After enjoying a
chance encounter with Virginia Astley and David Sylvian's "Some Small
Hope" on shuffle a while back I decided to play the whole Hope In A
Darkened Heart album.
Ryuichi Sakamoto's production
marks it out as firmly mid 80s but it's not a bad record at all. Astley's voice
is perhaps the sticking point - either you like it or you find it overly twee
and sugary.
I like it, so the sweetness doesn't bother me. It's very old
fashioned, very jolly hockey sticks in a decidedly Enid Blyton way, and there's
not a hint of irony about it either. Peculiarly English, and that's not
British, but definitely English, and Home Counties English at that.
Oxfordshire was where Astley grew up, and all of her songs seem to inhabit that
county; lovely green fields, chocolate box villages, old fashioned phone boxes,
dry stone walls, creaky gates, tweeting birds and leafy dells. Of course From
Gardens Where We feel Secure is the epitome of that pastoral imagery. The
natural sounds - birds, donkeys etc - were all recorded around the village of
Moulsford where Virginia lived. It's on the Thames, and has frequently been
used as a location for Midsomer Murders - it's that sort of English village.
Anyway, then I
searched and searched and unearthed some other, earlier VA music. Which is all rather good.
Still teetering on the fence that separates charming from twee, these early singles
initially demonstrate more of a reliance on synths. The earliest stuff is a
Peel session from early 1982 when she was the lead singer in The Ravishing Beauties
(the other two were Kate St John and Nicky Holland, both of whom later went on
to arrange masses of stuff for masses of bands). The Ravishing
Beauties frequently supported Teardrop Explodes as they shared a manager, but
the Beauties' mix of wobbly synth pop, warbly vocals and Wilfred Owen poetry
(oh yes, there's nothing like depressing WW1 imagery to sell records!) was a
long, long way from the Teardrops' sound. Nothing was recorded except this one
Peel session, of which "Arctic Death" is perhaps the strongest song.
It's a very confused track, borrowing a synth line from Gary Numan's
"Bombers", and VA's high vocals are all but unintelligible. But it sounds
terrific.
Branching out on her
own, VA then recorded some demos with John Foxx, which eventually became the superb From
Gardens… At the same time she issued a couple of synth pop style singles - the
first was an EP that reworked some of the Ravishing Beauties songs, but which also
included the choral "Sanctus", then we had the excellent "Love's A Lonely
Place To Be" which sounded cheery until you listened to the words...
More singles followed
in 1985 - "Tender" is about as conventional a pop song as she ever
recorded, very nice, but rather unremarkable, but "Melt The Snow" and
"Darkness Has Reached Its End" were far more ambitious. Soundwise,
these songs are encouragingly old fashioned - totally out of step with 1980s pop. No
guitars or booming drums, but string quartets and flutes, piano and precise
diction. "Darkness…" in particular, is a really wonderful song,
gorgeous orchestrations, and a very catchy melody. Of course, none of these even remotely
bothered the charts.
1986 saw the
recording of Hope In A Darkened Heart - the six Sakamoto produced tracks were
deemed not sufficient for a full album, so "Darkness Has Reached Its End",
and "Love's A Lonely Place…" were remixed, and a new version of
"A Summer Long Since Passed" was recorded, and these three tracks end
the album. This album did actually chart, a little, probably more due to
curious Sylvian and Sakamoto fans than anything else.
Since then Virginia Astley has been
pretty quiet. A couple of albums followed in the early 1990s, both of which
seem to be impossible to find, sadly, and not long ago she issued a mail order only album
of her poetry which she recited over harp music performed by her teenage
daughter. Which does nothing to shake off those accusations of twee-ness...
Well worth investigating though, as there's an undeniable charm about all of Virginia Astley's work, a charm that is rarely found in music today.
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