EPISODE 26 - AMELIA FLETCHER & ROB PURSEY

Young Southpaw talks to Amelia Fletcher & Rob Pursey of Heavenly, Swansea Sound, The Catenary Wires (and many more bands) about Spinal Tap, mix tape mishaps, wearing togas, and much more.  

 

https://swanseasound.bandcamp.com/releases

https://thecatenarywires.bandcamp.com/

https://www.instagram.com/heavenlyindie/

 

Young Southpaw: I was going to introduce you and list your bands but there’s like an infinite amount and they just seem to keep proliferating. So what ones are currently active? 

 

Rob Pursey: The main one is The Catenary Wires which is the two of us, recently joined by Andy Lewis who plays bass, Fay Hallam who plays keyboard, and Ian Button who plays drums. And all of those people have other musical lives as well, a lot of them more celebrated than ours. We’ve done two LPs and we’re just about to do a third one, nearly finished recording it. And then there’s Swansea Sound. This is a band that emerged during lockdown. What happened was I’d written some songs that were too fast and sort of punky really for The Catenary Wires, cause The Catenary Wires is a fairly melancholy outfit (Amelia laughs) 

 

Amelia Fletcher: We’re very melancholy.  

 

RP: And also I sing in The Catenary Wires and because my voice is low, I make any song sound melancholy even if it is fast. So we got in touch with Hue, who was Amelia’s friend more than mine because she sang in The Pooh Sticks back in the day, and Hue was the singer in The Pooh Sticks. And I thought he might wanna try singing it. And he did. He recorded the singing on his phone in a cupboard and sent it back to us and it sounded great. So we mixed the songs on the basis of that. And then put the first single out a few weeks ago. And there’s more in the pipeline. 

 

AF: There’s also one called European Sun, which is our friend Steve. Who writes great songs and didn’t know how to record them so we effectively arranged and recorded them for him. And then there’s Nancy Gaffield & The Drift.  

 

RP: It’s just The Drift. At the moment it’s got Nancy Gaffield with it but it won’t always.  

 

AF: Nancy Gaffield is a poet, and we basically do semi-improvised stuff, influenced by the rainy Kentish countryside in the background.