Indiepop veterans Heavenly: ‘We saw the world of grownups and we didn’t like that very much’

Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey met a little under 40 years ago, when they were both students at Oxford. Fletcher (later awarded the CBE for her services to the economy) and her friend Elizabeth Price (a future Turner prize-winning artist) turned up at Pursey’s room (he later became a TV producer) to see whether he wanted to join the band the pair of them had just formed, inspired by girl groups, the Buzzcocks, the Pastels and the bands on Postcard Records.

“We didn’t actually check whether you could play bass,” Fletcher says. “I had a cover of a Microdisney album on my wall,” Pursey says. “And I think that was probably enough to qualify me to join.”

Their group was called Talulah Gosh, and they were leading lights of the mid-80s indiepop scene, helping to inspire likeminded souls not just in Britain, but in the US, too – notably in Olympia, Washington, where the people who had coalesced around K Records pursued a similar aesthetic: childlike, rejecting the conspicuous ills of adulthood, dedicated to DIY.

Thirty-seven years since the first Talulah Gosh single, Fletcher and Pursey still make music together, and it’s still indiepop, though these days they are married with kids. After Talulah Gosh, there was Heavenly, then Marine Research, then Tender Trap, and for the last nine years the Catenary Wires. They’ve also been members together of another band, Sportique. They’re indiepop royalty.

Last month, Heavenly played their first shows for 27 years, to tie in with reissues of their albums. A pair of gigs at the Bush Hall in London sold out in minutes and the band looked truly astonished at the outpouring of love from the crowd. “I didn’t expect to look out and see everyone pretty much in tears,” Fletcher says. “The amazing love in the room for the band, which I knew was partly love for people thinking back on their own lives – it was quite moving.”

In Britain, indiepop became something to mock very quickly. No sooner had NME started championing it – notably with the C86 compilation tape – then others started laughing: oooh, look at these idiots pretending to be kids! Looks at the kiddy drawings on their record sleeves! Look at them in their silly anoraks! And they can’t even play or sing! Losers!

Yet much of the motivation for that came from the same impulse that created straight edge in the US hardcore punk scene – a deliberate rejection of the evils of adulthood. “It was: we’ve seen the world of grownups and we don’t like that very much, so we’ll stay where we are, thanks,” Fletcher says.

Pursey continues: “Indiepop, not always deliberatively, but sometimes, quotes childhood, because it’s taking you back to a time – children aren’t racist, they’re not misogynistic, they haven’t acquired any of these hideous traits. And I think there was maybe a naive idealism attached to it, and people don’t mind being reminded of that part of themselves, which is still uncynical and untainted.”

American fans, though, saw the punk rock behind it all. “While the bands were accused of being bedwetting, or twee, or whatever, by an increasingly misogynistic British music press, over in America, it was totally different,” Pursey says. “You were hanging out with straight edge people, the people associated with K Records, which obviously in that world later spawned the riot grrrl scene. We were part of a different scene over there, even though we were the same band.”

Quite how differently they were perceived in the US was proved when Marine Research – their band after Heavenly – were invited to open a UK show by their friends Fugazi. “I could see the British audience thinking, ‘What on earth are they doing?’” Pursey says. “They were really shocked. In America it didn’t seem strange at all, because we were all coming from the same place.”

Indiepop has always thrived away from the sunlight. After its flirtation with the mainstream – a bunch of those groups on the C86 cassette got major label deals – it retreated to the underground, a closed world to which the mainstream music press paid little or no attention. Calvin Johnson, of Beat Happening and K Records, called the scene the International Pop Underground – a network of bands, labels and fanzines that was mutually supportive, and governed by a shared DIY impulse.

“To be honest, we probably started Talulah Gosh to firm up our place in that scene,” Fletcher says. “We never cared about anything bigger than that – we just wanted people within our little scene to think we deserved to be part of it.”

At first, Fletcher’s songwriting was apolitical – she wrote and sang pop songs about love – but that changed in Heavenly. “I didn’t think I was a feminist. And I didn’t really write about that in my songs. Then one summer, when we were in Olympia, it happened to be when riot grrrl was taking off, and we knew the people that began it. There was just this most amazing buzz of people being willing to talk about all of these things that I’d known but hadn’t quite ever talked about in this way. And it was very exciting. But I didn’t really want to be a shouty riot grrrl band because that wasn’t really my favourite type of music. I thought I could have similar themes but do it in a more poppy way.”

The result was some extraordinary songs, notably Hearts and Crosses, a chilling account of a rape, set to music that sounds like a beach party: “Then one romantic day he took her hand and led her away / He pushed her down, removed her clothes, and put his body closer than close / He held her mouth when she tried to scream / It was all so different from in her dream,” Fletcher sang, before a woozy, disorienting organ solo that sounded like it should have accompanied the waltzers at the fairground.

Heavenly’s temporary return took so long because of the circumstances of their ending: Fletcher’s younger brother Matthew, their drummer, killed himself. “After Matthew died, I really struggled to remember who I was, because I saw myself as someone who sang in Heavenly and as my brother’s sister, and both of those suddenly weren’t there any more,” Fletcher says. One reason it took 27 years for the band to play again is that it took them that long to understand that maybe Matthew wouldn’t have resented them playing those songs under that name.

These days, the couple – married for 12 years, with two kids – live by the Kent coast. Fletcher, having been chief economist at the Office of Fair Trading, is these days professor of competition policy at the University of East Anglia. (Their bands have always been wildly overqualified: Talulah Gosh and Heavenly guitarist Peter Momtchiloff became one of the most influential people in philosophy as a commissioning editor at Oxford University Press; Heavenly keyboard player Cathy Rogers devised, produced and presented Scrapyard Challenge on Channel 4). But music, they say, is still the most important thing to them both, though not in any expectation of middle-aged superstardom.

“If we weren’t doing it, we’d probably lose contact with an awful lot of people we’d rather not lose contact with,” Pursey says. Fletcher laughs. “I’m afraid the world has to suffer the fact that I need to do this.”