In developing the first full-length album, John Cale was suggested as a producer for their first full-length album. The general listening public, however, remained largely unmindful, and Goya Dress carried on unobtrusively in their work, playing many shows across the UK. Nude Records was already at work trying to secure producers for an anticipated full-length album. Heads began to turn in the press, and the band earned accolades in notable publications like NME and Melody Maker. Later that same year, the band returned with a follow-up EP, the darkly ornate and intimate Ruby. The four songs on Bedroom Cinema balance the slash-and-burn of growling alternative rock with paisley piano pieces, possessing all the luminescence and texture of crushed diamonds. With this unusual mix of serrated textures and sophisticated euphony, the band continued their songwriting, eventually turning out Bedroom Cinema in the first half of 1995. By her admission, Williamson is not a trained guitarist, but with her instrument she creates a tempest of elegant shudders, chords that shower down in artful sweeps. Early numbers written by the band were propulsive and rhythmic set pieces that platformed Williamson’s particular talents. Sized up against de Castro’s lithe and muscular bass-playing, Pearson, a classically trained drummer, ensured the band a powerful rhythm section.

To capitalize on the burgeoning British alternative rock scene, the band eventually signed with Nude Records, home of Britpop darlings Suede. A few successful live gigs bore the fruit of several record deal offers. With de Castro and Pearson, Williamson created an impressive dynamic that managed a diverse range of sounds, often the product of a four or five-piece band.

By day, her practiced hands worked the keys, powered by her erudition of Bach and Beethoven. Williamson, by then, had scored a plum job as a pianist at the Groucho, London’s preeminent private club frequented by the artistic elite. Kirkpatrick introduced Williamson to the electric guitar, and of these electric experiments came the early blood of Goya Dress the songs would eventually turn up on the band’s two 1995 EPs, Bedroom Cinema and Ruby, and later, on their full-length debut. A fortuitous meeting with another musician, guitarist Anton Kirkpatrick, was instrumental in the band’s development. But the rigid structures of classical music left the young songwriter unsatisfied. Bearing a name that suggests much creative yield (Williamson named the band after the 19th-century Spanish painter Francisco Goya particularly his citation in author John Galsworthy’s 1920s-era trilogy, The Forsyte Saga), Goya Dress would produce a small but remarkable output for the three years they existed as a band.Īs a classically trained musician, Williamson’s background ensured that she had the musical chops to write and arrange songs. Shetland-born Williamson, a graduate of Glasgow’s Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, moved to London in 1993 after earning her degree, where she met American-born de Castro and London-based Pearson. One of the few relics left of their efforts is a sweeping, elegant, and mysterious album, Rooms, released in the spring of 1996.Ī unit comprised of the quietly alluring Astrid Williamson on vocals, piano, and guitar, and two virtuoso players, bassist Terry de Castro and drummer Simon Pearson, Goya Dress emerged during the smashing highs of the ‘90s alternative rock scene. They remain but a thumbprint in the canons of rock music history. Standing little chance in an industry that invested hungrily in the influx of young Britpop upstarts, Goya Dress ultimately vanished. The three-piece UK band specialized in stylishly baroque Sturm und Drang rock dizzying Märchens sated with so much drama they could have been captured in oil paintings and framed. Released to little, if any, fanfare, Goya Dress’ entire output never saw either end of a Top 40 chart, let alone North American distribution.

A sea of roses chords