Ah, Heavenly...
First off, there’s a new, very fun ‘C Is The Heavenly Option’ video, complete with indie-pop all-star cast, that came out on Friday along with the reissue of Le Jardin de Heavenly.
I first discovered Sarah Records in August of 1994, a couple weeks before I was due to leave for college. I had a crush on a girl named Sarah and flipping through the 7” boxes at Brass City Records in Waterbury, CT I came across a divider marked Sarah/K Records. I knew of K but, intrigued, I immediately inquired after Sarah and Walter and Fred told me everything they knew. I eagerly snatched up Another Sunny Day’s What’s Happened 7” (Sarah 16) as it looked so fantastic, and a few days later made the 40 minute drive up for more. Which came in the form of the Glass Arcade compilation on cd. And wow. A great comp, perhaps my favourite Sarah one. And Heavenly’s ‘I Fell In Love Last Night’ has always stood out to me as a perfect pop song (more on this later). It has graced many a mixtape over the years.
It was stuff like this that led me to write the characters of Walter and Fred in The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass, record shop owners older than the band who steer them onto all the right stuff. Sarapoly (the label’s board game in 7” sleeve) even gets a mention in the book. Walter from Brass City showed me a copy one day in 1995 and it was only $10. But as I was already spending $160, I opted not to buy it. I have never come across it again. A Holy Grail, to be sure.
I’ve been a Heavenly and Sarah fan ever since. As lockdown wore on in 2020, although I’d never met them, I messaged Amelia & Rob to do my Young Southpaw podcast. We had a really fun chat. Then when the next Catenary Wires album came out, I had them back on the (revamped) show for a somewhat less ridiculous conversation. The band are reissuing all the old albums with their relevant singles on Rob & Amelia’s Skep Wax label, and when Heavenly Vs. Satan came out last year, Cathy and Pete joined us too for an interview for The Quietus. Talking, amongst other things, about ‘the horrors of Britpop’. The transcription ran to over 10,000 words so there was plenty left over. TQ editor John Doran gave me permission to run some unused excerpts here.
THE INTERVIEW
Aug Stone: In the liner notes (to the re-release of Heavenly vs Satan) you mention “trying to come anywhere near the impossible goal of writing the perfect pop song”. Do you think you ever did this? Or came close?
(Everyone asks ‘Pete, what do you think?’)
Aug: I think you have, a couple of times, and I realize you might be too self-critical or too modest but –
Rob Pursey: I think if we had, we probably might have stopped. (Amelia laughs). We did a cover version that Pete chose which was ‘You Tore Me Down’ by the Flamin’ Groovies, which was on the b-side of the ‘Space Manatee’ single. When we first did that, I didn’t really know that band, and I always thought that was a perfect pop song, but we didn’t write it.
Amelia Fletcher: It kinda depends what you mean by perfect pop song. I think ‘Hearts And Crosses’ is a really good song in that it tells a whole story. My favourite pop songs are the girl groups songs that tell whole stories like ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’ where you have the fight with the mum and then the regret. I like that. Whether ‘Hearts and Crosses’ is a perfect pop song, I don’t know. I’m really pleased that it tells a story, and a hard-hitting story as well. I also like pure papp, and something like ‘C Is The Heavenly Option’ was really just trying to create the ultimate bubblegum pop song, and I think it does that quite well.
Peter Momtchiloff: Yeah. I think lots of songs which people are inclined to call ‘perfect pop songs’ actually don’t have much going on lyrically. They’re just neat, they work very well, they grab you. ‘There She Goes’ by The La’s, that’s the kind of thing people say is a perfect pop song. It’s really good. I don’t think you wanna think about the lyric too much. I mean it’s fine, it works. Lots of perfect pop songs have lyrics which work really well, but you don’t scrutinize them, you just listen and it feels good for three minutes. So Amelia may be setting the bar a bit high in wanting a good story out of a song. I totally agree about those girl group songs that manage to do so much in two or three minutes. But I think for a lot of people a perfect pop song is just a throwaway three minutes of pleasure. Often people write pop songs with stupid, idiotic lyrics just because they need something to sing. A dumb pop song can be a perfect pop song.
Rob: ‘There She Goes’ is a really good example, cause when he said it, I realized I don’t know anything about what the words mean apart from a woman went by.
Everybody: ...And again (laughs)
Aug: What I mean is in relation to your goal of trying to do that. Do you think you ever achieved that?
Cathy Rogers: It’s been actually quite interesting going back through the songs in preparation for playing again because most of us haven’t listened to them for a long time. I think there are songs we wouldn’t probably have named as really great pop songs at the time, that wouldn’t have been up there, but actually that song really works for what it was doing (Amelia shaking her head emphatically in agreement). Some of them have good stories and some of them don’t. Some of them are great because of other things, how the sounds meld or because of particular harmonies or a particular guitar part. Looking back on them....especially when you have five people in a band, there’s always going to be someone who is less keen on a particular song. So I think at the time there is always a level of criticism that exists about nearly all of the songs, but I’ve actually been surprised listening to them again, I think there’s a lot of really great pop songs in there. I don’t know what perfect means, nothing’s perfect, but there’s a lot of really good songs that stand up better this much later than maybe I would have predicted at the time.
Rob: Which ones do you think, Aug, comes anywhere near it?
Aug: ‘I Fell In Love Last Night’ is totally perfect to me. ‘Itchy Chin’ and ‘Modestic’ I think are both up there.
Amelia: ‘I Fell In Love Last Night’ I do remember being really proud when I’d written it because I did think it feels like a classic pop song. So I’m delighted that you say that one (laughs). I’m also really pleased because it really was what I was trying to do in writing songs for Heavenly, trying to write perfect pop songs. We didn’t create songs in the practice room, our songs were very much written in advance, and thought quite hard about before they ever went near the band. And then what was really good was everybody then brought their instrumentation, their harmonies, and everything else. So it was always a team effort, once I was sure the song was good.
Aug: You were saying before about how hard it is to have five people agree on what songs they like the most. I really like the story in the liner notes about Matthew (Amelia’s brother & Heavenly’s drummer, who tragically died in 1996) refusing to play ‘Shallow’. It’s such a great song, and perhaps the highlight of the first record.
Rob: It is a good song. But I was the same, really. When the band first started, live we were quite a loud band, and the songs were faster than on the records, and that’s the way Matthew and I liked it. And he found ‘Shallow’ to be a quite frustrating song to play live because it has to be done quite slowly, otherwise it doesn’t work. And it does go on a bit (Amelia and Cathy laugh). There’s a third or a fourth verse where really nothing happens. So he was quite cross with it cause it wasn’t much fun to play. And I think also he liked to antagonize Amelia because Amelia really liked doing it as it was one that all the indie kids really liked. So there was a kind of brother-sister battle going on around that song. I think the reason that Heavenly was good live was because there was a tension between the great melodies and the harmonies - Pete’s guitar is very melodic and adventurous - and me and Matthew were making quite a racket in the background, usually pushing for it to be louder and faster. Those elements combined is what made it really good fun live.
Amelia: There were bands that inspired us, but there was no band that inspired all of us at the same time (all laugh). So we never sounded quite like anyone else. Pete was trying to be Duane Eddy and I was trying to be The Ronettes, and I think that’s why it worked.
Cathy: I think Matthew had a particular thing against ‘Shallow’ though, because there were some other slow songs that he didn’t object to. I think it was partly about Amelia and partly because it was such a fan favourite. It was a good thing to fight back against (laughs)
Rob: Matthew did got quite cross with – it’s the sort of song where, people didn’t get out lighters and wave them in the air but - at the British gigs more than the American ones - people would sort of sway in a slightly pathetic fashion when we played ‘Shallow’, and Matthew found that a bit embarrassing to watch. He was quite antagonistic to the Sarah Records scene. He liked all the people involved but I think he found the coziness and the quietness of it to be kind of –
Pete: It’s interesting how one member of a band can act as a kind of coastguard or lighthouse to ward the band off from one extreme or another. It could be in a bad way, where one of us is inhibiting us from going somewhere good, but sometimes I think it’s a positive thing. Someone in the band can detect a tendency that is perhaps better resisted. I don’t think Heavenly had much of a tendency towards lighter-waving but if Matthew was right then fair enough.
Amelia: I think it just wasn’t to his taste.
Rob: It went beyond that. It was totemic for him. I think he thought if we did lots of songs like that it’d all get a bit twee and complacent, and a bit full of its own niceness.
Aug: I want to talk about the evolution of the cover art, because they are quite different. It was punky/DIY at the beginning, and then the three records after are very pop.
Amelia: Yeah. That’s an interesting thing. Matthew did the first one, and it was kinda like a continuation of some of the Talulah Gosh sleeves - nice textures and all duotone. I don’t actually know how he did it. I just had to redo the sleeve for the re-release and it was really hard (laughs) to copy his design. Made me incredibly impressed at the technical ability that he had in the days before computers, getting all the fonts the right size, and making sure that the gold ink was just the right level of see-through. For the second album, Matthew had a vision of how he wanted it to be - it was obviously inspired by Andy Warhol - but didn’t think he could do it. So he got his friend Sam Oakley to do it for us and Sam did a really great job. He’s actually currently trying to help us recreate this amazing Andy Warhol writing on the back, which he did by writing in ink and then blotting and pressing the blotting paper onto paper again, a technique that he nicked from Warhol. I wrote to him and said we need another two songs done that way cause we’re gonna put the singles on, do you know how you did it? And he said, ‘oh, I’d like to try that again’. The cover is clearly brighter and a more jolly-looking record. And the third one, Cathy –
Cathy: I had a cat that had kittens quite often. We never knew who the father was but there’d be litters of kittens in the house. So we thought that with the album title being The Decline and Fall of Heavenly, it’d be quite fun having Roman pillars and a kitten. My sister did theatre design at university so she did that for us. It was the one shot out of quite a few where the kitten was vaguely in focus. Kittens don’t tend to stay still very long. The kitten’s got a little crown on its head.
Amelia: Basically for every album, we decided that ‘Heavenly’ should be part of the title. And they were always a bit jokey. I think it was probably Pete who came up with The Decline and Fall of Heavenly, and the cat was just obliging. For the last record, the pictures are by Alison Wonderland, who did almost all the photos of Heavenly over time. She is a very good friend. We just thought the pictures were so great that they would make a really good cover. And that was a Matthew design again. Really well done. Quite clean. Operation Heavenly was meant to be like a spy thriller, so they were slightly inspired by images we thought might be in a spy film.
Rob: You know, I never realized that. We don’t really like spies, do we?
Amelia: What is certainly true is that we don’t look very cool. We’d obviously come to terms with our lack of coolness by then.
Rob: I think there is a theme. I mean putting a kitten on the front is actually kind of like ‘you can write us off as weedy cute people, but we’re not as weedy and cute as this fucking kitten’. So it’s jokingly antagonistic, like the name of the band, I suppose. Let’s see how fluffy and effeminate and silly we can appear to be.
Amelia: Even the ‘Atta Girl’ single with the cartoon girl’s face on the EP, that was very cutesy as well. Completely inappropriate for the music inside. They’re all really good covers, but I don’t know why we were so willing to make these basically uncool covers. We did it quite deliberately. I think it was a bit of a ‘fuck you’. A ‘we want to do this, why shouldn’t we?’, ‘we’re not gonna play by your rules’.
Rob: I think it’s also saying that this is a pop band. And the songs might be about date rape but that doesn’t mean to say they’re going to be anything other than pop songs.
Aug: Did people get the jokey antagonistic element of it?
Amelia: Probably not (all laugh)
Rob: I think they probably did. Also, we were making fun of ourselves. This is kind of Matthew again resisting the temptation of wallowing in shallowness, cause in England that kind of indie scene around Sarah, it could wallow in itself a bit. There was a tendency to wallow in slightly theatricalized sensitivity, and I think Matthew was probably resisting that. The sleeves are clearly not very sensitive. They’re poppy and cartoony, and it was slightly antagonistic in the other direction as well.
Amelia: Even though in a funny sort of way we took ourselves quite seriously, we were always a very fun band. I think people who came to see us always enjoyed the fun. We were determined to be an enjoyable band to be in and an enjoyable band to watch. So I guess when you talk about perfect pop songs, actually that aspect of pop we definitely had. We wanted to be a band that we would enjoy going to see.
Rob: We were quite serious about not taking ourselves too seriously. Cause I think the worst bands you go and see are the ones who take themselves really, really seriously. In all genres. And then if you’re in an audience with people who take the band even more seriously than they take themselves, it becomes a pretty grim experience. So we were keen not to fall into that trap.
Heavenly are playing May 19 & 20th at Bush Hall in London. I’m gutted I can’t make these gigs. Go if you can
SEVEN SONGS
A few more from Heavenly, shall we?
‘Wrap My Arms Around Him’. Another time they hit perfection.
‘By The Way’ was always one of my favourites.
‘Itchy Chin’. Always loved this song.
My friend Kelly had some great mixtapes when I met her in 1996. ‘Itchy Chin’ was on one, and two other excellent songs she introduced me to were:
Siouxsie & The Banshees - ‘O Baby’
The Tear Garden - ‘Romulus And Venus’
After Matthew passed, the other four later formed Marine Research and made Sounds From The Gulf Stream, a record I absolutely love. It’s in my Top 20 Albums of all-time. In the spring of 1999 I was as yet unaware that Marine Research existed when my band Rockets Burst From The Streetlamps were doing a radio session at MIT. While waiting to play, Marianna Parker, who worked at the station at the time, came outside and asked us if we ‘liked Marine Research?’ Since we were at MIT, we naturally assumed she meant the field of study. Though still thought it was an odd question, as we had just been talking about indie rock. All was soon cleared up and I caught them at The Middle East and loved it.
‘Parallel Horizontal’ opens the album & is a killer pop song.
And the song that started it all off, Another Sunny Day’s ‘What’s Happened?’. London Weekend remains the record I have paid the most for in my life. It was a Holy Grail all during the 90s, no way to get it in the States, and I finally found it at the Notting Hill Music Exchange when I was visiting London in 1999 for £35, at a time when the exchange rate was 2.5 dollars to the pound. Totally worth it
And the single sleeve that sold me in the first place
Just ordered a “Buttery” copy. Had I known Walter Q. and Fred-like characters were featured, I’d have acted more swiftly!
Walter turned me on to Flying Saucer Attack and Fred and I would talk Premiere League while I perused the week-old NME, etc. (I was a 35-YO Britpop obsessive. “Forget Blur vs. Oasis...is Dodgy better than the Wildhearts? What about the Boos? Where IS Ritchey Manic? Isn’t Kenickie’s Laura Laverne ab-fab?”, etc.)