Indiepop greats Heavenly will release their first album in 30 years, Highway to Heavenly, later this month. Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey have been making music together before and after Heavenly for the last 30 years, and their other groups — Marine Research, Talulah Gosh, The Tender Trap — aren’t totally different. So what makes a song a Heavenly song?
“I think one of the things is,” Amelia told us on the latest episode of the BV Interviews podcast, “trying to make them sounds quite catchy and kind of inviting you in, but then having reasonably dark lyrics. Some of them are kind of just pop songs but they hide their innards quite well.” She says the album’s very melodic opening song, “Scene Stealing,” was a deliberate attempt to update lyrically what Heavenly did in the ’90s to today.
“Lots of what was good about Heavenly was kind of the outlook of being me, and a young woman at that time — which obviously I’m not anymore,” Amelia says. “So I was thinking, okay, how do I make these songs Heavenly without… well, without being that person now that I’m older? I was thinking about the issues I was concerned about back then and whether they’d actually changed. Around that time, our daughters were telling us about these YouTubers and their kind of misbehavior, basically. And I was thinking, oh — it’s all the same. But what was interesting, and I guess this is a direct result of riot grrrl and things like that — being part of what made women more willing to speak up — is that the reason we know about the bad behavior of those YouTubers is that women spoke up in a way that, I think, when we were first starting out in music, they wouldn’t have done.”
You can watch the video for “Scene Stealing” which stars Amelia and Rob’s daughter and some of her friends, and listen to a Spanish language version of the song, below. You can also watch Amelia talk about “Scene Stealing” below.
You can also listen to our whole conversation with Amelia and Rob on the latest episode of BV Interviews wherever you get your podcasts.
Highway to Heavenly is out February 27 and the band will be on tour in North America this spring and summer.
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