About this item

Over three years in the making, Needle Mythology Records are releasing a super deluxe, expanded remastered reissue of The Lilac Time’s 1991 masterpiece, 'Astronauts'. Released as a triple vinyl, triple CD or single vinyl, only 1000 copies of each format will be produced, there will be no further pressings. Both the 3LP and 3CD editions 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.

TRACK LISTING

LP Tracklist:
1. In Iverna Gardens
2. Hats Off Here Comes The Girl
3. Fortunes
4. A Taste For Honey
5. Grey Skies And Work Things
6. Finistère
7. Dreaming
8. The Whisper Of Your Mind
9. The Darkness Of Her Eyes
10. Sunshines Daughter
11. North Kensington
12. Madresfield

3LP/3CD Tracklist:
1. In Iverna Gardens
2. Hats Off Here Comes The Girl
3. Fortunes
4. A Taste For Honey
5. Grey Skies And Work Things
6. Finistère
7. Dreaming
8. The Whisper Of Your Mind
9. The Darkness Of Her Eyes
10. Sunshines Daughter
11. North Kensington
12. Madresfield
13. Astronauts Meditation
14. Writing Dreaming
15. We Came From Anywhere
16. She Is All Colour
17. Writing Finistére
18. This Immortal Promise
19. In Iverna Dreaming
20. Hat’s Off #1
21. Writing The Whisper
22. You Come By
23. North Kensington Idea
24. Madresfield Demo
25. Fields (Sunday 28th October 1990 Derby College Of Higher Education)
26. The Road To Happiness (Thursday 16th May 1991 London, Underworld)
27. Black Velvet (Underworld)
28. Julie Christie (Saturday 18th May 1991 Manchester University)
29. And On We Go (Derby)
30. Dreaming (Manchester)
31. Icing On The Cake (Derby)
32. Lost Girl In The Midnight Sun (Underworld)
33. If The Stars Shine Tonight (Manchester)