virginia astley - early stuff

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.

 

 

from gardens where we feel secure

Originally released in 1983 Virginia Astley's delightful From Gardens Where We Feel Secure is a genuinely unique album of melodically varied, rich mood pieces specifically designed to reflect the passing of a hazy lazy summer’s day from dawn to dusk. The original vinyl’s sides were even titled ‘Morning’ and ‘Afternoon.’ This progression through an idyllic countryside is accompanied by field recordings, which include sounds of creaking gates, donkeys, birds, lambs and distant church bells. The gentle flutes and delicate piano creates a peculiarly English air (dubbed ‘pastoralia’ by Wire magazine) - a mixture of Britten, Vaughan-Williams and the Famous Five, and the album sometimes only just manages to remain this side of unbearably twee; but repeated plays unveil a childlike purity and simplicity that is utterly beguiling.

Virginia Astley was born in 1959. Her father was the renowned composer Edwin ‘Ted’ Astley, responsible for the music for a huge number of TV action serials of the 1950s and 1960s, with The Saint and Danger Man being two of the best remembered. In a move away from fast paced jazzy soundtracks, Ted Astley also composed the score for Kenneth Clarke’s monumental 1969 historical documentary series Civilisation. Virginia’s elder sister Karen married Pete Townshend and Ted orchestrated a number of songs for the Who. In the late 1970s the Astley family moved from suburbia to rural Oxfordshire, a tranquil setting which was to inspire Virginia.

In the early 1980s she formed the Ravishing Beauties; a short lived, all female band comprised of Virginia, Kate St John and Nicky Holland. They played a few gigs supporting Teardrop Explodes and recorded a John Peel session before splitting in 1981. St John later leant her woodwind and arranging skills to artists as diverse as Julian Cope, Dream Academy and Roger Eno, while Holland worked with Tears For Fears and the Fun Boy Three amongst many others.

Astley however struck out on her own, worked on demos with John Foxx and in 1982 released a well-received single “Love’s A Lonely Place To Be.” It reached number 5 on the indie charts and featured two simple tracks on the b-side, “A Summer Long Since Passed” and “It's Too Hot To Sleep.” The evocative titles exactly summed up the delightful instrumentals and in 1983 Rough Trade issued the From Gardens… album – full of this material. Virginia’s first solo album is precisely that - she plays all the instruments herself and the gentle piano and woodwinds are mixed with touches of synthesizer and the tape recordings that she’d made near her rural home. 

The melodies are deceptively light and airy, though as the day progresses the rise in temperature causes a corresponding increase in tension, which is subtly reflected in the music. Evocative aural pictures are drawn – the flute that emerges from the dawn chorus sets the morning mood of cheerful optimism, a mood that continues until a donkey brays harshly at the conclusion of “Hiding In The Ha Ha.” The afternoon tracks become darker. The repetitive squeak of a rusty swing becomes a creaky rhythm track, as does a loop of a bleating lamb. This creates a mildly uneasy air, which increases with the faint addition of farm machinery buzzing in the background. Lovely piano and flute (recorded so clearly you can hear Virginia breathing between notes) maintain continuity with the morning music but despite the vaguely disquieting afternoon, the soothing hoot of an owl accompanies the final “It’s Too Hot To Sleep.”

From Gardens… reached number 4 on indie chart in 1984 and Virginia was persuaded to attempt a follow up. Sadly the proposed Tales Of Winter only ever got as far as the single “Melt The Snow”, three versions of which were added to the Japanese reissue of From Gardens… in 1987.

The album was especially successful in Japan, where her rather prim English rose image proved to be enormously popular. Ryuichi Sakamoto offered his services as producer and in 1986 Virginia’s first proper album of songs Hope In A Darkened Heart was issued. Her delicate songs worked remarkably well set in Sakamoto’s synth arrangements, which suited her beautiful diction and clear as a bell vocals. David Sylvian collaborated on the single “Some Small Hope,” a peculiar tune that sounded as if it had been composed in another century, on which his lugubrious croon provided a fascinating contrast with Astley’s schoolgirl clarity.

The following year Virginia Astley dropped out of the music business to bring up her new born daughter Florence, only re-emerging in recent years with All Shall Be Well and Had I The Heavens (partially inspired by Thomas Hardy’s novel The Woodlanders). 

In interviews Virginia Astley would often talk of her desire to unite poetry with music – the Ravishing Beauties had used Wilfred Owen’s Futility on their only single. Whilst this ambition took some years to manifest itself fully (recent work has seen Virginia recording her own poetry), From Gardens…  still contains a lyrical, poetic quality in spite of the lack of words. 

From Gardens… has had a long life - Miranda July’s 2005 film Me And You And Everyone We Know uses “A Summer Long Since Passed” over the end credits, and Rough Trade reissued the whole album in 2003. Although the new digipack version replaces the precious dried flowers of the original cover with a sea of purple blooming in a very English forest (and the back now features a hazy photo of a child as Alice In Wonderland in front of a charming thatched cottage), these images, taken by Virginia, give a very accurate impression of the music within. Pastoral, nostalgic, romantic, soothing and wistful - in recalling a happy past, a time which will probably never be repeated, the poignancy of From Gardens… grows stronger with every passing year.

NB: The Japanese 1987 Rosebud reissue RBXCD1001 added “Sanctus” and three versions of “Melt The Snow” as bonus tracks, but the current Rough Trade CD RETRADECD001 goes back to the original track list.