Heavenly Archives - Sarah Records

Engine Common (Dave Morrison, Select)

Posted on April 20, 2016 by MattApril 20, 2016

Heavenly vs Satan ad, NME Feb ’91

Posted on January 27, 2016 by MattJanuary 29, 2016

The problem with Sarah, of course – as the music press insisted on telling everyone every week – was that we had no ambition; we were just happy in our bedrooms, mailing out 50 copies of everything to people we knew personally. Sigh. This is a quarter-page ad from the NME, 9th Feb 1991. The thing below it is a quarter-page ad for My Bloody Valentine’s Tremolo EP on Creation. Ah, Creation – they wore leather trousers and did drugs and had a photocopier and everything, just like a proper label (James Brown – journalist, not Godfather of Soul – once mocked us, to our face, for not having our own photocopier). Is Tremolo one of the good ones? – I can’t remember.

Heavenly, The Laurel Tree, Camden Town (David Hemingway, Melody Maker)

Posted on August 9, 2015 by MattAugust 9, 2015

La Nuit Pop de Sarah, Lausanne, 1990 (flyer)

Posted on June 25, 2015 by MattAugust 26, 2015

A night in Lausanne, Switzerland, where I’m not sure we’d ever sold a single record. We also didn’t know, till we saw the freebies on the door, that it was sponsored by Marlboro. “Le décor vous appartient” translates roughly as “the decor is owned by you” – I’ve no idea what that means, but I’m sure Alison from Brighter would love to know who owned the bit of decor that split her head open during soundcheck. She still played, after a trip to Lausanne A&E, but in a bit of a painkiller haze, so probably didn’t notice the mass pogo that broke out when Brighter started, and stopped seconds later when everyone realised they weren’t the Damned. All very peculiar. But probably what you’d expect from something that used the words “happening” and “jam session” on a flyer.

Posted on June 10, 2015 by MattJune 10, 2015

A photo of Keith and Paul watching Heavenly at the Harlow Square in July 1992 – I know it was at the Harlow Square because, if you look closely, you can see the T-shirt stall, on which I’ve stuck a rather forlorn note offering a free poster to anyone who can give me a lift back to either Epping or Loughton station afterwards. I presume somebody must have obliged, otherwise I’d have had to spend the night in Harlow, and if I’d done that I’d now be twice divorced with three kids and living in… Harlow. The poster would have been the one we did for Heavenly’s Le Jardin… tour. Though this one here advertises the gig itself.

Posted on May 7, 2015 by MattMay 7, 2015

An amusement arcade in Japan.
l-r: Cathy, Amelia, Peter, Rob, Mathew

December 1990 Christmas Party poster

Posted on May 4, 2015 by MattJune 25, 2015

I think we were quite excited to be offered the chance of doing our first Christmas party at a big London venue, the Powerhaus in Islington; the idea that big London venues might be on the lookout for gullible provincial labels who hadn’t quite grasped that a Sunday evening less than 48 hours before Christmas Day isn’t necessarily a good time to hold a party – especially if people have to get the Northern Line to Angel for it – never occurred to us. That would be the old Angel station, of course, with the really narrow island platform. The Powerhaus is now a branch of Halifax. Angel now has the longest escalators on the Underground. Don’t say we never tell you anything.

Posted on April 8, 2015 by MattApril 8, 2015

Sarah Christmas Party programme

Posted on March 24, 2015 by MattMarch 24, 2015

This is the handout that we handed out – that being the thing to do with handouts – at the end of the Thekla’s gangplank before the 1993 Sarah Christmas Party in order to let everyone know what they couldn’t expect. Having gone inside and read it, one person did (genuinely!) ask if he could be allowed back out again as a wet boxer short competition judged by Stewart Boyracer wasn’t really his sort of thing, but we just told him he should count himself lucky, as it wasn’t Stewart’s sort of thing either, and he’d be a lot closer. People are weird.

(NB this image is a bit bigger than most so you can read it – click more than once to bring it to maximum size!)

Heavenly stage plan

Posted on March 5, 2015 by MattMarch 5, 2015

With biggish gigs, the people who’d be doing the sound often asked for a “stage plan”. For most bands, this simply meant a list of which guitars they had, how many mikes they’d need and who’d be using them – that sort of thing. For Heavenly… it didn’t. Not sure who drew this, by the way, but Pete’s hair is spot on. (NB the gig was outside the UK, hence all the borrowed stuff: you can’t fit a drum kit in an overhead locker.)