The Lilac Time Astronauts Vinyl LP Deluxe 2024

Tracklist:

LP 1

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

LP 2

1. Astronauts Meditation
2. Writing Dreaming
3. We Came From Anywhere
4. She Is All Colour
5. Writing Finistére
6. This Immortal Promise
7. In Iverna Dreaming
8. Hat’s Off #1
9. Writing The Whisper
10. You Come By
11. North Kensington Idea
12. Madresfield Demo

LP 3

1. Fields (Sunday 28th October 1990 Derby College of Higher Education)
2. The Road To Happiness (Thursday 16th May 1991 London, Underworld)
3. Black Velvet (Underworld)
4. Julie Christie (Saturday 18th May 1991 Manchester University)
5. And On We Go (Derby)
6. Dreaming (Manchester)
7. Icing On The Cake (Derby)
8. Lost Girl In The Midnight Sun (Underworld)
9. If The Stars Shine Tonight (Manchester)

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. 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.

All three albums including a 2024 remaster, a collection of works in progress entitled‘Softened By Rain The Making Of Astronauts’ and a live compilation ‘Any Road Up The Lilac Time Live 1990/91’ have been mastered for vinyl by Miles Showell at Abbey Roadand will be housed in a triple gatefold sleeve with a colour inner sleeve and new artwork for each disc, which has been especially created by designer Mike Storey. The main sleeve for Astronauts itself will replicate the original artwork but with the four distinctive “blobs” rendered in a red “foil” texture. In addition to these three disc sets, 1000 single vinyl remastered copies of Astronauts will also be made available, in a cherry red vinyl edition to match the outer sleeve.

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 onsciousness 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.