“Model Village” anticipates Pete Astor’s new album Tall Stories & New Religions, which will be released on March 15th by Tapete Records.
2024 marks 40 years of Pete Astor making records, a fitting anniversary to take stock and look back at the songs that first appeared on records by Astor-fronted combos like Creation Records pioneers The Loft and The Weather Prophets and the Matador artists The Wisdom of Harry, as well as selections from solo albums that have appeared on labels such as Danceteria and Static Caravan.
Astor’s motivation for Tall Stories & New Religions is manifold. Some songs are effectively re-examined in the same way one might pore over a resonant image from a box of old photographs – connecting with the essence of a younger self. Other songs have recently been reworked into wiser, more reflective tones, while others simply demanded the exhumation of deliberately opaque, lo-fi non-production. The songs chosen aren’t the obvious ones – there’s no “Up the Hill and Down the Slope” or “Almost Prayed” here – but they were selected for more interesting, often esoteric, reasons.
Astor is accompanied by an estimable group of co-conspirators, the result of many hours spent playing together on records and concerts over the last decade. They are drummer Ian Button (Death in Vegas, Papernut Cambridge, Go Kart Mozart), bassist Andy Lewis (Paul Weller, Soho Radio and Blow Up DJ), guitarist Wilson Neil Scott (Summerhill, Felt, Everything But the Girl) and keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist/producer Sean Read (Dexys, Mark Lanegan, Dave Gahan, Iggy Pop, Manic Street Preachers, Beth Orton, Chrissie Hynde…).
Together, they revisited these lost gems of songs in a way that allowed Astor to balance how they still make sense to him now, looking both to the future and to that big, interesting new country, the past.
Tall Stories & New Religions is released on March 15th by Tapete Records.
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