The Virgin Prunes were masters of the uncanny, juxtaposing nightmares with lullabies, beauty with cruelty, combining gentle vocals and the spoken word with anguished wailing from purgatory itself. This first album powerfully laid out this terrain. Its themes ranged from mournful tales of unrequited love, frustrated sexuality, morbid eroticism and wasted youth, to yearnings for distant dreamlands which were juxtaposed with macabre visions of dystopian societies, overpowered by dark forces and where demons run amok. Guggi’s art work for A New Form of Beauty, which intimates a heartless transaction within a domestic setting, is in keeping with this sensibility.

A New Form of Beauty (1981) was recorded and produced by the band itself. It includes the tracks of the first four parts of what was a five-part, mixed-format project with Rough Trade Records. Part 1 was a 7” record, Part 2 was a 10”, Part 3 was a 12”: these were recorded between July and October 1981. Part 4 was ‘Din Glorious’, released as an audio cassette, was a recording of extracts of a live event on 8th November 1981 at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. Part 5 was to be a film of ‘Performance, Exhibition, Event staged at the Douglas Hyde Gallery on 7th and 8th November 1981.