The Sound of Calm Defiance

Heavenly: The Sound of Calm Defiance

Amelia Fletcher & Cathy Rogers from Heavenly interviewed by Simon Robinson.

As the band release Highway To Heavenly, their first new album for thirty years on 27 February 2026 on Skep Wax Records, long time fan Simon talks to Amelia and Cathy about then and now…

Heavenly are bigger now in 2026 than they were in the 90s.

That sentence feels faintly absurd, like a typo in a photocopied fanzine. But it’s true. They’ve played their biggest venues ever. “P.U.N.K. Girl” became a TikTok phenomenon. Teenagers in the Philippines, Canada and Romania are discovering songs written before they were born. There’s a new album – Highway to Heavenly – out this month. The band are about to embark on their largest tour yet.

“It’s genuinely all of those things,” vocalist Amelia Fletcher says when I ask how it feels. “Surreal. Satisfying. Funny. Slightly baffling.”

Heavenly were never meant for scale. They were built for sticky-floored rooms, photocopied sleeves, mixtapes, late-night radio you had to lean into. For listeners who actively sought them out. “It always surprises me when people hate Heavenly,” singer and keyboard player Cathy Rogers says. “Because I kind of feel like… you must have gone out of your way to hear it.”

That’s exactly right. You had to want it.

And yet here we are.

To understand why Heavenly have lasted – and why they feel so present now – you have to start with what they were always mislabelled as.

Twee as armour

“Twee” was the word. It followed them everywhere.

Amelia doesn’t pretend she liked it. “It’s taken 30 years,” she says, before she could even accept it. In 90s Britain, “twee” wasn’t neutral. It meant small, minor, unserious. And, as the band are clear, it was gendered. “It was a misogynistic term.”

In America the reception was different. Later the word was re-imported as something almost cool. But at the time it stung.

And yet Heavenly were “deliberately non-macho,” Amelia says. They leaned into femininity – “even the feminine side of the boys.” That wasn’t accidental. It wasn’t naïve. It was refusal.

They could have hardened their sound. They could have performed aggression. They didn’t.

Which is why the sweetness in Heavenly’s music has never been simple.

On the new record the guitars are cleaner, the arrangements tighter, the melodies bright. The rhythm section is locked in. Pete Momtchiloff’s guitar lines chime and snap. The backing vocals sit sharply in the mix. It sounds almost jolly. Pure power pop.

Until you listen to the words.

“It’s gritty lyrically,” Amelia says. The anger is there. It just doesn’t arrive as a scream.

There are songs about sexual misconduct and abuse of power (“Scene Stealing”), where a deceptively buoyant melody carries lines about blurred consent and reputations shredded “in the blink of an eye.” There’s coercive control (“A Different Beat”), where the arrangement holds steady while a life quietly contracts. There’s Stonewall-era defiance in “Deflicted.” And there is only one conventional love song – “Skep Wax” – about the label they founded.

“Do you think anger has to sound loud to be taken seriously?” I ask.

“I hope it doesn’t need to sound loud,” she replies. “Because it doesn’t sound loud.”

She calls it “calm anger” – icy, analytical. “It feels like it’s the result of analysis, not emotion.”

Heavenly’s fury has always been considered. It thinks before it speaks.

And that is why their supposed sweetness has always been confrontational. Not saccharine, but controlled. Rage held steady inside melody.

The misogyny wasn’t subtle

Controlled or not, Heavenly’s attitude didn’t endear them to a certain type of 90s music journalist.

The music press was “almost entirely male,” Amelia says. Even many of the women within it operated inside laddish culture rather than outside it. “There wasn’t a sisterhood really.”

The most notorious comment was the accusation that Amelia and Cathy were “too posh to menstruate.”

“It’s really fucking… horrible on lots of levels,” Amelia says. It was class hatred fused with misogyny. The “posh” tag never quite held up – her supposedly posh first name was chosen by a father keen to continue a family tradition of emphasising Englishness despite immigrant roots (his own parents named him Winston for the same reason).

But that was beside the point. The insult wasn’t descriptive. It was tactical.

It wasn’t about accuracy. It was about hierarchy.

More insidious than the words themselves was how normal it felt. “At the time that was just being a woman,” Cathy says. It wasn’t shocking. It was background radiation.

There were rules. If you were a woman in a band you had to occupy a stereotype: sexy, hard-rocking, ironic, compliant. Heavenly were none of those. They were deliberately “girls next door.” Amelia talks about loving bands like Altered Images and the Marine Girls – women who felt like people you might actually know, not fantasies constructed for male approval.

That ordinariness – that refusal to perform hardness – provoked critics who wanted spectacle or submission.

But Heavenly didn’t rebrand. They didn’t contort. They carried on.

At one point Amelia sent a journalist a padded envelope filled with used tampons – not in response to the menstruation insult itself, but because he’d been attacking fellow Sarah Records bands for being effeminate. “You should not be slagging bands off of any gender for being effeminate,” she says.

Heavenly’s drummer and guiding spirit, Amelia’s brother Mathew Fletcher, found some of the worst reviews funny. After Shampoo gave a Heavenly album one out of ten, he confronted them. “That’s one more than you deserve,” they shot back. He thought it was hysterical. So did the band.

There’s something very Heavenly about that reaction: dignified, amused, not quite wounded.

Indie in the 90s liked to think it was enlightened. It was just as cruel as ever – only cleverer about it.

Feminism without a rulebook

Heavenly have always been feminist. But they are not didactic.

Amelia once resisted the word because she had a 70s caricature in her head. Riot Grrrl shifted that. “I was a feminist all along,” she realised. She just didn’t have the language yet.

Language matters. She resists abandoning the term now simply because parts of it are contested. As Cathy explains: “The word should be allowed to be expansive enough to incorporate different versions of it.”

What distinguishes Heavenly’s feminism is its observational quality. They don’t pretend to have all the answers. They stage situations.

In “Scene Stealing,” Amelia’s anger is precise but not simplistic. “These boys that are now behaving badly could be my son,” she says – not literally, but imaginatively. There is condemnation, but also an attempt to understand how behaviour repeats and how easily people look away.

This music isn’t slogan-ready. It doesn’t fit neatly on a placard. It asks you to sit with it.

Heavenly don’t flatten people into cartoons. They don’t shout answers. They let questions linger.

The most devastating song on the record isn’t one of the angry ones. It’s “That Last Day,” about Amelia visiting her mother as she was dying.

It isn’t sentimental. It’s precise.

She recalls accidentally tipping her mother out of a wheelchair in the middle of a church years earlier. She was mortified. Her mother roared with laughter, loving the attention. At the bedside now, Amelia talks, then falls silent. Was that a glimmer of a smile? Or just her imagination?

“I took your hand; I felt the warmth / I’d like to think you felt it too.”

Then:

“There is never a right time / But we said our last goodbyes / And we left you all alone.”

That line lands like a bruise.

No orchestral swell. No melodrama. Just the ordinariness of leaving someone you love in a hospital room. The fluorescent lights. The plastic chairs. The corridor outside.

Even grief, for Heavenly, is layered.

Mathew Fletcher: funny, difficult, missed

And grief brings us to what is missing from this version of Heavenly: Mathew Fletcher, who took his own life in 1996.

Amelia describes how he brought a “very different kind of energy” to the band. Punkier instincts. More fuzz. Faster songs. Mathew wrote lyrics. He did the artwork. On stage he was manic and magnetic, drumming on what looked like the world’s smallest kit.

He was also, Amelia insists, “blindingly funny and scathing.”

That matters. Suicide flattens people in retrospect. It invites a rewrite: sad, doomed, saintly.

That wasn’t Mathew.

“He wasn’t easy,” Amelia says. But he was hilarious. Lovable. Complicated.

Humour was his camouflage. He could say something dark – “Oh my god, kill me now” – in a jokey tone. Present and absent at the same time. Hidden in plain sight.

The rest of the band didn’t grasp how serious it was. Neither did his parents.

Looking back, Amelia wonders whether things might have been different now – with better understanding of mental health and stronger support systems. “We know much more about suicide,” she says quietly. “I think we might have had a better chance.”

Mathew’s absence made the first reunion gigs feel like communal goodbyes. You could feel it in the room. People who hadn’t seen each other for decades hugging in the bar. Grown adults crying through the first chord. “He was a huge presence in that room,” they say.

Thirty years of life had happened to everyone there. It wasn’t just about Mathew. It was about time.

Now his presence is less overwhelming but still there – in the songs he wrote, in small moments when the band imagine how he’d react. They haven’t frozen him in sainthood. They remember him as human.

Not a comeback, exactly

Is this a comeback?

“It feels like something continuing,” Amelia says. It once felt finished. But this doesn’t feel like a cynical reunion. It feels more like a relationship resumed.

Heavenly were never a fully professional band. They call it a “very rewarding hobby.” Weekends and holidays. Other lives running alongside. There was no label dictating output. When they made four albums in four years, it was because they wanted to.

That looseness is why this works now. There’s no pressure to turn it into a career reboot. They play because it’s fun. They make records because they have something to say.

The new album sounds like that.

The production is cleaner. The lyrics easier to hear. Amelia jokes about fidelity and the temptation to auto-tune old vocals. They didn’t. Humanity over perfection.

“Heavenly plus,” as she and Cathy describe it.

Not a museum piece. Not a tribute act to themselves. Just older, sharper, more confident.

The weirdness of now

And then there’s TikTok.

When “P.U.N.K. Girl” blew up, Amelia was “completely bemused.” It felt like hearing something from another life. But she recognised it. And it wasn’t even the only one – “Me and My Madness” has travelled even further.

The band had nothing to do with it. No strategy for viral success. “Nobody has any idea,” she says.

Lockdown had already nudged them towards revisiting the catalogue. Compiling the singles collection sent them rummaging through archive boxes. Open those and you’re transported back to how it felt at the time. Not nostalgia. Continuation.

The first reunion gigs were overwhelming. People flew in from around the world. There were tears. It felt impossible.

Now they look out at audiences who weren’t even born when these songs were written.

That matters.

Heavenly were never supposed to survive scale.

They did anyway.

The songs still sound gentle.

They still tell uncomfortable truths.

It turns out that was never a small thing.

It was the whole point.

 

Highway To Heavenly on Bandcamp

Skep Wax Facebook

Tour dates TICKET LINKS 

25 Feb 2026 • Coventry, Just Dropped In (album launch)
26 Feb 2026 • London, The Lexington [SOLD OUT]
28 Feb 2026 • Athens, Temple
05 Mar 2026 • Ramsgate, Music Hall
06 Mar 2026 • Paris, Petit Bain
08 Mar 2026 • London, The Lexington (matinee – all ages)
14 Mar 2026 • Oxford, Florence Park Community Centre (SOLD OUT)
18 Mar 2026 • Manchester, Yes
19 Mar 2026 • Glasgow, Mono [SOLD OUT]
20 Mar 2026 • Sunderland, Pop Recs
21 Mar 2026 • Sheffield, Sidney & Matilda
26 Mar 2026 • Brighton, The Hope & Ruin
04 Apr 2026 • Cardiff, Wales Goes Pop
16 Apr 2026 • Washington DC, Black Cat
17 Apr 2026 • Philadelphia, Johnny Brenda’s [SOLD OUT]
18 Apr 2026 • New York, Bowery Ballroom
19 Apr 2026 • Boston, The Sinclair
21 Apr 2026 • Toronto, The Great Hall
23 Apr 2026 • Chicago, Empty Bottle
24 Apr 2026 • Chicago, Beat Kitchen (all ages)
07 May 2026 • Valencia, Loco Club
08 May 2026 • Madrid, Sala Galileo Galilei
09 May 2026 • Tarragona, Sala Zero
10 May 2026 • San Sebastian, Sala Dabadaba
21 Jun 2026 • San Diego, The Casbah
22 Jun 2026 • Los Angeles, The Regent Theater
24 Jun 2026 • San Francisco, Great American Music Hall
26 Jun 2026 • Portland, Aladdin Theatre
27 Jun 2026 • Seattle, The Crocodile
28 Jun 2026 • Vancouver, Hollywood Theatre

 

Interview (C) Simon Robinson 2026 for Louder Than War.

All photos by kind permission of Alison Wonderland.