
Jnana Records is proud to reissue the The Legendary Pink Dots’ Asylum, originally released as a double-LP in 1985. The CD comes in a gatefold card sleeve with an eight-page booklet featuring new liner notes by Edward Ka-Spel as well as the only two photos of the group’s first lineup.
Asylum was remastered in 2014 by Ka-Spel and features a rare bonus track making its debut on CD.
“We recorded this in the tiny bedroom of violin player Patrick [Wright] who was the only Pink Dot to own an 8-track tape recorder and a ‘real’ mixing desk back in 1985. I’d moved to The Netherlands in December 1984 and it had all gone terribly wrong.... Ultimately I fled to a friend’s floor in Amsterdam on the train with a synthesizer under one arm and a bag of clothes over the other shoulder…. Graham Whitehead actually joined the Dots during the long-protracted sessions as he was the second decent keyboard player in a band that was now used to two ivory tinklers for some time, and he was also Patrick’s flatmate.
“Steve Stapleton (Nurse with Wound) gave a little assistance with a couple of tracks as we waded through the mountain of recordings. Still mostly it was a time of people disappearing. Julie [Niblock Waller], who joined the Dots from Attrition, dropped out from the recordings quite early….
“Ultimately I completed the album with Patrick and Phil [Knight], and strangely the result turned out to be a small pearl in our history. Better still, everybody turned up again when it was finished for the first listen to the album in its entirety.... No murmurs of discontent, just the occasional (approving) tear. Julie threw a Tarot at the end of the session (we were using a special pack, the name of which is now lost in my memory) and the top card was Asylum. A perfect fit and inevitably the title for this album.” —Edward Ka-Spel