The Catenary Wires

A British ensemble fronted by veterans of the country’s indie rock and twee movements, the Catenary Wires cultivated a leaner strain of bittersweet indie pop once they relocated from urban surroundings to wooded countryside in 2014. Their first recording, the mini-album Red Red Skies, appeared the following year, while their third full-length effort, Birling Gap—titled after the emblematic turbulent waters off England’s southern shoreline—emerged in 2021.

Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey, previously active in Heavenly, Marine Research, and Sportique, had already spent more than twenty years as road musicians when their earlier project Tender Trap entered a hiatus in 2014. Relocating from London to the modest Kent settlement of Tenterden, the pair initially had no intention of resuming creative work. Soon afterward they began composing understated, wistful material on their daughter’s three-quarter-size acoustic guitar. Accepting an impromptu invitation to play as a duo at a Bristol celebration of the defunct Sarah Records label, they were encouraged by the response and adopted the name the Catenary Wires, drawn from the graceful arcs formed by overhead power lines. An initial single, “Intravenous,” surfaced in early 2015, followed later that year by Red Red Skies on the Spanish imprint Elefant Records.

By 2018 another set of songs had been prepared for tracking in rural Kent, now incorporating harmonium and brass. Andy Lewis of Spearmint and Pimlico handled production for the resulting Til the Morning, issued on Tapete Records in 2019. With Lewis installed as a permanent member alongside Fletcher, Pursey, Fay Hallam, and Ian Button, the group delivered Birling Gap in 2021. Again captured in Kent under Lewis’s supervision, the album appeared via Fletcher and Pursey’s own Skep Wax in conjunction with Shelflife.