To coincide with the release of the remastered From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, Virginia Astley kindly spared time to answer our questions regarding the album...
Can you tell us a little about what you're currently working on?
Well one thing I'm doing is listening to my father's old music to put together a CD of instrumental music for EMI. So obviously it will have the theme tunes, but they also want to have incidental music and what they call feature music as well. So I'm doing that and then I'm also writing a book which is a novel which I'm halfway through at the moment.
That sounds intriguing. What's that about?
Well it's got a slightly sinister, eerie side to it. It's set in Dorset but its contemporary, it's not set in the past or anything, but it's got this slightly edgy kind of feel to it.
So I'm doing that and then musically, I'm just really practising to keep playing a lot. I've got lots and lots of stuff stacked away so I would really like to do another instrumental album. I'm hoping that by re-releasing this that Rough Trade or whoever will say "Can you do an instrumental album?" and I would quite like to base that on the idea of The Woodlanders - the musical I did. But maybe The Woodlanders would be a separate album. I mean The Woodlanders would actually work quite well as an album in itself too.
So what I've got to do is limit my choice in a way because I'm just aware that there's about five different things I've said there. But maybe just aim for some sort of album of some description, either a Woodlanders one or an instrumental one I reckon, probably.
So getting back onto Gardens, did you have the whole album planned out before you started recording or were you improvising as you went along?
Improvising, yes. The only thing I had planned beforehand was to create an atmosphere - just create this really heavy-with-summer atmosphere.
So how long did it actually take to record the album?
Gosh, I don't really remember because we did it kind of very 'bit-ely'. Going out in the mornings and recording the various sounds, I know we hired a Uwer tape machine to do that and I think we hired that for a week and then we went another time and just used a really ordinary kind of tape machine - cassette recorder I think.
So mostly we did the bulk of the recording of the birds and stuff I suppose over a week. And then probably did the recording... actually it says here doesn't it, let's have a look [ examines credits for Gardens.. CD ]April then in May, so I must have used something separate. And June. So I suspect that April was when I had the Uwer - April and May. And then late May and June I must have used something else to record with, but it's really hard to remember. And because I recorded it on my dad's 8-track as well, it wasn't like booking in studio time. And then mixing, I booked a studio to mix it and just took a couple of days to mix it.
Can you shed any light on the stories that people such as John Foxx and David Byrne were in line as possible producers?
No, I mean I didn't really have any dealings with John Foxx. And David Byrne, I remember he just got sent a copy of my first EP and he said he liked it because it was pizza shaped or pizza sized or something(!). That was about it! ( laughs ). That was my limit of contact with him.
So no, I was always going to do it with Russell [ Webb ] - I think. I mean maybe other people were discussed but Russell was an obvious choice - a good choice.
When you recorded the actual sound effects, did you go out specifically to capture certain sounds? Or was it more random like "Let's record some birds now" etc?
No it was to get birds but then that led on to thinking "Oh you know this gate sounds good, what else could we use? What other sounds do you associate with the country and summer?".
Do you have any specific memories of recording the album?
Lots of arguments with Russell! ( laughs )No, no there was some arguments but a lot of the time it was very nice. It was very unpressured, relaxing, no record company man coming in going "Can you do this? Can you do that?". You know, no outside pressure.
There was talk about other labels releasing it, specifically Operation Twilight
No, it was Zoo. It was Bill Drummond at Zoo who originally asked me to do it and said "Wouldn't it be great if you did an instrumental album?", I was originally going to do it for him and then what happened was he vanished. So I set everything in motion and started doing it and even though I was using my dad's 8-track it still cost - I was still hiring this tape machine and still buying tape and then mixing costs. I mean overall it didn't cost very much in relative terms, but nonetheless Bill Drummond had vanished and I was left with this album and the mixing costs were relatively high.
So it's why I've always owned it, why it's always been completely mine - which was the good thing about that situation! ( laughs )And I just had to try and get someone to put it out then. Rob Dickens liked it but said it was all too 'middly' and that he would put it out, on I guess it was WEA then, if I re-recorded it all! ( laughs )Which was impossible because it was all improvised, the backward stuff... I mean you couldn't do it.
I did try and do A Summer Long Since Passed again, on Hope In A Darkened Heart, but it was very, very difficult - and that was an easy one to do. But all others, the backward stuff and so many random elements. Plus, because it was an 8-track, we'd mix things down as we went along so you couldn't even go back and go "Oh yeah that's got that on that track". It was just impossible. And backwards guitar, backwards piano strings.. I mean you would never know what piano strings you plucked. It would be very, very difficult to recreate that - and to recreate that atmosphere. I just thought that even if it had all the imperfections that it had at least the one thing it did have was this atmosphere and that you would lose that if you slogged away at trying to recreate it. So that wasn't really a run of that idea and so eventually Geoff [ Travis ] said he'd put it out on Rough Trade.