A Short Album About Love

In 1990 Neil Hannon started recording and releasing under the name The Divine Comedy. Thirty years and twelve great albums later, Hannon is rightly adjudged one of the finest singer songwriters of his generation. To celebrate, Divine Comedy Records are remastering and reissuing nine of the band's classic albums.

This “short diary (of loss)”, as drummer Sebastian Rochford calls it, is offered as “a sonic memory, created with love, out of need for comfort.” It is dedicated to Rochford’s father, Aberdeen poet Gerard Rochford, 1932-2019, and to his family. Seb, one of ten siblings, wrote most of the music shortly after Gerard’s death and delivers it here, in performances of deep feeling and hymn-like clarity, together with pianist Kit Downes. The final wistful piece, “Even Now I Think Of Her” was composed by Gerard Rochford. Sebastian explains: “It’s a tune my dad had sung into his phone and sent me. I forwarded this to Kit. He listened, and then we started.”

Sea Level recorded their fourth album for Capricorn on the cusp of the label's 1979 bankruptcy, and Long Walk on a Short Pier went unreleased in the United States for nearly 20 years, finally issued in 1998 by a resurrected Capricorn, with distribution through Mercury/Polygram. The album continues down the path of the band's third album, 1978's On the Edge, caught up in a disco-fied era and trying a little bit of this, a little bit of that, hoping that something might catch fire…

2014 original album series 5 CD set, in LP replica papersleeves. Collects five classic UK Mersey beat albums: Gerry & the Pacemakers' "How Do You Like It?" (1963) & "Ferry Cross the Mersey" (1965), plus the Swinging Blue Jeans' "Blue Jeans A'Swinging" (1964), Billy J Kramer with the Dakotas' "Listen…" and the Fourmost "The First & the Fourmost (1965)…

A pop music band from California in the sunshine pop genre, The Association are known for their tight vocal harmony. In the 1960s the group had numerous hits at or near the top of the Billboard charts…