In 1980, Caroline Crawley and Jemaur Tayle met in Bournemouth, England, where they discovered a mutual appreciation of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
[2] Two years later, after taking the name Shelleyan Orphan from the Shelley poem Spirit of Solitude, the pair moved to London to seek out orchestral elements to add to their voices.
[2] So called after a flower that blooms only once in its lifetime, this album was intended to mark "an event which affects enormous change, maybe once in a century: on a world scale, the atomic bomb: on a personal level, the death of someone close to you".
In 1991, the band received another break when Crawley was approached by 4AD Records founder Ivo Watts-Russell who asked her to appear on four tracks of This Mortal Coil's Blood.
[2] Named after Tayle's childhood dog, Humroot was recorded by Bill Buchanan, and the band were joined by Boris Williams, Porl Thompson (The Cure) and Roberto Soave (Presence).