The Astronauts – In Defence of Compassion CD re-release
The sleeve notes I wrote for the 2020 CD re-release of The Astronauts album In Defence of Compassion. Should you wish to purchase a copy of the CD you can get it from Bandcamp.
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Recorded over the course of 1989, In Defence of Compassion was The Astronauts’ fifth studio album and one which vocalist and songwriter Mark Wilkins would later describe as the most overtly political album he has ever recorded.
With the exception of Secret File, which dates back almost to the very inception of the band in the summer of 1977, the eleven tracks it contains were written over a three year period between 1984 and 1987, and form a loose narrative based around a then-future 1990s dystopia which becomes more and more authoritarian as the album progresses.
Mark Wilkins was without a band when Acid Stings offered to fund and release In Defence of Compassion, and turned to long term friend and guitarist Chris Bland for help in finding suitable musicians. Bland suggested Terry Cain and Martin Meadows, both of whom he had performed with in the early 1980s post-punk band The Glee Club.
With Wilkins living in Welwyn Garden City, Bland and Cain both based in London, and Meadows having recently moved to Brighton, full band rehearsals were scarce and this version of The Astronauts made only four live appearances together during its short existence.
Acid Stings chose Raven Studios in Surrey for the recording location, which at the time operated from a spare bedroom in the home of its owner Alex Cable, drummer of the female-fronted anarcho-punk band Internal Autonomy. The tracks which originally made up side one of the album were recorded there over a five hour period in the spring of 1989, and the band went their separate ways shortly after.
When Mark Wilkins later returned to Raven Studios to record the vocals for those tracks he found Alex Cable had added his own synthesiser to them, along with extra guitar played by a friend of his called Jason Gray. While somewhat surprised at this, Wilkins liked the overall result Cable had achieved, so the extra instruments made it onto the finished album.
Rather than find another new band to record side two, Wilkins turned to Russ Seal, another friend and collaborator who had previously produced the earlier Astronauts albums Soon and Seedy Side for All The Madmen Records, to complete the album. These remaining three tracks were recorded in Seal’s bedroom in Luton in the autumn of 1989.
Along with owning his own recording equipment, Seal was a musician in his own right, having played in several local bands, and offered to play all the instruments himself rather than involve other musicians.
Wilkins already knew he wanted to include an expanded version of the Orwellian song Secret File, which had previously only been available in a very primitive form on a limited edition cassette released in 1978, and this formed the majority of side two.
While discussing what else to include on the album, Russ Seal played Mark Wilkins a tape containing a drum track he had recorded with his brother Steve several years earlier combining an electronic drum machine with a bass drum, floor tom, and bamboo sticks being hit together. This formed the basis for the ambient track Behind The Mirrors, which is still occasionally played on the radio to this day.
Russ Seal also composed the album’s closing track, Sudden Pause, which featured vocal samples from the 1955 Charles Laughton film Night of the Hunter. Again, this was something he had recorded several years earlier, and the same sample would later be used in Pudden Sause, the opening track of 1999’s You’re All Weird album.
In Defence of Compassion was released in January 1990, and sadly its themes of poverty and social decay remain as relevant today as they were all those years ago.
The bonus lo-fi tracks included with this release were recorded at Ludwick Hall in Spring 1988 by the Seedy Side lineup of The Astronauts shortly before they disbanded, plus a young woman the bass player had met earlier in the day on saxophone. Nobody remembers her name, and nobody saw her again after this.
No Cold Water and Somnambulist were originally intended for release as part of a split single with The Apostles to be released by Acid Stings later in the year, but a mix up with cabling meant one of the guitars failed to record properly so the project had to be abandoned.
The master recordings for these tracks are now lost, but were dubbed onto a cheap cassette tape for Mark Wilkins at the end of the recording session. It is from this cassette which these tracks, many of which were either never recorded again or would take a further thirty years to see release, have been rescued. As a result you will notice a distinct drop in quality from the studio tracks which precede them.
