The Lilac Time / Astronauts reissue reviewed

The super deluxe edition reissue of The Lilac Time’s 1991 album Astronauts is a handsome thing. It expands the original release to three times its initial length: it’s now a triple album, with 21 additional tracks made up of demos and live recordings. It comes in a foil-blocked gatefold sleeve, with each of the albums inside it given new artwork. There is a beautifully designed booklet, which recounts the story of Astronauts’ making in exhaustive detail over 10,000 words of oral history, and comes with an additional essay about the album, set amid reproductions of handwritten lyrics and contemporary photographs. It is lavishness on a scale that even the label who commissioned it seem to realise is faintly demented. Needle Mythology’s co-founder, writer Pete Paphides, recently penned a lengthy essay on Medium, explaining how, even with The Lilac Time’s frontman and chief songwriter Stephen Duffy forfeiting all royalty payments and the vinyl edition priced at £70, it’s almost certainly doomed to make a loss. “If a job’s worth doing at all,” Paphides wrote defiantly, “it’s worth doing properly” even if doing it properly constitutes “a heroic folly”. 

It seems more demented still when you consider the album at its centre. “It has yet to receive its 18-page Mojo retrospective,” wrote Paphides, dryly, which is certainly one way of putting it. Astronauts was an apparently final, doomed roll of the dice from a band who had resolutely failed to set the world on fire over the preceding five years. It failed entirely in reversing the commercial fortunes of The Lilac Time, who were probably condemned to failure from the start. Of all the things a mainstream, Top Of The Pops-friendly pop star could do in the mid-80s, forming a folk-rock band was among the most foolhardy. This was, after all, an era in which the only other public figure who admitted to liking the kind of artists the former Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy claimed as influences on his new project – Nick Drake, The Incredible String Band, Donovan, the Grateful Dead of American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead – was Neil from The Young Ones. In fairness, there were hints at that direction on both the albums he released in his teen idol era: ‘The World At Large Alone’ and ‘The Darkest Blues’ on 1985’s The Ups And Downs; ‘Sunday Supplement’ and ‘Julie Christie’ on 1986’s Because We Love You. But even so, when Duffy announced his intention in the pages of Smash Hits the interviewer reacted with horror, proclaiming the idea “incredibly boring”. 

Accordingly, no one seems to have known what to make of The Lilac Time. When Duffy submitted the first fruits of his new acoustic musical direction to the label that had released his solo hits ‘Kiss Me’ and ‘Icing On The Cake’, they immediately dropped him. Another major eventually picked the band up, then applied the kind of shiny production lacquer that major labels were wont to apply to anything leftfield in the late 80s, to no commercial avail. Duffy’s songs were strong enough to withstand the coating of unnecessary gloss, but chart success proved elusive – their biggest single, 1990’s ‘All For And Love For All’, made it all the way to Number 77 – and the band were dropped again. Offered a lifeline by Alan McGee of Creation, they embarked on making Astronauts, at which point things started to go really wrong.  

Weary of touring, Duffy’s chief musical foil, his multi-instrumentalist brother Nick, quit the band as recording commenced. Spotting a potential link between the band’s laid back, gently psychedelic sound and the indie-dance scene that had finally made stars of Primal Scream, McGee felt The Lilac Time should pursue a modish dance-influenced direction, but – wary of the over-production of previous albums – Duffy demurred, pulling the plug on that idea after one song, ‘Dreaming’, was remixed by Hypnotone. Recording began at Duffy’s home in Malvern, but when they decamped to London, sessions were hampered by their studio of choice’s engineer, who it transpired was a drug addict. After further sessions in London left him unable to complete the tracks to his satisfaction, Duffy essentially gave up, submitting Astronauts unfinished, before embarking on a desultory tour, breaking the band up and attempting, unsuccessfully, to prevent the album from being released. 

Astronauts may well be the best album The Lilac Time ever made

Alexis Petridis

As catalogues of disasters go, it’s not unimpressive, but the really striking thing was the end result. Despite it all, Astronauts may well be the best album The Lilac Time ever made. With Nick Duffy’s multi-instrumentalism replaced by new guitarist , their sound was simplified: what you lose in colour you gain in room for the songs to breathe. Despite its lo-fi home-recorded origins (you can hear a plane passing overhead during ‘Grey Skies And Work Things’), and whoever was behind the mixing desk – and whatever their extra-curricular proclivities – the production was more sympathetic to Duffy’s songs than that of any Lilac Time album since their eponymous debut, or rather the original version of their debut that came out on a tiny Birmingham indie label, before their deal with Fontana required it to be sonically buffed-up, to detrimental effect. Everyone else The Lilac Time worked with imposed a sound on them, for commercial or artistic reasons, and that sometimes worked – the swirling Beatle-y psychedelia XTC’s Andy Partridge conjured on 1988’s ‘And Love For All’ was pretty effective – but Astronauts suggested the lighter the touch, the better. For all Duffy’s reservations, Hypnotone’s remix of ‘Dreaming’ deployed a similarly subtle approach: introduced with the same steal from Joni Mitchell’s ‘Free Man In Paris’ as the album’s opening track, ‘In Iverna Gardens’, it’s an oddly delicate example of early 90s post-baggy alt-rock, a pattering drum machine and muted synths chattering around Duffy’s breathy, heavy-lidded vocal.

Ultimately, however, its greatness rests on the songs themselves. Their mood is split between lovestruck euphoria – ‘Hats Off Here Comes The Girl’, ‘In Iverna Gardens’, ‘A Taste Of Honey’ – and tracks where something of the weariness that surrounded The Lilac Time as the 80s turned into the 90s seemed to have seeped into their bones, where regrets and shattered dreams prevail: ‘Grey Skies And Work Things’, ‘Fortunes’, ‘The Darkness Of Her Eyes’. All of them are quite extraordinarily beautiful: the lyrics filled with hauntingly evocative imagery, the melodies uniformly exquisite. You can see why it wasn’t a hit – it was painted in muted watercolours in an era when neon-bright hues were hip – but the idea that an album that seems to be this well-crafted is unfinished boggles the mind slightly. 

You can see why it wasn’t a hit – it was painted in muted watercolours in an era when neon-bright hues were hip

Alexis Petridis

It ends with the acoustic ‘Madresfield’, originally dashed off for a limited-edition single on a friend’s tiny label, that turned out to be one of the most poignant and affecting songs Stephen Duffy has ever written: filled with memories, images of encroaching winter and intimations of death, it was the perfect way for The Lilac Time to end their career. 

Of course, neither Duffy, nor The Lilac Time’s career ended with Astronauts: there was subsequently a sequence of solo albums, 1995’s Duffy chiming with the Britpop era, a Lilac Time reformation that continues, sporadically, to this day, and, unexpectedly, vast international success – at least by proxy – as the co-author of Robbie Williams’ 6m-selling album Intensive Care, number one in 15 countries in 2005.

If it isn’t entirely clear from the sleeve notes what Duffy makes of Astronauts today, it still sounds incredible, particularly in this version: I’ve no idea what the original vinyl sounds like – a copy is hard to find, there currently isn’t a single one for sale in the UK on Discogs – but this remaster is rich and full; and besides, it comes garlanded with previously-unreleased tracks. LP2 has spoken-work, hissy bedroom recordings of sketched-out works-in-progress, complete with birds twittering in the background – the demo of ‘Dreaming’ has a far more doleful mood than the finished version – and five unreleased songs: the staccato, Beatle-y ‘She Is All Colour’ might be the pick. Whatever the mood in the band when the album of live tracks were recorded – in Derby in 1990, and in London and Manchester a few weeks before they split – they sound pretty great: the songs from their previous albums are stripped back to considerable effect; ‘Dreaming’ is recast again, drenched in feedback-laden, impressively unbound guitar; Duffy’s second mid-80s solo hit ‘Icing On The Cake’ is given a very bold jazzy makeover. 

You could say the extra material is very much fans-only, but then, who else is this reissue for? It would be lovely to think it might lead to a more widespread re-assessment of Astronauts, but that seems unlikely to happen. It appears destined to remain one of the great if-you-know-you-know albums: a disaster waiting to happen that carved out its own little cult. Said cult’s followers are likely to be overjoyed with Needle Mythology’s reissue, which sounds fantastic and has evidently been put together by people who love Astronauts as much as they do: a heroic folly, with the emphasis on the word heroic.

Review by Alexis Petridis. The Astronauts super deluxe editions are released today – 29 November 2024 – on 3CD and 3LP vinyl.

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