Virginia Astley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Virginia Astley (born 1961) is an English singer-songwriter active during the 1980s and 1990s. Although more popular in the far east, most notably Japan, she remains a cult artist in her native England.
Contents |
[edit] Life
Virginia was one of twin girls born to Hazel and Edwin Astley. From the start of her career in 1980, her composer father was her most direct influence. The other influences were classical music and poetry as Virginia refused to be pigeonholed with the pop music mass and went her own way. That way was to lead her eventually to fame in Japan while she was unknown in her own country.
Her family were from the Warrington area and lived in Grappenhall, where her elder sister Karen was born in 1947; Karen became the wife of Pete Townshend of The Who. They relocated to Stanmore in Middlesex because of Edwin Astley's work as a film and TV writer. In the early 1960s he was musical director at IBC in Boreham Wood, the company responsible for TV series such as The Saint and Danger Man.
In the 1970s Virginia's elder brother, Jon Astley, became a tape op for Eric Clapton and worked his way up to his current activities as a remasterer and producer. Virginia graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Virginia's first appearance in public was as a busker outside Kensington Tube Station, where she, Anne Stephenson, and Caroline Lavelle would play baroque music. In 1980 she auditioned for a new band from Clapham, the Victims of Pleasure, formed from the ashes of the Monos, together with ex-No Dice drummer Chris Wyles. Here was the blueprint for Astley's career, as she was unable to remain in one place for long. The VOP's first single, "When You're Young," was the only one with her name in the credits, as keyboard player.
[edit] Ravishing Beauties (band)
Astley formed the Ravishing Beauties with two girls from one of her music colleges, Kate St. John and Nicola Holland, both of whom had solo careers in the 1990s at the time of Virginia's reemergence in Japan. The only release was a semi-official version of the Wilfred Owen World War I poem "Futilty," and the signs were already there that Virginia was interested more in poetry than rock music, in spite of Pete Townshend's being her brother-in-law. They also played a Peel Session on BBC Radio 1 in April 1982[1].
The Ravishing Beauties did a few support slots, including one for The Teardrop Explodes, with Astley writing or arranging the songs herself and recording them as her first solo project.
The band was short lived, with St. John first becoming a model and then eventually a member of Dream Academy, while Holland did session work and joined Tears for Fears.
[edit] Solo work
Astley also had a separate existence as a session musician at the Crépuscule label, playing piano and arranging music for Richard Jobson and Anna Domino. She also made a track with Jean-Paule Gaude credited to The Dream Makers called "Helen's Song" for a proposed Crépuscule album called Moving Soundtracks; the track was issued on the 2LP version of From Brussels with Love in 1986, and the Moving Soundtracks project was finally issued on CD in 1991. She recorded a duet with Vic Godard called "Spring Is Grey," and sessions with Richard Jobson for the final Skids album Joy, which featured Astley on flute and as a backup singer along with Holland.
It would be years before some of this material came out, but some of her collaborative work with Jobson and saxophone player Josephine Wells was picked up by Bill Nelson and issued as "The Ballad Of Etiquette" on his Cocteau label. In late 1981 this became Astley's first entry onto the indie chart (#24), which has separate lists for singles and albums. Additional work was also released on Jobson's Crépuscule album An Afternoon in Company.
She signed with Why-Fi in mid-1981, cutting an EP called A Bao A Qu, possibly her approximation of "Jabberwocky," as she would prove there was more Alice In Wonderland to her than Alison Moyet. However, it would be a good six months before the disc was released, by which time she had made sessions with label mate Troy Tate and Townshend.
On this four-tracker, produced by her brother Jon, were examples of her predilection for setting other people's poetry to music. Already she was showing a staggering sense of melodic invention. The Ravishing Beauties, soon to come to a close, did a couple of radio sessions for the late John Walters, which included some of these songs.
Using a demo studio in Wapping called Echantillion, Astley recorded the song that was to land her in the indie top 10 (#8) in 1983: "Love's a Lonely Place to Be," a song of despair and anxiety in spite of its Christmas carol sound. The demo was so good it became the official release.
The album, 'From Gardens Where We Feel Secure' was released in August 1983 and was distributed by Rough Trade, who have since reissued it. The album made the top 5 of the indie chart (#4), but neither single or album dented the so-called "proper charts". The LP was on her own label Happy Valley, named for a beauty spot in Cheshire and her 1990s CDs on the same label made this the longest-running indie one of all.
Astley was also unwittingly in competition with herself because of the Why-Fi label going bust and Crépuscule's acquiring her masters, so out came an export album for the Belgian and Canadian markets called Promise Nothing. This had no fewer than three different sleeves and with only nine tracks was not very good value, especially as it repeated Gardens tracks. Available in the UK as an import, it has never been on CD other than custom ones, and like everything else by the artist, is extremely rare. Astley referred to it on a radio session she did with Audrey Riley and Kathy Seabrook, but she was not very happy about it, especially as it was issued without permission.
In 1983 Astley established a more permanent lineup with string players Audrey Riley, Jocelyn Pook and Anne Stephenson, with guests such as drummer Brian Nevill and composer Jeremy Peyton Jones. The music press found it quite amusing that her dad was making more money due to the residuals from reruns of Danger Man.
By the end of the year she began to work on a new song called "Melt the Snow," but it wouldn't be until 1985 that it came out as a 12" single, backed by three tracks, all instrumentals, with the same name and a number though the tracks were given other names by the time they appeared on the first actual vocal album "Hope in a Darkened Heart," an album which was to be her final UK one, though it was to lead to her reemergence in Japan. Another song from her stage act was "Waiting to Fall"; this would eventually be issued as a track on a Some Bizarre sampler, as well as the B side of a promo single by The The. The EP peaked at number 27 on the UK Indie charts in March 1985.
In 1984, Astley played keyboards on tour with Prefab Sprout around the time of their first album, and she also did sessions for their Kitchenware labelmates Martin Stephenson and the Daintees. The new single did no more than scrape the bottom of one of the indie charts, but in spite of what was the start of a career of failure, she did more sessions for The Simonics and Anne Clark, the London poet who created her own World of Chaos and became a big name in Germany.
The 1987 release, Hope in a Darkened Heart, spawned two singles as Warner Brothers tried to find something to warrant Virginia Astley being on the label. They arranged for Japanese producer Ryuichi Sakamoto to handle the sessions and he, in turn, brought in his long-time collaborator, David Sylvian, for a duet on the song Some Small Hope. The album was not commercially successful and Astley concentrated on raising her daughter, born the previous year.
Virginia Astley's already strong Japanese connections enabled her to achieve a career of sorts in Japan where she made two CDs "All Shall be Well" and "Had I the Heavens", Within these her poetic sensibilities appeared stronger than ever.
Since then, Virginia Astley has guested on CDs by both Hideaki Matsuoka and the Silent Poets but by the new century she had finally gone to ground. The only "new" material was a reissue of "From Gardens Where we Feel Secure". In 2006, Virginia released her first album of new material in 10 years.
Entitled "The Words Between Our Words", this mini album features Virginia reciting her own poetry to a backing of mainly European harp music played by daughter, Florence. In 2007, she premiered a long poem "Ecliptic", with flute, harp and sound effects.
[edit] Influences
Once Virginia Astley emerged into the music mainstream, the music press published a number of articles about her. She named her influences as poetry and classical music and paid only lip service to rock. She was also interested in synthesisers as her father had introduced her to them. Though her music was original, one can hear strands of Debussy, Elgar, Satie and Vaughan Williams in there. Benjamin Britten was another influence, especially his use of the War Poets.
