Astronauts by The Lilac Time

BUY TWO OR MORE PRODUCTS AND RECEIVE A FREE SIGNED POSTER OF THE COVER ARTWORK TO ASTRONAUTS (Ltd to 250 copies)

Over three years in the making, Needle Mythology Records is delighted to announce a super deluxe, expanded remastered reissue of The Lilac Time’s 1991 masterpiece, Astronauts. This 3LP edition will come with an extensive 11,000 word oral history of Astronauts and liner notes by Needle Mythology co-founder and longtime Stephen Duffy fan, Pete Paphides.

With the shoegaze and baggy movements at their zenith, The Lilac Time’s fourth album was released at a moment when the left-field music zeitgeist was shaped by the nascent shoegaze, baggy and grunge movements. Whilst Astronauts conformed to none of those trends, neither was it the record Stephen had in his head when he finally finished working on it. We’ll never know how that record would have sounded, but it’s hard to imagine a better version of the album he did end up making. The songwriter who brought ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Hats Off, Here Comes The Girl’ into the world envisaged the sort of choruses that would jump from the single speaker of your favourite transistor and lodge themselves into the collective memory bank. But while he really was writing some of his most beautiful melodies, Astronauts is a family of songs that demands to be kept together in the sun-dazed cloud of inspiration that created it. It constitutes a partial retreat from the outward-facing utopianism of its predecessors, choosing instead to dwell on the journey taken to get to this point.

That this is an audibly different band to the pastoral expeditionaries of the group’s previous releases is almost entirely down to the departure of Nick Duffy and the arrival of Sagat Guirey. Suddenly, accordions, banjos and mandolins are out; jazz guitar is in. Sagat’s filigree work on the outro of ‘A Taste for Honey’ acts as a sublime parting shot to a lyric which acts as a wiser, wistful companion piece to Stephen’s 1985 solo hit ‘Kiss Me’, something tantamount to the camera retreating to reveal the years elapsed between the time depicted and the present day.
The distance between the carefree youth of pop stardom and the first intimations of mortality can be measured between the first and second verses of the quietly devastating ‘Madresfield’; from the depiction of the deserted cricket pavilion obscured by fresh snowfall to the sudden shift in perspective from subject to protagonist: ‘No one ever told me/That killing time is harmful/For time cannot recover/What soon the ground will offer.’ For all of that, however, the resulting album didn’t correspond to the vision its creator had for it. At a loss as to what to do with it, Stephen surrendered Astronauts to Creation with no plans to promote or draw attention to it. The consciousness shift of which Stephen had hoped The Lilac Time might be a precursor hadn’t happened. Or, rather, it had – but it had happened elsewhere, in the Haçienda and Shoom and in Ibiza. Not on the hills of Herefordshire. In a nod to that sea change, Stephen handed over one song, ‘Dreaming’ to Hypnotone, who subtly reconfigured it for the dance floor. But that was as far as he was prepared to go. He sold up and left his Malvern idyll behind, unsure of whether he even had a career anymore. The idea that birthed the band had now died with it.

And yet, 33 years on, Astronauts has come to be regarded as the crowning achievement of The Lilac Time’s first incarnation. In keeping with that reappraisal, Stephen has mined his personal archive for live recordings from the final Lilac Time shows – the only sonic documentation of the lineup which featured Sagat Guirey. To listen to these performances is to glimpse an unrealised parallel reality which might have seen Guirey’s improvisational flights of inspiration open up new vistas of possibility for the group. On the resulting live album of previously unheard performances, earlier Lilac Time like ‘Fields’, 'The Road To Happiness’ and ‘The Lost Girl In The Midnight Sun' are repainted in lysergic jazz-folk colours with results that are nothing short of revelatory.

On a separate album, the profligate burst of creativity that yielded the songs on Astronauts is fully revealed with a selection of demos laid down on the first floor room of Stephen’s Malvern house. With the windows open, the sound of everyday life – traffic and birdsong – somehow compounds the wistful qualities of the music that seemed to be pouring out of its creator at this point. Alongside soon-to-be favourites such as ‘Dreaming,’ ‘Madresfield’ and ‘North Kensington’ are two hitherto forgotten songs that Duffy chose not to bring into the
studio: ‘We Came From Anywhere’ and ‘You Come By’.

As Pete Paphides puts it in the notes which accompany the album “To fans who have returned to these songs over the years, Astronauts has come to be regarded as the indisputable masterpiece of The Lilac Time’s first incarnation. A record that was never quite of its time has, through the years, become truly timeless.”