The Null Device

Dr. Amelia Fletcher, Chief Economist at the Office of Fair Trade and possibly the world's most high-achieving active indiepop musician, has just been appointed Professor of Competition Policy at the University of East Anglia. This is about three months after her former Talulah Gosh bandmate Elizabeth Price won the Turner Prize.

Professor Fletcher's current band Tender Trap released their most recent album, Ten Songs About Girls last year; it featured in The Null Device's Records of 2012.

¶ academic amelia fletcher economics indiepop music tallulah gosh 0

This year's Turner Prize has been awarded to video artist Elizabeth Price for her work The Woolworths Choir of 1979, a hypnotic video mixing footage of 1960s girl group The Shangri-Las performing with news footage of a fire in a Woolworths department store. If Price's name sounds familiar, it's because she was in 1980s Sarah Records indiepop band Talulah Gosh. (And, indeed, she is by no means the only Talulah Gosh alumnus to have a notable subsequent career; the band also boasts a senior government economist and an Oxford University Press commissioning editor.

Other contestants for the prize were visual artist Paul Noble, who had been nominated for a series of detailed pencil drawings of a fantastic metropolis named Nobson Newtown, filmmaker Luke Fowler, whose entry was a documentary on controversial Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, titled All Divided Selves, and the splendidly named Spartacus Chetwynd, a performance artist.

¶ art indiepop sarah records tallulah gosh turner prize 0

Following this year's rerelease of the entire Field Mice back-catalogue on CD, LTM are turning their attention to another Sarah Records band: The Orchids:

Unofficially there is a rumour about the reissue of the complete Sarah Records catalogue of The Orchids in the next autumn. Three CDs are in the plans but the track list is still in progress.

Uncharacteristically, the band appears to still be together and planning to play live in the summer; not only that, but they have 8 new songs too.

Anyway, it's good to see Sarah material being remastered and rereleased; the whole lot has, naturally, been available on various file-sharing services, though MP3s recorded from well-loved vinyl records at home tend to be of variable quality. Anyway, hopefully LTM or someone will get around to putting out some Blueboy next, and/or Even As We Speak. It'd be nice to see some of the more obscure stuff like The Sweetest Ache and Gentle Despite come out as well, though that's probably less likely.

As far as Sarah Records rereleases on other labels go, US shoegazer imprint Clairecords has a CD with most of Secret Shine's releases (which is worth getting; they're right up there with the best of the shoegazer movement of the early 1990s), and, of course, Olympia skronk merchants K Records have everything Heavenly and Talulah Gosh ever released, all on individual CDs.

¶ heavenly k records ltm sarah records secret shine tallulah gosh the orchids 0

The Australian indie-pop marketplace now has more competition, with a new mail-order outfit and record label in Fortitude Valley opening. Taking the time-honoured indie-pop strategy of having a literary name (see also: Library Records, Chapter Music, and numerous bands), Book Club Records has their own releases and overseas imports (including Tender Trap, Amelia "Talulah Gosh/Heavenly" Fletcher's latest project), with postage being free in Australia. They also have a page of MP3s free for the download, which includes Barcelona's "I Have The Password To Your Shell Account". (via Rocknerd)

It's interesting to look at their links page. Among the usual indie labels and stores, there is an Other section, which features 4ZZZ, LiveJournal, and, um, Manchester United. The last addition seems puzzling, looking at the site from the UK; no-one here would associate football with the indie-pop subculture, and Man.U, one of the biggest and highest in profile of clubs, doubly so. Mind you, it appears the be the usual indiekid-Anglophilia phenomenon, where any and all affectations of British everyday versimilitude are more indie than the local variety. This has been commented on in the past, in observations of American indie fans who are into everything one can slap a union flag on, from Blur to Oasis to Fatboy Slim to Mogwai; not to mention appropriations of British slang, sometimes with unintentionally comical results (I mean, "Shag Frenzy" sounds more like a tabloid headline about suburban swingers' parties than a name for an indie night). With that in mind, I wonder how long until indie kids in America and Australia start imitating the chav phenomenon to get that imported-from-Britain boost to their indie cred.

¶ amelia fletcher amusing anglophilia barcelona heavenly indie indiepop tallulah gosh 3