Tender Trap's Amelia Fletcher Content With Annoying People

Nothing about Amelia Fletcher's early education suggested she would one day become an indie-pop singer and songwriter. She was more a left-brain kind of girl, and even now, when she's not fronting Tender Trap, her fourth band in 24 years, she works as an economist for England's Office of Fair Trading.

"I remember when I first started writing essays at university, because I did science and math and things [in secondary school], so I never really wrote essays," the Oxford-educated rocker tells Spinner. "Everybody else seemed to know how to write essays, and I found it really hard. I wrote these incredibly taut essays with nothing in them, and I think they were pretty good, in fact. Because I basically, I was and am, in written form, completely unable to waffle.

"I really love TV writing and any sort of writing that is taut and says what it needs to say," she adds. "I guess that's my ideal."

Fletcher's knack for trimming the fat and keeping things simple has served her well. In 1986, she formed Talulah Gosh, a band whose lo-fi sound combined the sweetness of '60s girl groups with the shambolic no-frills drive of punk rock. It's a style she's stuck with in subsequent groups Heavenly, Marine Research and now Tender Trap, whose third album, 'Dansette Dansette,' is out now.

"When we first started, we were really influenced by punk rock, but what we took from punk was kind of the DIY aspect, the fact that anyone can do stuff," Fletcher says. "You can pick up a guitar and you don't really need to learn how to play it, and that spirit was much more important than skill."

That DIY spirit persists to this day, as a new crop of indie groups, such as Slumberland label mates the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, have taken a similar approach to writing and recording. As is now the case with the Pains, Talulah Gosh was sometimes accused of being too cutesy and clever, charges that underestimate the edginess -- however subtle -- behind the band's seemingly innocent '60s revivalism.

"When we started out, we didn't think we were subversive at all," Fletcher says. "And then we discovered we quite annoyed people, so we kind of had this discussion: 'How do we feel about the fact that we annoy people?' And we decided we quite liked it. At that point we became subversive."