With the shoegaze and baggy movements at their zenith, The Lilac Time’s fourth album was
released 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 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 the utopianism of its predecessors, choosing instead to dwell on the journey taken to getto this point.
TRACKLIST:
SIDE 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
SIDE 2
1. Dreaming
2. The Whisper Of Your Mind
3. The Darkness Of Her Eyes
4. Sunshines Daughter
5. North Kensington
6. Madresfield