Echo & the Bunnymen - Evergreen LP (25th Anniversary edition)

In January 1997 Will Sergeant, Les Pattinson and Ian McCulloch decided to come back together in a recording studio for the first time in ten years. The reborn Bunnymen entered Doghouse studios in Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, the self-produced sessions further embellished with strings, horns and vocal arrangements at Abbey Road. The resultant album achieved the almost impossible; commercial, conceptual and critical acclaim on a par with their past achievements.

Evergreen marked a critical and commercial renaissance for the band; an album that rightfully returned them to the Top 10, sporting three UK hits including the seminal ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’. The song crashed the UK Top Ten at number 8 in June 1997, the highest new entry in the band’s career and equalling their best ever chart position for ‘The Cutter’. The Bunnymen had proved themselves not only deserving of a second wind but effortlessly welcomed by the musical landscape of the late-90s. Arriving in the season of Oasis’s Be Here Now and The Verve’s Urban Hymns, Evergreen was both of and beyond its time. 

NME called it “impossibly good. The first comeback in history not to be dogged by a nauseous sense of distress, the first one to actually sound important”, the Melody Maker declared “the new songs are as good as the old songs, and probably better than almost anything you’ll hear this year”.