Back to the garden
Forty years on, Virginia Astley returns to the idyllic pastures of her cult debut
“ILOOK back on the early ’80s in a very positive way because I was aware that it was a good time,” says the poet and composer Virginia Astley from the sitting room of her Dorset cottage. Forty years ago, the 24-year-old Astley released From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, a sublime album of gentle English psychedelia that blends field recordings of birdsong and church bells with enchanting pastorals played on piano and flute, evoking a hazy summer evening in deepest Oxfordshire.
The album had originally been commissioned by Bill Drummond for his Zoo label, “but he vanished”, says Astley, leading to Geoff Travis putting it out on Rough Trade. Although only a modest success at the time, the album has become a touchstone for anyone working at the nexus of modern classical, ambient and found sound.
Astley was introduced to music through her father, the composer Edwin Astley, perhaps best known for his theme for The Saint. Her brother Jon became a producer for the likes of The Who, and her older sister Karen married Pete Townshend, for whom Astley has great affection. She remembers him coming over for Sunday lunches and bringing gifts of Talking Heads and Lou Reed LPS. He later wrote the foreword for her poetry collection, The English River.
Studying music at Guildhall, Astley immersed herself in the London scene of the early ’80s, hitting the Blitz and Wag clubs, performing with the shortlived Ravishing Beauties for a Teardrop Explodes gig in Liverpool, and recording an experimental LP with the Skids’ Richard Jobson: “We played a fashion show in a tent full of white sand in Japan. Richard did poetry and I played piano.”
Her connection to Japan was cemented when Ryuichi Sakamoto came to England to arrange and produce Astley’s second album, Hope In A Darkened Heart, a darker, more polished set of otherworldly excursions. “Ryuichi was a gentle, brilliant man. I remember watching him play piano and he looked so young.”
Two further albums for Nippon Columbia followed in the ’90s, but since then Astley has focused mostly on poetry. Her 2018 book The English River traces the Thames from source to mouth – she even took up a job as a lockkeeper’s assistant at Benson lock, to spend her time by the river more constructively. “It was with a lovely guy called Bob who would assign me to different places each day, so I got a really good understanding of the river, and would write poems.” She was also writer-in-residence at Thomas Hardy’s cottage in Dorset in 2017.
It was something of a surprise, therefore, when Astley returned to music in October, releasing The Singing Places – a suite of songs very much in the style of From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, as if to mark its 40th anniversary.
Like Gardens…, it combines recordings of rivers and rain with graceful meditational folk, each song inspired by her lifelong love of nature. Astley’s daughter Florence plays harp – the pair often perform together – and a friend adds harmonica. Astley even plays the same piano she used for Gardens…. “The Singing Places refers to places that I feel have an emotional or acoustic resonance,” she says. “The cover photo is of Kelmscott where William Morris lived, which for me is a singing place – and for Morris too, as he said it was heaven on Earth.” Looking ahead, Astley hopes to play these songs live. “It is really nice writing stuff again. My plan is to make a longer version of The Singing Places and then do some more songs.”
The Singing Places is available now on Bandcamp
“It is really nice writing stuff again”