"Highway To Heavenly"
The Oxford indie-pop outfit Heavenly formed out of the ashes of another Oxford outfit, the beloved indiepop band Talulah Gosh. With the addition of singer/keyboardist Cathy Rogers, by the time the band's second album Le Jardin De Heavenly hit shelves, their low-fi jangle became augmented by lush and spellbinding harmonies. Throughout the '90s put out a handful of winning albums including Heavenly vs. Satan and The Decline And Fall of Heavenly but they called it a day in 1996 after the death of their drummer Matthew Fletcher. The core unit of Heavenly resumed under the moniker Marine Research and they put out one lone marvelous album and that was that for a while. Did the members of Heavenly stay busy in the interim? That would be a resounding yes but let's also add accomplished. These are the broadstrokes, but you'll get the idea: Singer Amelia Fletcher, who, by the way, has been in The Wedding Present and the Pooh Sticks and guested on tracks by the Candyskins and the 6ths,
is a Professor of Competition Policy at the University of East Anglia and in addition to being a Non-Executive Director on the boards of the Financial Conduct Authority, Fletcher was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire and Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the economy. As for bassist Rob Pursey, who, by the way, is married to Fletcher, he's a screenwriter and he ran the Touchpaper TV production company. He now co-runs the awesome indie label Skep Wax with Fletcher. An educational neuroscientist, Cathy Rogers was the presenter of the British reality competition series Scrapheap Challenge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapheap_Challenge) and Junkyard Wars, and she has worked as a producer for the BBC, ran an olive farm in Italy and worked as Creative Director for RDF Media. Meanwhile, guitarist Peter Monchiloff played in the Would Be Goods, Scarlet's Well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet%27s_Well), Les Clochards, and Hot Hooves and he was Commissioning Editor for Philosophy at Oxford University Press and is currently Associate Publication Consultant at Lex Academic. As for drummer Ian Button, the former member of The Thrashing Doves has been a university lecturer in music production, he worked with everyone from Robert Forster to Dot Allison, was a member of Death In Vegas and is an in-demand mixer and masterer. Again, this is an abbreviated list, but you can see the members of Heavenly have been busy. But somehow, between all that busy-ness and other bands like Tender Trap and Swansea Sound, Heavenly are back. Not sounding diminished by time, the band's first long player in 30 years Highway to Heavenly is a spry collection of janglepop that's effortlessly melodic and unreasonably catchy. It's lovely work that ranks among the years best. And this is a great chat with three members, then five members, then two members. And we pulled it off without any dropping of the baton--this is a great chat with the charming, gregarious and lovely personnel of Heavenly.
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