Secrets of the Beehive

After the Gone to Earth press tour Sylvian wrote the whole album in about two weeks, telling Melody Maker that each track came in one sitting. He demoed nearly everything and roughed out the orchestral parts, and Sakamoto worked from those demos, except for his arrangement of When Poets Dreamed of Angels. Recording began at Château Miraval in the south of France and ran for two and a half months, with orchestral parts at Angel Studios in London, vocals at Wisseloord in Hilversum, and Steve Nye completing and mixing it at the Wool Hall in Bath. The title draws on the beehive as an ideal society, and many of the songs are about wanting to belong without fitting in. He first met the image in Yeats, Rudolf Steiner and Joseph Beuys.

Time and money ran out before the intended centrepiece, Ride, was finished. It appeared in 2000 on Everything and Nothing, and Sylvian called the album something of a failure. NME gave it nine out of ten and called it fabulous and mercurial, and Record Mirror heard the most honest, direct songs he had written. Reviewing the 2019 vinyl reissue, Pitchfork named it his masterpiece. Let the Happiness In and Orpheus were the singles. The sleeve is by Vaughan Oliver and Nigel Grierson, with portraits by Yuka Fujii.