yourself, running things on a shoestring, only putting out stuff you love, and not caring if the music press hated it - which they very often did! And now, looking back, the links between the bands on the label seem more obvious to me, as do the attractions of the ‘scene’ that we jointly created, without quite realising we were doing so…”
By the time of the fourth and last album, 1996’s Operation Heavenly you're almost doing a Britpop thing. Did you ever feel part of all that stuff, or do you wish you'd been more so?
“Well observed. Operation Heavenly was very much our Britpop album. It is hard in music not to get swept along by what is going on around you. One of the songs - ‘Fat Lenny’ - was even kind of about Supergrass, who remain one of my favourite bands. That said, to some extent, that album felt like returning to what we were first doing in Talulah Gosh – just trying to write great punk pop songs with attitude. It is probably my favourite of all our albums. Although it didn’t sell much, because it sadly coincided with my brother Mathew dying and the band consequently stopping.”
I was so pleased you carried on making music after Mathew died, because it felt like some light in the place of such misery and sadness. I'm so sorry you lost your brother. I thought Mathew was the most amazing drummer and utterly fucking cool. Was it difficult returning to music or is that a stupid question - I really don't mean to be insensitive…
“No, that’s fine. When Mathew died, we did decide we would just stop doing music. It just seemed wrong to go on without him, and we did nothing for a year. To be honest, I’m not sure anyone would have wanted to hear any music I’d have made during that year anyway, as I wasn’t in a great state. But after a year, Rob and Cathy decided they missed being in a band, and proposed that we start something new, but entirely without real drums. They thought that would be easier than having someone in Mathew’s place. So I wrote a few songs and we asked this guy called DJ Downfall to work with us a programmer, rather than a drummer. He listened to the songs, said he liked them, but declared they would be far better with real drums. We thought he was giving us the cold shoulder, until he added, “I happen to be a drummer too…” And that was the start of Marine Research.”
A very good band they were too. So many people who've passed in and out of your bands have gone on to achieve big and interesting things with their life - and I do of course, include yourself in that. Out of everyone you've been in a band with, including yourself, who has been the biggest swot?
“Ha ha! Well, I do admit to being quite a swot. I am pretty much always doing stuff, and very rarely manage to just relax and watch TV. But I think the biggest swot is probably Elizabeth Price, the girl with the Pastels badge in Talulah Gosh. She is a video-based fine artist, and works incredibly hard at it, which was reflected in her winning the Turner Prize in 2012. She’s still making brilliant stuff, and has a show in in Borough at the moment called Slow Dans. Although she doesn’t strictly make music now, she uses a lot of sound in her video pieces.”
As I’ve said, this interview is a pretty big deal to me. Do people in your job know you are on the Mount Rushmore of British indie pop? Have you encountered any fans in your work?
“In the Venn diagram with two large rings for ‘Indie Pop fans’ and ‘My Work’ - which is in competition and consumer policy and sector regulation - there are quite a few people in the intersection. Was that an appropriately nerdy answer? In general, though, while most people in my work world know about my musical life, most of them haven’t a clue about indie pop. So I think they would be pretty confused to references to Mount Rushmore. Nice of you to say so though!”
So, here’s a thing. It was literally a week ago that I learned that 90% of your first band went off to form Swervedriver when you did Talulah Gosh. Is there an alternative universe where Amelia Fletcher is in Swervedriver and 'Beatnik Boy' is a song drenched in fuzz?
“Well, ‘Beatnik Boy’ is actually Elizabeth’s song, but I take the point. Maybe, but there were always – ahem – ‘musical differences’ in that band. In my head, I was trying to sound like The Pale Fountains and the Marine Girls, while the rest of the band was thinking more Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cult. It was never really going to last! I was glad Swervedriver did well though. That said, when I was living in Oxford, I did sing on one song drenched in fuzz which was written by my friend Simon Oakes. Unbeknownst to me until recently, he ended up in a band called Peach, and the song I sang on, which was called ‘You Lied’, remained part of Peach’s set, and it ended up being covered by Tool. Their version has 4.9m views on YouTube!”
There’s a great pub quiz question in there. What has been your experience of the UK music press? At various junctures I think they've been quite mean, but there's certainly an appreciation - even fandom - in some quarters now...
“It’s funny because many music journalists seemed to hate Talulah Gosh and Heavenly, but we seemed to get a fair amount of coverage nevertheless. I think there were always enough journalists who wanted to be different, and who loved indie pop, to make it alright. Plus, I always quite enjoyed the out-and-out slag-offs. Much better than a mediocre review. I’m quite proud of Heavenly’s 1 out of 10 in the NME album reviews.”
Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Marine Research, Tender Trap. Every band you've ever been in has a good band name. What's the secret to naming a band?
“Not letting me anywhere near it! Every band name I have suggested has been out-voted. Actually, I guess the secret is democracy. Lots of ideas – as stupid as anyone wants – and then a vote. Unfortunately, this did lead to Marine Research originally being called ‘Marine Salvage and Research Limited’. But luckily the promoter of our first ever gig, Mackie at The Jericho Tavern in Oxford, told us the name was so stupid that he refused to put it on the poster. It quickly got shortened.”
You've guested on a bunch of other people's records over the years. What's that experience like, walking into someone else's set up? And do you think Calvin Johnson felt similarly the first time he sang on a Heavenly record?
“I’ve always been a bit surprised that people wanted me to sing on their records, since I am clearly not the greatest of singers. But I guess I am a safe choice if you want something indie-sounding! In retrospect, I’m kind of surprised by my confidence. I didn’t really know quite a few of the people I sang with at that time, and I was pretty shy back then. But I just rolled up and sang and it was always fine. I do remember The Wedding Present producer [Chris Allison] being especially exacting – I had to sing each bit over and over again to get it just right. With Calvin it was different, because he recorded his part for ‘C is the Heavenly Option’ in the US and sent it over on a tape. Something that is normal now but seemed very unusual back then. I still remember how hard I laughed the first time we heard his voice placed into the track. Such a brilliant performance!”
You've been in five bands with your partner Rob now. Could you ever imagine making music without him? And what are the advantages and disadvantages, positives and negatives, of being in a band with your partner?
“Well, I wasn’t actually going out with Rob until Tender Trap. Prior to that he was just a friend. But yes, he’s been involved throughout. In our latest band, The Catenary Wires, we both sing– an indie Nancy and Lee! Rob had never sung in a band before, so I guess one advantage is that it turns out Rob can sing! Who’d have thought? Another big advantage is that we are good at geeing each other on, while also being quite open about what is working and what doesn’t work. A disadvantage in The Catenary Wires is that we both write the songs and I can never remember who wrote what, so I’m always claiming to have written Rob’s bits! Another disadvantage is that the whole thing risks being a bit nauseating for other people. Like those couples on Facebook who say how much they love each other and it just makes everyone groan. We never say we love each other, and in fact we usually take the piss out of each other quite a lot onstage. So that hopefully helps.”
Okay, this might be a big ask. Can you tell me what all the other members of your bands are up to now?
“Okay, so. Elizabeth Price, Talulah Gosh, artist. Eithne Farry, Talulah Gosh, journalist. Chris Scott, Talulah Gosh, specialist travel services. Pete Momtchiloff, Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Marine Research, still in bands including the Would-Be-Goods and Tufthunter, plus philosophy editor at Oxford University Press. Cathy Rogers, Heavenly, Marine Research, PhD student. John Stanley, Marine Research, Tender Trap, still making music as DJ Downfall. Also, editor of Bow International, and UX expert. There was also Elizabeth Morris, Emily Barwise and Katrina Dixon in Tender Trap and we are now playing in Catenary Wires with Fay Hallam, Andy Lewis and Ian Button.”
That was very impressive. Want to plug anything?
“Right. Where to start? We’ve been busy. First, there is a new retrospective Heavenly singles album - called A Bout De Heavenly - coming out on Damaged Goods in December. Second, we have a new band with Hue Williams from The Pooh Sticks called Swansea Sound. We just put out our first single, ‘Angry Girl/Corporate Indie Band’, on Lavender Sweep Records. Our second single will be out in the new year. Third, we just put out an album on WIAIWYA with a new band called European Sun, which we started with our friend Steve Miles. Fourth, we have a rather different project coming out in November. It is with a poet called Nancy Gaffield and the band is called The Drift, which is Rob and me with our friend Darren Pilcher. It is called Wealden and is coming out on Longbarrow Press as a pamphlet and CD. And finally, our main band The Catenary Wires is just finishing mixing a new album, which should also be out in the new year. We are pretty pleased with it, but there is nothing to listen to quite yet except a lockdown live version of the a couple of the songs!”