A career-spanning 35 track collection of hit singles and fan favourites including National Express, Something For The Weekend, Songs of Love, Our Mutual Friend, A Lady of A Certain Age, To The Rescue and Norman and Norma. It also includes a brand new track The Best Mistakes. Remastered at Abbey Road, the new ‘Best Of’ offers a comprehensive guide to The Divine Comedy as curated by Neil Hannon himself and is released on his own Divine Comedy Records. Charmed Life follows 2019’s top five album Office Politics and 2020’s extensive Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time reissues project.
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.
Plenty of bands and artists have tried to perfect chamber pop into an ideal mixture classical ideas, instrumentation, and compositions with modern sensibilities and textures. Some end up landing mostly in the pop category with a few strings and horns sprinkled in, other veer far into the experimental and lose any pop appeal entirely. But Neil Hannon, leader and only consistent member of the Divine Comedy, apparently hit the ideal balance sometime in the late ‘90s and just keeps running with it. But Foreverland doesn’t sound like the result of an artist that’s been at it for over two decades. It’s still fresh and impressively in tune with the rest of the musical landscape.