Someone could write a book about Amelia Fletcher, and someday, somebody probably will. Since the mid-'80s, Fletcher's Everygirl vocals have been at the center of an elongated string of bands, or rather, basically the same band with a new name for each major personnel change: first Talulah Gosh, then Heavenly (TG plus keyboardist Cathy Rogers), then Marine Research (Heavenly minus Amelia's drummer brother Mathew Fletcher, who committed suicide in 1996), then Tender Trap (basically the core duo of Fletcher and bassist Rob Pursey). She was the face of the twee pop scene: Little Hits could do a week just on songs with guest vocals by Amelia, and you have no idea how many women I knew in the '90s who were either directly or unconsciously copping Amelia's signature slicked-down short back and sides with bangs. The way she deliberately played with gender roles in Heavenly's songs was also highly influential to a scene filled with straight girls vaguely flirting with the idea of not being quite so. (My understanding is that many of Heavenly's lyrics were written by Mathew Fletcher, and Amelia simply didn't change the gender pronouns of Mathew's songs, although she was in a relationship with guitarist Peter Momtchiloff since before Talulah Gosh formed.)

On the other hand, "Sperm Meets Egg, So What?" is all girl, a first-person song about a woman who thinks she might be pregnant, but really really really hopes that she isn't. This is one of my favorite song lyrics of all time, because it does something you rarely see in a three-minute pop song: it deals with messy, conflicting emotions in a decidedly real-world fashion, with cockeyed humor and moments of sheer panic. It's also a sterling example of what became a Heavenly trademark during this era: Fletcher and Rogers' voices are artfully arranged on this song, with Rogers' harmonies darting in and out of Fletcher's lead as a kind of commentary on the story. Plus, the song itself is just unbelievably catchy. Truly, this is one of the great indie songs of the '90s.

Incidentally, Heavenly had beyond a doubt the best day jobs of any band in history: Peter Momtchiloff is the Philosophy editor at Oxford University Press, Rob Pursey has a long career as a producer at the BBC (his long-distance romantic drama series NY-LON recently ran on BBC America), and Cathy Rogers is the creator and host of a British competitive reality series called Scrapheap Challenge, which runs in the US under the name Junkyard Wars. And Amelia? Well, at the time Talulah Gosh was starting, she was an economics student at Oxford. By the time Heavenly were going strong, she was a lecturer there, and now she's Dr. Amelia Fletcher, chief economist at a UK governmental organization called the Office Of Fair Trading. I mean, really. How cool is this woman?

-Stewart Mason