Heavenly: 'Our anti-macho-ness really strikes a chord with young people today'
Back in the 1990s while Britpop’s laddish culture was raging all around them, Oxford five-piece Heavenly were defiantly ploughing their own furrow as purveyors of jangly indie-pop with a feminist ethos and sharp political edge.
Singer and guitarist Amelia Fletcher would go on to become a renowned economist, who was made an OBE and later CBE for her work, but in recent years she’s returned to performing with the bands The Catenary Wires and Swansea Sound while running the label Skep Wax with her husband and fellow musician Rob Pursey.
Three years ago they reformed Heavenly with guitarist Peter Momtchiloff and keyboard player Cathy Rogers for a gig at the Bush Hall in London, drafting in Ian Button in place of original drummer Mathew Fletcher, Amelia’s brother who tragically took his own life in 1996.
More gigs followed in 2024, along with reissues of the four albums they made in the 1990s for Sarah Records and and Wiija. Now, at last, comes a fifth, Highway To Heavenly. Its title might be a playful pun on the AC/DC’s album Highway To Hell but its musical content is a world away from rock’s macho posturing.
Pursey feels this is an apt time for the group to be writing songs again. “The macho culture that you found in rock seems to be spread into politics and the operation of digital companies,” he says. “(Mark) Zuckerberg referred to masculine energy as a sort of positive, so in that respect it is a good time because it’s worse than it was. It used to just be idiots with guitars, but now it’s idiots elsewhere, too.”
Fletcher agrees, adding: “One of the drivers of Heavenly getting back together and doing more stuff, apart from just fun, was we’ve got surprisingly popular with quite young people, and particularly I think females and non-binary and queer young people. Our anti-macho-ness really strikes a chord with them today. It did a bit back in the day, but living through in this very macho world a lot people are reacting and we’ve become a bit of a voice for that.”
The couple were heartened by the response to their live shows, where their setlist has combined old songs with new. “Everybody’s susceptible to flattery and people have taken delight from hearing the songs live more than we could have expected,” admits Pursey. “We’ve also shown signs of life with the new songs because we’ve played quite a lot of them live and nobody left. We didn’t have any notion at the time that we would get round to doing a new record, it was more like it’s fun and there seems to be an appetite for it. And I think we’ve missed playing in a band with Pete and Cathy – on a personal level it was a really nice thing to do. Out of that when we did the gigs certainly me and Pete were, like, we don’t want to do any more gigs where we just play old songs because it’s a bit boring.”
“There’s a sense where you become a covers band of your own band,” says Fletcher. “To be fair, nobody else seems to be chomping at a bit to be a Heavenly covers band, so if there’s going to be one it has to be us, but we don’t want to do that, we wanted to do some new songs.”
Fletcher, who turned 60 last year, says it was “interesting” to write from a contemporary perspective. “The last Heavenly record was made in my mid to late 20s, and I think some of the people that are liking the music now are that age and maybe that’s why it speaks to them. But when it came down to we’re going to do a new album and I’m 30 years older now, are they going to like what I say now? So, one of the things was trying to find a way through being true to what I want to write about now and what I am now but equally being very aware of who that audience is, so there was some reasonably careful thinking about that. The new single is called Excuse Me and it’s basically about someone of my age but looking back at missing someone from school or when they were young and going up behind them and going, oh, you’re not the person you thought you were. So it was trying to find ways to cover that time gap. There’s a few songs that are like that. And then there are songs that are about the world we’re living in now, I felt I had to write those.”
The original incarnation of Heavenly had taken inspiration from the inclusive feminism of the US Riot Grrrl movement. “Our records came out in America on K Records which was based in Olympia, Washington which is really where Riot Grrrl emerged from, and K and Kill Rock Stars Records were the two real Riot Grrrl labels initially, so we knew a lot of the people involved and we got very excited about the whole thing,” explains Fletcher.
“Heavenly had always been broadly feminist but I think it hadn’t really got into our music. We thought it was important we behaved in certain ways but we didn’t write songs about it, and then we saw all these people writing songs about it and we went, OK, we’ve got to do this too. We were very inspired by that back in the day and I think that has stayed very much part of our outlook. It’s partly the anti-macho thing.
“At the time I didn’t realise there was such a thing as trans exclusionary or trans inclusive feminism, I just thought there was Riot Grrrl, so it was interesting writing the (new) album because I didn’t really want to just be feminist because there’s all these different strands so I had to be quite careful writing that as well. There’s songs that are essentially inspired by, even if they’re not not overtly about, the trans experience. We try to be very inclusive.”
Highway To Heavenly is out on February 27. Heavenly play at Sidney & Matilda in Sheffield on March 21. https://skepwax.myshopify.com/collections/heavenly