Tender Trap Look Back to '86 on Third Album

After fronting Talulah Gosh, Heavenly and Marine Research, English singer and guitarist Amelia Fletcher figured it was time for a change. The year was 2001, and she'd been doing the scruffy, jangly, neo-Phil Spector thing for the better part of two decades. She formed her fourth band, Tender Trap, with the intention of trying something new.

And she did, to an extent, infusing Tender Trap's first two albums with elements of synth-pop, among other sounds. With album number three, 'Dansette Dansette,' due out June 22 on Slumberland, Fletcher is returning to her roots, reviving a style of '80s guitar-pop she helped to create -- and that a new generation of musicians have made fashionable once again.

"We decided to change direction a bit," Fletcher tells Spinner, describing 'Dansette Dansette.' "When we started Tender Trap we were more interested in a bit of electronics and trying to do something a bit more different and what we thought of as interesting. Actually, I really like the first two albums but increasingly we were thinking we weren't doing the stuff we're really good at, which is the proper girl-group fuzzy songs we started out doing."

"It was deliberate," Fletcher adds. "We deliberately decided to go back a bit and kind of embrace what we'd really enjoyed doing."

Fletcher says she and bassist Rob Pursey, the father of her two children and a member of all four of her bands, were heartened by such groups as the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, one of many newbie acts reviving the so-called 'C86' sound, named for a sampler cassette issued by the British music magazine NME in 1986. Talulah Gosh played its first shows around the time of the tape's release and is now seen as representative of the scene, which dissolved in the late '80s.

"When Talulah Gosh stopped the first time around, it felt like no one would ever make music like that again, because in England, basically, dance music so took off," Fletcher says, relieved the world is once again safe for the jaunty, hyper-melodic pop-punk sound of her youth.

"No one was doing anything with guitars," she adds. "No one was doing anything that sort of had any punk-rock base. It was all house and stuff I didn't really like."