Heard Ya Missed Me WELL I'M BACK!

For the UK singles chart of the week beginning 17 October 1992, the top spot went to singer-songwriter Tasmin Archer’s Sleeping Satellite, a sparkling electro-acoustic number with an addictive, shuffling backbeat.

- Chris Wheatley

With subtly enigmatic lyrics, a lilting melody, and smoothly emotional vocals, the song remains instantly recognisable. Parent album, Great Expectations, broke the UK Top 10 at the end of that same month, but it would be another four years before a second long-player appeared: 1996's Bloom. Then came a split with label EMI, and a lengthy hiatus until a third album, On, in 2006. Now the singer is finally set to return once more, with a brand-new LP: A Cauldron of Random Notes.

Almost the first thing you notice about Archer is that she uses the first-person plural: ‘we’, not ‘I’ — the ‘we’ in question being longtime musical and life partner, John Hughes. The self-effacing singer is not someone naturally drawn to the spotlight.

“It’s always been a push,” she says, “to get me out in the front.”

Born in Bradford, Archer left school at 16, taking a job as a sewing machinist while moonlighting as a musician. “I got into local bands,” she explains, “and I was doing a lot of gigs during the week, as well as getting up about five o'clock in the morning to work in the factory. I was always writing music in my room, but I never really showed anybody.”

Archer later found employment in a local recording studio, providing backing vocals. It proved the perfect environment to make connections. “I met [songwriter and keyboardist] John Beck there,” she remembers, “and we started writing together. Then I met John Hughes. He'd come along to a rehearsal that we were having somewhere in somebody's bedroom. He had a cassette of some original songs that he'd written, and I instantly thought, ‘Yeah, that is something I want to be involved with.”