David Sylvian

David Sylvian's Secrets Of The Beehive - Jewel Case Reissue

The album was originally released in October 1987. The musicians are a stellar cast: Danny Thompson, Phil Palmer, Mark Isham, David Torn and Steve Jansen, together with orchestral arrangements by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Recorded at Studio Miraval in the south of France.

Produced by Steve Nye.

Of the 3 mainstream albums he released from the mid to late 1980s (Alchemy... & the Czukay collaborations could hardly be termed 'mainstream') this is the most accessible and to anyone trying to get into his work for the first time probaly the perfect introduction. Brilliant Trees is more experimental and Gone To Earth heavy and dark; Secrets of the Beehive by comparison is a long, meandering poem of beauty from the Last Romantic.

Do you remember hearing Secrets of the Beehive for the first time? For me it was the late 80s when it first came out. Youth, a gathering together of better things from better places: Jean Cocteau's dreamy South of France brought back to life through the dreamy trumpet playing of Mark Isham; the lyrics of Orpheus recalling a truly ground-breaking movie from the 1940s & that man again, Cocteau and his Jean Marais Orphee; When Poets Dreamed of Angels and not getting past the face of Maria Casares. The whole album was washed in a beautiful melancholy, from the wistful September (time passing inexorably) to the final tumbling of train carriages to their end of Waterfront. Of course in them days Promise (The Cult of Eurydice was kept from us, certainly in the UK market though the Japanese release included it. Unfathomable why that was so for it is up there with anything on the album. Ditto, Ride, offered to Scott Walker (as I recall, though I might be wrong on that one) - we would have to wait to discover that one.

We weren't to know it at the time but it was a kind of full stop to the commercial aspect of his releases. The ambient albums with Czukay, whilst satisfying if perservered with, were never going to find a mass market nor were they intended to do so; ditto Ember Glance; Rain Tree Crow was a little too late and Dead Bees on a Cake was far too many years away. Sandwich RTC and DBOAC with The First Day & Damage and, for my ears, when you consider the abrasiveness of Robert Fripp's input, then that wasn't a path I wanted to d.tread. Frippertronics, to me, is like being hit arond the head with a baseball bat. From behind.

Jean The Birdman, for example, sounded like a great song desperate to escape the clanging of its album appearance.