"Actually, I quite like
librarian punks"
A Christmas gift
from Heaven
ly
Remember those big Adidas school holdall bags? Ubiquitous across school playgrounds in the 80's, you could only really identify yours by the band graffiti decorating it. Put your name in the tag and you ran the risk of (unwanted in my case) identification and likely subsequent humiliation for not having the right musical taste. Or, in my case, a seismic violation of the single genre code when I scrawled my love for Teardrop Explodes, Crass and Alien Sex Fiend all over the bag.
Was I a punk? Goth? Two-toner? Post punker? Didn't give a fucker?
I would get them back with some Einstürzende Neubauten one day….that'll confuse them...
Liverpool was pretty much the polar opposite. I could like Public Enemy, Slayer, Hüsker Dü, Steinski, Bronski Beat without having the genre police all up in my grill.
About 6 months before I started my student life there - 5 February 1986 to be , I'd watched The Shop Assistants support The Jesus and Mary Chain in Blackburn.
That was the detonator for a love affair with the Shoppies and the other bands in that scene that I uncovered through, predominantly, Peel and random students' union gigs -
The Primitives
Soup Dragons
Wedding Present
The Flatmates
Razorcuts
Brilliant Corners
Rosehips
The Vaselines
June Brides
The Pastels
photo courtesy of Nicola Crichton
& Talulah Gosh
their eponymous single blew my mind: Blondie, Ramones, Mary Chain
punk in attitude, spirit and approach.
anti-establishment
pop perfection
when Talulah Gosh called it a day in 1988, Heavenly rose from the ashes late the following year and released four LP's of their own version of pop perfection until they too called it a day in 1996. It's hard to overstate the significance of this band. When the world was turning its gaze towards Seattle and male-dominated corporate rock and peering towards the other horizon where the unborn spectre of Britpop lurked, Heavenly revitalised and polished the Talulah formula. The harmonies and melodies were, well, perfectly glorious, the lyrics caustic, introspective, satirical, empowering and human (clearly many of the press from that era couldn't be arsed with lyrics…or maybe they were a bit too close for comfort).
I digress….
"Before Christmas, I wanted to put on a girl-based show and everyone laughed at me. Well, now I've finally done it", said Amelia Fletcher in July 1993, playing with Linus, Pussycat Trash & Skinned Teen.
Prescient.
Heavenly co-founders, Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey, continued to write and perform music as Marine Research, Tender Trap, Sportique over the years.
If you're reading this, you'll likely know that Heavenly recently reformed and played two emotional sold out nights at Bush Hall, London over the summer. There's more to come on that. They are actively recording as the excellent Catenary Wires and Swansea Sound as well as setting up their own label, Skepwax Records, to champion the careers of carefully selected artists, just as labels like the legendary Sarah did for them in the 90's
I'm delighted to present this wonderful chat with Amelia and Rob, two legends of music, two mighty fine songwriters and two wonderful people who are resolutely anti-music establishment, resolutely DIY and very much champions of the next generation of musicians. They embody what culture should be all about.
dedicated to the memory of Mathew Fletcher
Rob
Yeah, we're having a lot of fun. We've just been recording the rhythm track for the Swansea Sound Christmas single. If I can get my act together, we'll get it out in time.
Amelia
We're just in time delivery here. You always hear about people recording their Christmas hits in April, so at least we’re verging on Christmas here (😂).
Giles
Trying to emulate the John Lewis adverts or something like that…. In April I feel like I’ve just about survived the previous Christmas.
Rob
There are two songs and I wrote them in the summer. And then of course, we failed to record them. So yeah, I actually was quite efficient, the band wasn’t (😂).
Amelia
The marketing
machine
that is
Swansea Sound!
photo courtesy of Alison Wonderland
photo courtesy of Alison Wonderland
Giles
I was thinking back to when I first became aware of you guys. And it was very much in the non-digital age when I was a student at Liverpool Polytechnic from ‘86 to ‘89. I don't think you played in Liverpool as Talulah Gosh. I remember my first day there and going over to the Haigh Building which was where the Students Union lived and where all the gigs and assorted rowdiness happened. I couldn’t wait to get there, y’know, leave home and be my own person, whatever that meant! And Liverpool was an incredible place with this incredible resilience and fortitude in the face of the riots over police racism, Thatcher and her determination to destroy the city, Derek Hatton was leading the council, the Militant movement was in full flow and the best football team in the world was there! So, politics and music was, y’know, everywhere in the city, and the Haigh Building used to be massive on the gig circuit…I remember seeing The Wedding Present, The Primitives, House of Love, Mudhoney, That Petrol Emotion. I think even Bad Brains and Stone Roses played there but I missed them sadly.
The Shop Assistants – actually that might have been the Uni when John Peel was DJ’ing. It was such a great time.
Giles
I think the Uni’s then used to put on bands that got bigger crowds. I remember seeing the Ramones and Motorhead there, but the real big non-student union venue was the Royal Court. Going there was like a big deal, like we were venturing out of student territory….the scene of the Beastie Boys infamous 10 minute gig.
Rob
We played Liverpool a bit later as Marine Research at Liverpool Sound City. It's very memorable because we were introduced on stage by John Peel who was presiding over it. That would have been about 97/98, something like that.
Amelia
Yes, it was a big venue, but I don't know what its name was (Giles – my research has found that the venue was called L2 and the tracks for all the boffins were: Queen B, At The Lost And Found, You And A Girl and Parallel Horizontal). Surprisingly, we've never been back.
Rob
Yeah, it was a whole day of Radio One…. stuff. It was great.
Amelia
We have been back to Liverpool….just not anywhere very big (😂).
Rob
We’ve not played there for ages. I'd love to go back and play there.
Rob
I think there was a really nice crossover with whoever was in charge of booking bands at Student Unions.
Amelia
Our kids have just gone off to uni. Well, one of them is in second year, the other one’s literally just starting. They go to gigs a little bit because they’re the kind of people who go to gigs. But I don't think there's really any on at the student union or whatever. It’s not something that's considered something that students would be particularly interested in. It’s a bit weird.
Rob
It’s coming back a little bit. I mean, they do go to gigs in a way that kids 10 years younger, I think, probably did. It's hard to know. But yeah, that was a golden era.
Amelia
It's funny that you asked us whether we’d played there as a kind of question - well, you more or less knew that Talulah Gosh hadn't played in Liverpool - but actually, our memory is so terrible and I am actually an academic at University of East Anglia. So, my colleagues asked if any of our bands ever played UEA, and I said very confidently, “no, no, we’ve played Norwich, but we've never played UEA”. And then, of course, someone will stick a picture online of Heavenly playing at UEA. I was like, “Okay, my memory is completely crocked. I have no idea!”
Rob
I don't remember it either.
Amelia
It was fantastic that the person who stuck it up did remember the gig as well. So, I think it must have happened!
Rob
Yeah, my memory is terrible too. Really bad.
Giles
So, we haven't seen each other since the wonderful
Bush Hall gigs with Heavenly. Those couple of nights must have been pretty special for you.
How do you feel about those nights now the dust has settled somewhat?
Rob
Yeah, really good. We weren't sure whether the Heavenly show would be a one off or not, because we didn't really know how we’d feel about it all. But, we are going to do it again, but in moderation.
So we're playing in Spain in January and then it's quite likely we're playing in America in June. There are a couple of other things but that’s broadly it
Amelia
We might play London again, but we haven’t got anything planned yet.
Rob
I think it's good to do it in moderation, partly because you don't want to become one of those bands that goes on those long,
“It's us again”, tours. Fair play to people that do that but we don't want to. And also we've got new things that we'd rather spend our time doing.
You can get swept up in your own past and let new things fall by the wayside. It’s harder to get people to listen to new things than it is to get people to get nostalgic about old stuff, isn't it?
So I'd rather make the effort and keep on with the new things.
Giles
I’m interested in why we like the old stuff so much, sometimes at the expense of new stuff. Or there’s clamour for new stuff and then it’s always compared to the old. Comfort in familiarity maybe?
Amelia
I think it's familiarity, but I think it's also that the music takes you back to a time in your life when, you know, you really cared about music and those songs. For at least some people, they really mean something to them. It was true of myself. Introspectively, I still listen to a lot of music and I like it, but if you asked me the songs that really mattered to me and that could make me cry or just suddenly be very emotional, they would almost all be from when I was a lot younger because that's when I guess I was going through things and music seemed really important to me, just in a different way. That was partly what was quite emotional about the Heavenly gig. I think we played well and I think people like the songs and everything, but it was getting people to think about how they were back then, what those songs meant to them then and what's happened in their life since. I think it was a real emotional happening..
Rob
There were a lot of reunions going on within the audience. I noticed there were people who had not maybe seen each other for years. The whole thing really was a lot more emotional than we expected. Obviously, it was quite emotional for us, but we got it out of our systems because we practised and then we were playing the gig, but we underestimated just how emotional it would be - very emotional, in some cases - for some people who were there. And that, in turn, was quite overwhelming for us, really, because you think that the songs are good and everything and I think, like you said, we played them pretty well, but they also open the door to other parts of people’s life. That isn't so much to do with the quality of songs but where they were when they first heard them and what part of your secret life that door opens into. The music takes you back very quickly to a particular place, doesn't it?
Giles
You're absolutely right. Thinking about that time and place, I would have been 22 in 1990. Bear with me on this: as soon as you get to school, you know, like the fun, uninhibited life that you had as a kid growing up, gets gradually knocked out of you by the system - education, society, work. I wonder if there's a part of all this emotion that’s regret or sadness on some level at those (relatively) carefree days
Amelia
I think you're right, this is interesting…
Rob
Heavenly is obviously quite an upbeat band. But then some of the songs are quite moving. Some of them are surprisingly tear jerking. That came through more strongly now than it did then. Because back then, we just hammered through all the songs, whether they were moving or not. We just sort of played them really fast (😂). And Mathew, in particular, would have liked that. Mathew was funny, because he was a very sensitive person, but he didn't have tolerance for people getting mawkish about songs. So, that song Shallow, which everybody loves because they all sing “shallow” and they all sort of sway a bit and everyone's a bit sad, Mathew would deliberately play that 2000 miles an hour.
Amelia
He did that partly to annoy me (😂).
Rob
Yes, partly to annoy his older sister, but also because he didn't want to see people looking sad.
But I think those aspects of the songs probably suddenly felt like they came good.
Amelia
I think you are right, that, partly the music you love takes you back to a time before you had responsibilities as an adult. But I also think that that move from childhood to adulthood is quite a difficult time.
Music - at least for me - played a really important role in helping me through it and I think probably does for quite a lot of people. It's a pure and simple emotional thing that holds you together in the face of lots of other challenges that you're facing.
Talulah Gosh, and to some extent Heavenly, we deliberately made it somewhat about the refusal to grow up and the desire to keep what was pure and uncorrupted of childhood and it got seen as kind of being fey or twee or whatever - and to some extent it was - but I think it was meant to be a bit of a statement that there's this adult world awaiting you and there's a lot not good about it.
Giles
Absolutely right. I have a real bugbear about the labels that the media and industry uses to describe things – one or two words to describe a band, or sound. It’s lazy nonsense.
I've long felt that they've been created by the industry to make marketing and promotion easier (for them), but also to keep groups of people in their lanes, or keep the lid on the boxes that the industry puts them in so you
know your place and you're not allowed
to go out of that lane that we've put you in. Once it’s said, it’s done isn’t it? It sticks.
The twee/fey/anorak label was riddled with nastiness.
Rob
I think it's right. The people in the industry could instinctively smell that we were a hostile act, because the correct way to behave is to grow up by signing a deal and then having chats with journalists of various flagging organs (😂).
It was very obvious that we weren't interested in that. And I think if the industry, like any ind
ustry that thinks it’s the be all and end all, sees signs of people existing quite happily without its help, they find it quite irritating and they don't like it.
So I think then they call it twee or bedwetting or whatever the kind of homophobic or misogynistic term they fall upon, because they want to train their listeners to see it as something to be contemptuous of so they can neutralise it.
Amelia
I think at various times that we've been trying to make music basically macho indie rock has been quite popular, you know the leather trousers, I'm cool, I play my guitar, I hang it low, I play it loud. And obviously, we did all those things as well (😂), but we thought that there was a feeling of “Well surely you want to fit into that stereotype, don’t you? Why wouldn't you want to?”. I think that part of our retainment of childhood was actually to do with feminism as well, which was actually not only is the World of Adult not that great, but it's particularly not that great if you’re a woman. So, I think we deliberately tried to create an alternative way to be a first female led pop band. And actually we could see lots of females liked us. I mean there weren’t many females in the music press, and the few females there were, were kind of desperate to be in with the males that were in the music press. So, you know, we had quite a lot of fans – and we had a few fans in the music press - but most of the music press wanted a genre of music that we were just not providing.
photo courtesy of Nicola Crichton
Rob
I had an amazing conversation this weekend with a friend who first heard Heavenly when he was at school. And he's gay and he hadn't come out at that time. This is in America. He liked indie music, but said that when he first heard Heavenly, he immediately loved it because, although he’d never met us, he said he got a sense that we were his allies because we weren't playing at gender roles. An awful lot of indie rock obviously relies on reinforcing a very standard male-female stereotype that gets rehashed in thousands of tragic songs. And I was touched. He’d never told me this before and I've known him for quite a while. But he said that there was something about it, and he thinks it was probably the fact that, well for one there were women singing, but it was quite gender neutral.
Giles
How did you handle the hostility – if that’s the right word - towards the band?
Rob
I think because Talulah Gosh, which had a bigger ascent and a very quick decline, had been on the receiving end of an awful lot of hostility. Because at that point, punk rockers didn't like little girls making their kind of noise. I think we were all forearmed really. I mean the band was called Heavenly partly to annoy the kind of people who we knew were already programmed not to like it. So, we were sort of up for the fight in a very puny kind of way (😂).
Amelia
I think that's right. I think I possibly got a bit more upset about it than other people, but we didn't really mind
Rob
Well, you copped it more because you were the singer. Sometimes it was directed at you. I mean, all sorts of things were flung at Amelia.
Giles
Just as an aside but it is related to how women get treated, I interviewed Jarboe last year and she was saying how, when she started playing live with Swans that she was on the receiving end of some awful physical treatment - kicking and spitting - because they held her solely responsible for changing the sound and, perhaps, vibe of the band.
Amelia
I mean, we got off scot free, really in that regard. I mean, that's just awful.
Rob
I suppose we were fortunate because the band had set out its plan pretty clearly, so people like that just wouldn't come to the gigs. I suppose you get a kind of tribal behaviour at gigs, which some bands encourage, it can end up going lots of different ways. But, when you animate a bunch of men like that, too…. I suppose they might have seen Jarboe as an imposter who was kind of corrupting the pure male..
Giles
And possibly because she was in a relationship with Michael Gira as well. I dunno...
Rob
I don't know what goes through people's heads. I think because we were once bitten twice shy, we called the band Heavenly - I remember telling a friend that the alternative name for Heavenly was Petal (😂). We thought of the most pathetic names you could think of, because we want to make it absolutely clear that this was gonna be a macho free zone (😂).
Amelia
What you raise about Swans is a really interesting thing, in that, I think fans sometimes feel that bands are their own in a funny sort of way. Obviously, as a band, you don't feel like anyone owns you. I am a huge fan of music and I know that certain bands mean much more to me than the people in those bands could possibly imagine. And I actually have to remind myself of that when I’m in my own band (😂). I think it's probably the case there - those people obviously really loved Swans, but in the wrong way.
Rob
Did she not think about just leaving? I mean, how did she cope?
Giles
She'd worked so hard to get in the band and made a lot of personal sacrifices to get in the band. And, she was deeply in love with Michael and Swans. She described such an intense environment at that time – mid 80’s living in a kinda bunker room - actually they called it “The Bunker” in the East Village or Lower East Side of New York – basic to say the least. They rehearsed there as well. The volume must have been epic. It sounded like a tough environment..
Amelia
This is a totally boring interview compared to that! (😂)
Giles
Ok, so let’s get back on track! What were your formative influences when you were growing up – music, scenes, people, environments….the sort of things that shaped who you are now?
Rob
Musically, for me, I was too young to be a punk. But the very first gig I saw was The Clash in Bristol. That was obviously quite a big moment. From that point on, I was hooked on live music one way or another. But I was much more into literature and poetry. I studied English. So I was probably more influenced by William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett.
They were the people whose voices I spent most of my time with, if you know what I mean. Sometimes the music was on the background. That’s probably a rather weird thing to say but it more about literature, really, when I was a kid. I was into music, but it took second place. So, I think not surprisingly, one of the bands that I loved the most when I was 16 or 17 was The Fall. I just listened to those lyrics on repeat, and still do.
Amelia
I don't know if you feel this, but the things that I really first loved were the things that, when I first listened to them, I thought they were terrible. I was like, “What's the point of this?” And then you have to listen again. And you'll listen again. And then you love it. And then there's a community of other people who love it. And then there's a load of people who go, “what is this rubbish?” So for me, at an early stage, it was Joy Division and things like that, and then The Cure, who were big, but they were big amongst a specific set of people. And then I guess Orange Juice and things like that.
Rob
I got all the Postcard records. So I love Orange Juice and Josef K, and the Go-Betweens, but I think it was about hearing really good pop songs sung slightly out of tune. It's something I still love.
Giles
I was gonna say that there is something about that, where there are those imperfections, either on record, or played live, where it’s a bit loose or there’s a duff note. I love it. I don't see the problem in that. I think it's just shows the beauty in fallibility
Amelia
And it's actually why I think AI will struggle to make music that actually people really love because I think it will struggle to be human. I think the other thing for me is that I felt different in some way. And I didn't know why I felt different. It wasn't really anything to do with music, but I was a bit of an awkward teen. But I think that, therefore, when I did discover music that I really loved, actually most of the people in my sixth form were like, “what is this?” And that actually made it more important to me, and then I would go to gigs, and I'd meet other awkward people who liked the same music as me. And that became about being part of a community of people that I felt I had some sort of identity with. And that community was different from the average person at my sixth form, who were all perfectly nice people, but you know they weren’t really my people, so I became part of the indie community before I actually realized that I want to do music as part of it. And I guess I could equally have made a fanzine as part of it or something. I wanted to be a contributor to that community.
Someone somewhere is working
on the
shambling algorithm. Once the shambling, jumbling algorithm is perfected, we’re all
fucked
Rob
just when you were talking, I was remembering my dad and he had played in a band when he was young. He’d stopped by the time I was born. But not long before I was born. I think he thought that now he was a parent, it was his job to stop having fun and just be a parent. And he had this acoustic guitar under his bed that seemed like an enormous thing. I'm sure it was a standard size, but I was only a little kid and I would get it out sometimes try and play it and it had a really heavy action. Like you needed a vice to be able to bring the strings down. I couldn't do it. And I used to try and encourage him to do it a bit. But he had really sort of turned it off. But what I did get from him, he was still massively enthusiastic about music and on
Saturday mornings, he would play Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club of France really loud on the stereo. And I still do love that music. It's so brilliantly upbeat and inventive. And, and you can tell the people in the band, they're having so much fun, the best time. So through listening to that, I thought being in a band must be pretty cool. My dad’s band did covers of Sweet Georgia Brown and the stuff that Django and Stéphane Grappelli would have played, so I got the sense of fun from that.
Amelia
Your middle name is the same as the bass player in your dad’s band…
Rob
Yeah, my middle name is Jack
Amelia
Always destined to be a bass player.
Rob
I was. I never really heard them play but I wish I had.
The tale of Rob's subversive entry into music
I never got trained in music. I can't read music. I took recorder lessons when I was a little kid and me and my friend Mike got thrown out of recorder lessons for burping into the recorder during the national anthem. It was kind of an early project.
It’s one of the most punk things I've ever done.
So that was the end of that.
That was the end of my musical education.
There was a school friend who had got hold of a guitar that his older brother had left him - by now we're into bands - and so it was decided that I would need to get a bass because he had a guitar. So, I just learned to play by ear. We had quite a small house and we had an amp that we’d sit on the kitchen table. And they were in the room next door trying to watch the telly and me and Tim in the kitchen trying to make up songs. And they were very tolerant and I remember one time my dad coming out saying, “Do you think you could play a different chord now?” as we were hammering away at some minimalist blast. It must have driven him to the end of this tether. So that's how I started… it was just playing by ear because I wanted to just start a band. I've only recently learned what the chords are because, the bands we're in now, I have to communicate to other people what the chords are in songs that I’ve made up!
I haven't really matched that responsibility with competence in terms of notation.
I think it’s too late for me
The tale of Amelia's less subversive entry into music
I never burped into a recorder with the result that I didn't get kicked out and stayed playing recorder for absolutely ages.
And I can still play it.
Rob
So we’ve still got that fucking recorder (😂). It's a bit like you know, was it in Morecambe and Wise with the bloke that tries to play his mouth organ and then gets ushered off stage? That's a bit like Amelia with a recorder. So if there's a song which even suggests that it might slightly enjoy a bit of recorder, she’ll whip it out the cupboard, and we have to go “Nah, come on, put it back, put it back”
Amelia
It’s a real shame for kids now, because we did all have to learn recorder at school, and actually, because I learned recorder, that was my way into music. And then I got quite good at recorder. And then my mum said, well, let's get you a recorder teacher out of school so we did that and that teacher said, “I can teach violin as well, so get yourself a violin and I'll teach you that alongside the recorder”. But I wasn't really very good at the violin. But doing the two of them together meant I learned to read music. But I’ve never actually been very good at playing anything, but I can read music and I’ve never burped at the wrong time.
Giles
There's a salutary lesson for all of us.
Rob
What a reward. I got the better deal there.
Giles
So when you both came together to form a band, how did that happen?
Amelia
Rob had already been in bands with his mate Tim in Bristol. He was, by this point, in third year of uni and I was in first year. In the end, I did actually have a bit of a band at school - a bit of a goth band really. And then I decided I really wanted to be in an indie band. So, I wrote some songs and put it together in the first year. I had my brother play drums, so that was easy. And my then boyfriend played guitar – well, he played bass but he was willing to learn guitar - so that was quite easy as well. And then I found this girl, Liz, another student, but just because she was wearing a Pastels badge at a gig and I was like, yeah, there’s the outsider found outside the university. And so she said, “I can't play anything, but yeah, I'll give it a shot”, which was fine by me. But then we needed a bass player so I was just asking around and a friend of ours called Tim said, “Well, there's a friend of mine called Rob, he can play bass”. So we went around to see him never really checked that he could play bass just looked at the records that he had. And he was clearly like us, kind of into the somewhat more obscure music that liked and so he got in the band on the basis of his record collection (😂)
Giles
Oh my god, yes! When I was at school, there were a handful of people who liked music like me and we’d go to house parties and try and convince people that Einstürzende Neubauten was a band that people needed in their lives. As you can imagine, we would got fairly short thrift if we ever got as far as getting the pneumatic drills on the turntable. Back to Everyone Wants To Rule the World…..
Amelia
It’s really funny. I mean, obviously to people that aren't obsessed with music, what music you like is kind of irrelevant. But for people that really like music, it's just so important. I remember there was some boy when I worked at the exam schools after A-Levels there was some quite nice boy there and he made me a mixtape, but the mixtape was all things like the band that shall not be named. I thought you were a nice boy, but hey, this is over now. Maybe there was a girl that was going to be impressed by this, but it wasn't me (😂)
Giles
There were some bands that I just could not find any shred of interest for – then or now – and the band that shall not be named was one of them. But I would be so opinionated about it. Wow, the shame.
Rob
I sort of look back now and think - because I was like that as well, you know, I was very particular and I’d make judgments about people’s tastes - how ridiculous it was, really. I sometimes think the amount of effort that I put into policing taste, or being very animated about taste, that I could have used the same energy in the real world, to be more active in a political party arguing about useful things like what turbo capitalism was doing to our society rather than arguing about whether the band that shall not be named were any good.
Giles
You’ve both managed different working lives alongside the music – Amelia in her ongoing capacity as professor at UEA, Non-exec roles and formerly at the FCA and Rob as a former TV exec and producer, I'm sure there are other things too – and I wonder if you’ve felt any tensions between inhabiting the music world and “corporate” world
Amelia
Yes and no. I mean, yes they are different lives to some extent. And clearly, I try and be serious and grown up in that environment.
I think my ethos in both environments has been not that dissimilar.
In both environments I’ve always really pushed and fought for the things that I believe in and in a similar
sort of way. I've tried to be a good female role model.
I mean I guess the regulator work is not strictly corporate, it’s more akin to a civil servant, really, where I’m attempting to bring fairness to the system.
Rob
Yeah, so I guess my environment was more corporate because I worked in TV producing programmes which is much more cutthroat.
I mean it’s creative, but it's cutthroat because you're
trying to get your programme made. But, there's quite a lot of bad music lurking in TV. I’ve had to tolerate some bad background music in my time (😂).
Lockdown sealed getting out really. I’d got a bit bored of it. It is quite intense doing that job. I think because we had little kids and, whilst I did see them, I felt like I wanted to spend the last few years at home while they were still around, so I thought, right, I'm gonna dial this down, spend more time at home with them and do more music. I mean, music is what I've always loved the most, but it's never been what I do for a living. So, after lockdown I thought I don't really need to go back and do this anymore. If you do go into it, you've got to go right into it, you can’t really do it part time. I don't really miss it if I'm honest. I'd rather write a song than make a programme because the people involved are nicer and there are a lot less of them. There were some brilliant people that I worked with - loads of great writers who I always really liked working with - but then to make that programme, at some point there's gonna be 100 people involved.
Giles
Do you feel completely in charge of your own lives and destiny now?
Rob
Yeah, totally. Certainly. Just not doing it anymore opened up the time and space to start a label. We're gonna be putting out other people's stuff. I suppose that part of music has filled that gap in a way because it's kind of facilitating somebody else's work, which is what I was doing on TV. There's no one person who's really the creative heart, but you’re a team and it’s great. But being in a band, if you can write a song, and you can get it on the radio, that feels more like a personal achievement, I suppose.
Giles
And is there as much work in running a label as everybody says there is?
Rob
It’s basically infinite.
Amelia
I guess it doesn’t have to be a lot of work if you don’t do it very well, if you see what I mean
Rob
Some things get easier. Take the whole business of getting things manufactured and distributed: to start with that was really complicated. But now we can do that. It's quite straightforward. It's time consuming and fiddly sometimes and some of it's quite boring.
We sell most things in the shop, but we do sell quite a lot of things on
Bandcamp and I don't mind sitting at the kitchen table writing out loads of envelopes. I mean, if you had to do it for hours on end, you'd get really fed up. But I do quite like it. I think the reason
we started the label was partly because we could,
but also, it felt like we've worked so hard to record everything. And obviously,
we make up the songs ourselves, and then we record them ourselves. And we can make videos as well. By doing the label as well, it's almost like we've formed a complete indie circle.
I think this proves to anybody who cares that you can do the whole thing yourself, if you find the right sort of collaborators. Actually, the one thing that we have got involved in recently is publishing which is really complicated.
And there is no indie version of publishing - you either have your songs represented by a big publisher or you stick try to do it yourself.
Amelia
I mean it can be done, but you're not really doing it properly unless you've got someone big behind you.
Rob
I thought that actually we should do that because if we're gonna make this a complete label then we should have it as an option - I don't think we'd ever make bands do it. And this is partly because, you know, there's a lot of bands even now who don't get their music registered, so they lose out because there's money owed from radio play or whatever.
So, we have made a deal with a big publisher so that we can have the stuff that Skep Wax puts out represented and properly looked after.
I mean, there's probably never much money at stake because these are probably not going to be songs that become huge. But it’s unpredictable, these things do happen. The thing that spurred us to actually get down to understanding it and doing something about it was when that Heavenly song P.U.N.K Girl went completely bananas on Tik Tok, and it's been a really big song this year. And you think shit, I mean, if there's money to be had, I'd rather we had it than Ed Sheeran. So, that does make us think, right, we have grown up enough to confront this. But it is not much fun. I'm really glad to be writing out another spreadsheet of song titles (😂).
Amelia
I guess this is true of anyone that runs their own business, but if you were working in a corporation, and they said, “Okay, now for an afternoon, you're going to stamp envelopes, or you're going to fold T shirts, or you're going to do this or that other banal task”, you'd be like, “I'm better than this. I'm not going to do this”. But actually, if you're doing it for yourself, you're like, “Yes, I'm loving this”.
Rob
There's a whole lot of people that I met in TV who could have done with spending a day in the post room….. .
photo courtesy of Alison Wonderland
Giles
I’m really interested in emotional intelligence and how it’s going to solve the world’s problems. OK, not all of them, but I do believe that EQ – things like self awareness, empathy, social skills etc – are just so important given how we live our lives and how complex and volatile the world is. You both wear many hats and have experience in so many areas – parents, professor, board member, TV producer, professionals, label owner, band member, band manager, PR, you’re probably seen as mentors as well – and, given this, I’m interested how emotional intelligence might be helpful for you
Amelia
That's a really interesting question. What I find is that I think about those issues more when I'm at work, and I think that might be because I guess I'm around people that aren't so naturally like me. And also I've got a degree of authority. So, there's a risk that if I say something, people are going to run off and do what I say, even if it was a completely stupid thing for me to say. So, I'm quite careful about how I come across, I'm quite careful to ensure that everything's been understood the right way and everyone's happy. I do quite a lot of work actually with the Competition and Markets Authority, where I'm on the board for inclusion, diversity and equality. So, I chair a group there and we do a lot of work to ensure that the various networks are working well, supported and all this kind of thing. So I think a lot more about all of those things in that context. I think, actually, in a band with a label, because you're surrounded by people that are naturally rather like us, we maybe don’t think about it as much - and most of the time, that's actually fine - but I think sometimes we maybe should think about it a bit more. I think it's fair to say that Rob is naturally quite good at thinking about people's emotions, and I'm less good. So I have to work at it a little bit more.
Rob
In terms of the label, if you're talking to another band, or musician, about their music, they then you, then your own ego has to be outside the room, because you're there to listen to work out what they think they're going to be and what the music should sound like. And then if you've got some useful experience you can bring to bear that might help, then you can do that. But that's very different than being in a room writing a song or sharing a song with your own band. I think they're very different things.
I’m more prepared to see that there's a good side to that band whose name shall not be spoken.
Giles
That’s emotional intelligence right there
Amelia
I don't think we've hacked off that many people in our time. But maybe they just don't tell us.
Giles
I’m sure you’d know about it if there was a recorder involved….
Do you feel that, with the work that you're doing now, that you're still prepared to take risks? More, less?
Amelia
I'm more of a risk taker now
Rob
With the music? Yeah. I think we take risks. Even when we were young and even though we had very much set ourselves on a route which was not the kind of corporate indie route of getting signed, you do probably care more at that point: you think that maybe lots more people will like it, you're looking to get more popular or somehow grow - and we did.
I think you probably learn as you get older that those things only ever happen by accident, anyway. I mean, you could find yourself as the person whom a major label want to spend millions of pounds on and then you're going to achieve something, because they throw that money at you for nothing, and there will be some measure of success. But if you're not in that situation, then actually, you've got no idea what's going to be successful, and what's going to be a “hit”. So, the only sensible thing to do is to do the thing that you think is good. That which entertains you. So Swansea Sound, for example, we had really no idea that anybody would want that because we were bored and locked down. And I had this song that I thought would sound good if Hue (Williams) sang it. And he did and his mate in Swansea put it out on a cassette. And we thought that was that really. But then it suddenly got on the radio. And it's like, “Oh, we've accidentally stumbled across something.” And then it was just exciting and it was exciting in exactly the same way as it would have been 30 years ago. It doesn't look any different at all.
Rob
I think the bad thing about the indie scene, or any scene, is that it does get a bit smug and comfortable with itself. I don't really mind Sonic Youth, but I do think the kind of worship of this guru has reached a level of kind of absurdity. Just because he detuned his guitar once and lived in a New York squat, I mean, there's a level of adulation that is appropriate and there's a level that is just self-serving.
Giles
I like Sonic Youth and, for me, Kim Gordon was just the epitome of what was so good about Sonic Youth. I’ve followed her work – music, art, fashion - the most out of all of them I’d say.
Amelia
Yep, it’s really amazingly similar. But also, Rob likes toppling people from perches. And some of the people on perches that he likes toppling are the kind of people that all of us would agree need toppling like big tech leaders, Roger Daltrey, and people like that. Then on the on the current album, he also like tries to topple bands like Sonic Youth by saying no one likes them, and things like that. And I'm kind of, “oh no, you're gonna lose so many friends here”. But then I was like, “no, go for it.”
Rob
Yeah, I think that's probably right. So the song’s called Markin’ It Down and Hue is a guy coming into the record shop, and Amelia is the proprietor of the shop who's having to deal with this slightly tedious customer. And when we did that song recently, and everybody laughed, I didn't notice that everybody was laughing at all the jokes apart from the Sonic Youth one, which I thought was the funniest one
Rob
it would probably be the same if you made a joke about the Velvet Underground. I mean, 7/8 of the indie community would probably faint if you described the Velvet Underground as anything other than brilliant. I've got bored listening to the Velvet Underground….three minutes of that would have done. But the veneration is sometimes taken to slightly absurd levels, I think. We’ll have to mention Velvet Underground on the next record….(😂) No, I do love the Velvet Underground! This is one of the benefits of being older you don't really care if some people think that your joke is kind of…..(trails off)
Amelia
I got told that, in general - particularly for women I think, but I suspect it's the same for men - as you get older and older you just care less and less about what other people think so I'm kind of looking forward to being this really old lady just walking along the street and swearing and I think we're well on our way to that through Swansea Sound
Giles
I did a podcast with Cynthia Sley from the Bush Tetras and we were talking about this same subject and she just laughed and said “oh just wait till you get to 65, you do not give a single fuck”.
Amelia
And I think it is interesting because then you get people like Mo Tucker and you’re like “Oh no, please do give a fuck”
Rob
God knows what I’ll be like when I'm 65, I've been a bit like this most of my life!
photo courtesy of Nicola Crichton
Giles
So....back onto safer ground.....what's next??!!
Rob
We’re working on the third Heavenly reissue – The Decline and Fall – and that will probably be out in January 2024.
Amelia
Then the fourth one probably about six months after that.
Rob
I don’t know if this is cheesy or not, but one of the singles that will be collected on that third LP is P.U.N.K Girl which is now by far the biggest Heavenly song. So, we’re gonna do a little CD single with badges and postcards and make a little thing of it. Partly because there's this whole other generation of people who like it now. I mean, the resurgence of the song was entirely driven by people who are under 20 and it'd be quite nice to put out something that they might like, you know. So we're doing that. And then there's the
Swansea Sound Christmas single, called Santa Bail Me Out. Actually, that might not be the A side. Anyway, there's two songs (well, there are three but one song has two versions if that makes sense) that are on the Christmas single. I think we did this last year where you get a Christmas card with a CD in it.
Amelia
The first Christmas song about indebtedness
Rob
And then we're gonna do another Under The Bridge compilation. I've got all the tracks for that and it's looking really good. It's actually gonna be a double album, because there's an amazing amount of really good stuff being done by that cohort. So there's that. And then there's a couple of new bands we've been talking to which I probably shouldn't say anything more about as it’s not definite. But there are some new bands who are younger than us, whose music we're gonna put out. We’re not sure whether we've talked to too many people, but once you start a label, I think if it looks like it's even vaguely competent, then obviously other people are interested in the label putting their music out. We've said yes to some, just because there's a real range, actually. Some of them are very young, some of them are the same age as us, but we don't really think that age is particularly relevant.
Giles
Independent labels owned and run with integrity and the ethics and values that are true to who you are and can be related to by your bands, suppliers, customers, whatever are the ones that will be more credible and successful in the long run. Surely that has to be the way forward.
Rob
We’ve been on various labels, and I admire some of them more in retrospect than I did at the time. Some were better than others, I have to say, but knowing the amount of work that labels we’ve been on have put into releasing our records and supporting them, it feels like it's our turn to do the same for today’s bands that we like..
Giles
I know you've talked about Sarah before, but I guess that’s one that, at least from my perspective as an outsider, had the right ethics and values in how it was run.
Rob
They also ran it really well, you know. There are some labels that we've been associated with who had the same attitude and ran things well, but Matt and Clare ran things just brilliantly. And they were uncompromising, but they were also really - it feels like the wrong word to use - professional.
Giles
What do they do now?
Rob
They’re not involved in music anymore. Clare retrained as an accountant. She's really into walking and rambling and she writes for magazines associated with that, so it's quite political in a bit a different way about having the right to roam. So she's very into that. Matt's a really great writer. I mean, he's done a couple of magazines and which are quite small, Sarah-like things. I don't know whether he strives for a bigger audience for his writing but every email you get from him is a little gem. He’s a very observant writer and he does it like falling out of a tree. He was doing observations of different parts of London, not a million miles away from what Clare’s doing in a way because it was environmental rather than musical. So yeah, we still have a lot of contact with them.
Amelia
We've said this before but worth saying again: we were on Sarah Records over here and, at the same time, we were on K Records in America, which was also ran by a male/female duo, in some ways similar but in other ways incredibly different. They were much more interested in making something that was really cool and embedded in the punk scene rather than the indie scene. Thoroughly professional in their way, actually. But what was funny for us was flying to the US to hang out with them, and then coming back to the UK, because we were exactly the same band, but the scenes that we were part of in the US and UK were really different. In the US, we were kind of part of the rrriot girl scene and the things that led up to it and the things that followed it, but those cool punkers as it were would be like “Oh, it’s those twee Sarah types”
Amelia
We've said this before but worth saying again: we were on Sarah Records over here and, at the same time, we were on K Records in America, which was also ran by a male/female duo, in some ways similar but in other ways incredibly different. They were much
more interested in making something that was really cool and embedded in the punk scene rather than the indie scene. Thoroughly professional in their way, actually. But what was funny for us was flying to the US to
hang out with them, and then coming back to the UK, because we were exactly the same band, but the scenes that we were part of in the US and UK were really different. In the US, we were kind of part of the rrriot girl scene and the things that led up to it and the things that followed it, but those cool punkers as it were would be like “Oh, it’s those twee Sarah types”
Rob
We were like librarians over there. Librarian punks.
Amelia
Way better than twee.
Rob
Actually, I quite like librarian punks. I can see a T shirt coming. Actually, the cool thing about running a label is that if you get a good idea for T shirt, you can just make it. A while ago, we were doing a press release for these Heavenly things and I was thinking…..how can you condense it most? And the two words were Riot Twee. So we made a T shirt that said Riot Twee, black flowery letters, which seemed like the closest, the smallest summation of Heavenly I could come up with.
We may have found another one….
Librarian
Librarian
Librarian
Librarian
punks
punks
punks
punks