Track Listing

1. Phosphorescence
2. Don't tell me
3. I will find you
4. Tenderness
5. Astart
6. A better time
7. His best girl
8. Touch and go
9. Wendy and the lost boy
10. Just good friends
11. Since the kids
12. Your tall ship

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #256686 in Music
• Released on: 2002-05-27
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Ballad masterpieces from a ballad master.
Peter Hammill, a master craftsman of the ballad and love song, here collates some of his most beautiful pieces. This is, a few years down the line, the successor to the 1984 compilation "The Love Songs" a similar exercise in the the more pointed, and generally under-4-minute, Hammill song. Hammill has always had a penchant for the considered romantic ballad and "The Thin Man" is an outstanding summation of this aspect of his work. Here, in classics like "Touch and Go" and "Just Good Friends" he favours the direct and beautifully over-the-top emotional statement; "Tenderness" and "Phosphorescence" are mellower, taken straight from the heart. "Astart," "I WIll Find You," "Don't tell me," - yes, there are some fine vintage seductions and heartbreaks here. The selection is broad, taken from albums covering two decades, yet each song interfaces with the next in structured intensity to merge in to a seamless selection that, in some alternative Hammill world, might have been an original album in its own right. Peter Hammill's songs continue to mature as he gets older and this album manifests a lifetime's integrity to his craft.

Back on form
I used to be really into Peter Hammill, but in the late eighties I think he went a bit off the rails musically and became dangerously middle of the road. I have since avoided his 1990s releases. Curiosity about his more recent work led me to this compilation of tracks, mostly from the last ten years or so. I was very impressed. This album is supposed to be more accessible than others, which I suppose it is but this is not music to watch the girls go by. Hammill's songs are very intense in emotion and arrangement and whatever happened to his muse in the eighties, if this album is represenative then I think he's definitely back on form throughout the nineties and I look forward to all those albums I previously avoided!