Bob Dylan’s great. I love Bob Dylan. I love Lay Lady Lay, Visions of Johanna, ‘It’s all Over Now, Baby Blue’, Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands, Like a Rolling Stone, Mr Tambourine Man, ‘Maggie’s Farm’…...

The Velvet Underground: very much a band’s band, and much loved by critics and influencers. Their debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico might not have shifted many units on its initial release in 1967,...

Despite falling in love with the ubercool sound of Teen Age Riot at first listen after finding it on one of the free CDs that came with the short-lived Rock CD magazine, and despite being...

I don’t quite know how this has happened, but according to my last.fm profile, My Bloody Valentine currently lie somewhere outside my top 500 most listened to artists. While I’ve never professed great love for...

In which I root around in the bin marked 'classics I've just ignored until now for one reason or another'.

Every Time The Sun Comes Up is menacing yet beautiful, Van Etten's voice somehow sliding smoothly but forcefully through the notes while the sparse instrumentation keeps to the corners

And so the transformation of The Horrors from psychotic freak show through a sort of goth-garage, out the other side and into swirling psychedelia is complete. And let’s all agree right here right now that...

Given that it’s taken me the best part of 20 years to figure out what my favourite R.E.M. album is, this might explain why I could spend most of forever trying to put together anything...

There are many live versions of this track available on youtube, but my advice would be not to spoil the moment of actually hearing it played live for the first time by accepting a pale...

After the not entirely modern, not so old-fashioned either, relatively straight-up Victory for the Comic Muse, much of Bang Goes the Knighthood is refreshingly and charmingly off-beat. At times it’s endearing or silly; sometimes it...

The obvious reference point for the title is the long-forgotten début album Fanfare for the Comic Muse. The truth, as so often is the case with The Divine Comedy, is more ambiguous. Victory for the...

After Regeneration sadly, mystifyingly failed to have the intended impact, Neil Hannon broke up the band, toured with Ben Folds (the two performing extra-special covers of classics such as Careless Whisper to great acclaim), before...

Maybe if just the music had changed…

Fin de Siecle was the last album The Divine Comedy recorded for Setanta; its title is almost too perfect. There’s a definite sense throughout that this thing, in its present form, has gone about as...

What to do after the success of Casanova… not so much the success of the album itself, which didn’t quite make the Top 40, so much as the success of singles like Something for the...

It’s tempting to see Casanova as nothing more than Neil Hannon’s cheeky-chappy coming out album. The truth, as ever, feels not quite as simple as that.

Just in case Liberation was a bit too easily-digestible, not quite soaked enough in literary reference, art or artifice, for its follow-up Neil Hannon pulls out all the stops. On Promenade he casts aside, for...

“An ordinary day, down old festive road” begins The Divine Comedy’s second album (or first if you discount outlier album Fanfare for the Comic Muse), with Neil Hannon’s now customary literary wit and appreciation. Inside...

Tuesday April 29th is Divine Comedy Day on Record Rewind Play - eighteen years to the day since the release of Casanova, and I've owed Setanta a review ever since...

If all I really wanted was to show the authenticity of my indie credentials, I’d just pick The German Album, or The House of Love as my favourite House of Love album. Purists would no...