A Heavenly Interview
New album by Sarah Record legends...
It’s taken a while, but ‘twee pop’ pioneers Heavenly are back with a new album, Highway To Heavenly, their first LP for thirty years. Die-hard fans will agree, I’m sure, that the wait has been worth it. Although the sound is identifiably that of the Heavenly of old - a boppy, poppy collage of instantly hummable 60’s girl pop and disco, with the occasional burst of punky guitar - the lyrics betray a contemporary edge, as per Scene Stealing, a withering commentary on online influencers who abuse their position to exploit women.
After forming in the late 80s and helping to define a sound that straddled sweet pop and sharp politics, the band split in 1996, understandably grief stricken following the death by suicide of drummer Matthew Fletcher, shortly after the release of their well-regarded long player, Operation Heavenly.
Keyboard supremo and vocalist Cathy Rogers recalls, “when Matthew died, it felt obvious that Heavenly was not going to carry on, and we weren’t going to do music for the time being, at least. And then, after a while, we did start doing music again, but it never felt like it was going to be called Heavenly, because Heavenly involved Matthew. I guess three decades later, we’ve managed to see it slightly differently.
“In terms of the songs [on the new album] we do joke about ‘continuation’ Heavenly songs and ‘new’ Heavenly songs’, [but] I suspect that if we got average listeners to try and guess which we thought fell into each category, they wouldn’t agree with us. A lot of that is in our head, but I think there’s always been quite a diversity of different song types that have somehow sat together on an album.”
A key difference in the decades between Heavenly stopping and restarting with new drummer Ian Button in 2023, has been the development of the internet, which has proved to be an unlikely boon to the band. Since Tiktokers picked up on their 1993 single P.U.N.K Girl, demand for their music has soared via streaming services.
Rogers says, “I think it’s quite odd how much you can find out, if you want to look, about who is listening to your music, like where they are and what their favourite songs are. I’m sure that big bands use that kind of thing hugely. We even joke about customising a set list to what the preferences are of a particular place, but I don’t think we would ever go that far.”
She shares vocal duties with lead singer Amelia Fletcher (Matthew Fletcher’s sister) who observes that despite the availability of data to guide the band, “actually the only reason we’ve been successful on Tiktok and now Spotify is because we slightly randomly did the thing that we did.”
In other words, they were initially discovered by this new cohort of fans precisely because they weren’t being pushed by the algorithm; every new generation likes to discover deep cuts and rarities for themselves and, happily for Heavenly, they have been among the beneficiaries of teenage cratediggers, leading to demands on both sides of the Atlantic for ‘all ages’ shows, which the band seeks to accommodate wherever possible, subject to local licensing laws.
But how best, to make the most of their new found popularity - and the data trove that accompanies it?
“I think the only way in which it has influenced the songwriting is that I was quite keen not to make lyrics that young people absolutely wouldn’t engage with,” says Fletcher. “I wasn’t trying too hard to make them ones that they would engage with, but I didn’t want to kind of just be talking about being old.”
All the same, the most affecting song on the new record is That Last Day, where Fletcher channels the bittersweet emotions shared by all of us who have lost a parent. The strong feminist instincts that have driven her songwriting also remain, although in this era of intersectionality she is wary of using that word.
“One of the things that I was very alert to was the whole fact that feminism has splintered” she says. “I’ve gone from being very comfortable about calling myself a feminist, to being a bit uncomfortable about it, because then you have to start qualifying what kind of feminist you are.
“On this album, there are definitely a few songs that are more about celebrating diversity than just about telling the story from a female perspective.”
Heavenly are on tour now in the UK, Europe and North America.