Crinklybee

Pop Celebrity

As internationally renowned pop stars go, Amelia Fletcher is a slightly strange case given that

a- her face is unknown to approximately 99% of the population, and

b- when not being an internationally renowned popstar, she is busy in her dayjob being Dr Amelia Fletcher, the Chief Economist at the Office of Fair Trading.

If the truth be told, Amelia isn't even an absolute household name among fans of British guitar pop.  I'm guessing, for example, that if you were to take a straw poll of the globe's contingent of Morrissey devotees, her name (or the names of Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Marine Research and Tender Trap; the string of bands with similar line-up that she's fronted since the late 1980s) might ring a bell with maybe 10% of them.  Of these, maybe half might be able to hum you the opening lines of 'Talulah Gosh' by Talulah Gosh, the 3 minute slice of jangly-guitared girl-vocal-harmonised pop perfection which, in 1987, propelled the then embryonic Oxford-based outfit to the dizzy heights of the indiepop top twenty and a fleeting video appearance on Channel 4's Chart Show.      

For a small subset of indiepop fans, however (well-brought up provincial boys and girls of a certain sensibility who loved the Smiths like anybody else sure enough, but if the truth be told, found their edgier Mancunian cousins the Happy Mondays a trifle uncouth and would be more likely to be found lying face-upwards on the floor of their student accommodation self-consciously smoking Silk Cut and listening to awkward, angular Glaswegian outfits such as the Pastels, or a lovingly-preserved 12 inch single of 'Downtown' by Petula Clark) the first listen of Talulah Gosh (or its follow up, the equally delectable if slightly less shambolic and more polished Bringing Up Baby) were electrifying and formative moments in our pop lifetimes which coloured everything which came afterwards.  Ask one of us, for example, to name the defining moment of the Britpop boom years, 1995/96.  It won't be the Battle of the Bands between Oasis and Blur, or even the day we first heard Pulp's 'Sorted for Es and Whizz' on daytime Radio One.  It will be the day we learned of the suicide of Matthew Fletcher, Amelia's brother and the drummer with Talulah Gosh and Heavenly. 

I am one of those people for whom Amelia (never Amelia Fletcher, just 'Amelia') is A Very Major Popstar Indeed- the unifying figure in the jangly-guitared, floppy-fringed, lyrically melancholy genre sometimes referred to as 'Twee' (although we are never quite sure whether to embrace that title, with its sometimes entirely intended connotations of cloying, overbearing cuteness) which brought us Bristol's Another Sunny Day, Birmingham's Sea Urchins, Glasgow's Belle and Sebastian- and, latterly, a whole raft of bands emanating from Stockholm, that improbable hotbed of global indiepop.  So when, during some semi-random browsing sometime back in Febuary I came across the news that Tender Trap had been signed up to do a one-off gig headlining an indiepop club night in a room above a pub somewhere up Oldham Street, and it was £3 in, and you could pay on the door- well, the truth is I more or less refused to believe it until I could see it with my own eyes.  But I knew I had to be there.

And so- last Saturday night found me in the downstairs bar of an unremarkable-looking old man's boozer named Gulliver's, where the presence of a smattering of indiepop fans of a certain sensibility aged 25-45 (jet black hair, polka-dot shirts, floppy fringes/ balding pates where there used to be floppy fringes, studious eyewear) gave any clue that a major event may be about to take place.  I still didn't believe it, so sneaked up a wooden staircase to find a trio of twentysomethings guarding the entrance to a much longer, darkened room, in which they assured me that Tender Trap were soundchecking even as we spoke.  Seconds later, as I found out the next day, they posted on the club's Twitter page about 'some old bloke who has just come upstairs in disbelief that Tender Trap are really playing here tonight' which tells you all you need to know about my attempts at passing myself off as a nonchalant aficionado. 

A couple of hours after my Twitter debut, I got to meet Amelia for myself.  The fivestrong line-up of Tender Trap (who were brilliant, obviously, but you knew I was going to say that) had come off the stage and, it not really being their style to be swept away at the close of the encore in a waiting helicopter, were standing near the front of the room sipping at pints of warm disco lager.  Emboldened by a can or two of Red Stripe I edged up to the group and tapped Amelia on the shoulder.  Clearly there follows immense potential for embarrassment on all sides from this point onwards, but it turns out Amelia has no airs and graces whatsoever and is perhaps quite used to half-pissed blokes sidling up to her (perhaps, occasionally, during coffee breaks at important European economic summits) and solemnly informing her that they are 'fans since Can't Get No Satisfaction (Thank God)' and that they listen to the new Tender Trap LP every morning on their way to work (I was pleased with that bit, it proved that I had a regular dayjob and was therefore statistically less likely to be a crazed indiepop stalker) and that their now 7-year old son was dancing around his bedroom singing 'Talulah Gosh was a Pop Celebrity..' soon after he was able to talk (actually I forgot to mention that bit but I wish I had).

Even so, quite a lot in two minutes, and I also remembered to mention the other thing, which is that my longtime indiepop ally and Best Man David (the only other person of my acquaintance who I might have seriously considered going to the gig with; I wouldn't have wanted to inflict on just anyone two hours of nervously sipping at overpriced Jamaican lager followed by 45 minutes of leaping four feet in the air at the opening chords of classics such as 'Do You Want A Boyfriend', a breakneck-paced wall-of-sound rumination on the eternal challenge of finding The Right One whose knowing, tongue-in-cheek lyric contains the frankly umimprovable couplet Where do want to meet him- Walking in the Rain? Does He Have Like The Jesus and Mary Chain?) runs a clubnight in Newcastle specialising in Swedish indiepop and girlgroups that had been the subject of an exchange of exploratory emails a year or so ago, and if Tender Trap were ever interested in making the acquaintance of their NorthEastern fan base, then....

I didn't put it as eloquently as that of course (I'd had several cans of Red Stripe, for God's sake, and I was trying to maintain my equilibrium while conversing with someone I've been singing along to while waiting for the bus for the best part of twenty five years).  But Amelia clearly understood what I was saying and didn't immediately leap into a waiting helicopter en route for suburban Oxford- all of which I am taking as a good sign.  So maybe there will be a Tyneside postscript to this story- but in the meantime, you can take it from me that the spirit of C86 jangly/twee guitar pop is alive and well, and to be found, on occasional Saturday nights, in a long, dark room with beer- and sweat-stained walls above an Old Mans Boozer in the unfashionable end of the Northern Quarter.  Long may it prosper.    

hand in hand

Frankie was seven years old last week, an event which has sneaked up and caught me unawares, it only seems like yesterday that he was two and we were deciphering his first forays into the Engish language, and the day before that that he was a baby and he was having the life frightened out of him by his first experience of a steam-train ride or a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the  Liberal Democrat party.

It's early days for seven (and so far we've spent them more or less constantly celebrating his birthday in one way or another; we made an executive decision to avoid hosting a mass rally of infants-dressed-as-pirates this year, which seemed like a tactical masterstroke until it transpired that the alternative was to be plunged headlong into a social whirl consisting of fully three weeks of small, initimate, minutely choreographed and exhausting teaparties) but I'd say it seems like an on-the-cusp sort of age to arrive at.  On the one hand he's still a baby, of course, at least to us.  He still insists on having 'cat towellies' after bath-time, for instance (this means being wrapped up in four different towels and curling up in a ball on the carpet until he feels dry enough to come out).  And he still wants to hold hands when we walk down the street, and he won't let me leave the classroom in the morning before the completion of a ritual involving approximately seventeen kisses and multiple mutual declarations of undying love.  And he still says 'Nusually' instead of 'Usually', and firmly believes that there is a town in Staffordshire called 'Stoke Au Contraire'.   

But on the other hand... well, he's growing up.  In lots of small, out of nowhere kinds of ways, like not being particularly bothered about going on the 10p merry-go-round in Stockport precinct, knowing the correct train connections from Levenshulme to Liverpool Lime Street, being able to read, for God's sake, developing a rudimentary command of simple French, and asking pertinent questions about current affairs, such as 'What is a Libyan anyway?', and 'Why does David Cameron want to close our swimming pool?'.

Suddenly it's apparent that mornings like this morning, when we ran, late for school and hand-in-hand, past the hassled commuters and roaring 192 buses of Stockport Road, me in my crumpled work suit, him in a home-made gingerbread man costume lovingly cobbled together out of wallpaper, orange paint and paper plates, won't last forever.  For now, as we totter on the cusp of the unknown territory of juniorhood, I'm going to hang on to every last precious memory of these infant years.  Because sure enough, like the fox catching up with the gingerbread man, time will catch up with us one of these days, and when it does, the memories will be all we're left with.  I just hope he remembers them too.