Spirit of Eden

EMI gave the band an open budget and full creative control, and Hollis barred the label and the manager from the sessions. From May 1987, five days a week from eleven in the morning to midnight, Hollis, Friese-Greene and the engineer Phill Brown worked in a blacked-out Wessex Studios lit by an oil projector, a strobe and three Anglepoise lamps. Harris, Webb and seventeen other musicians, including Nigel Kennedy on violin, Danny Thompson on double bass, woodwind players, and the boys of Chelmsford Cathedral Choir, improvised for hours; Hollis estimated that eighty or ninety percent of what was played was improvised. Brown ran five 24-track machines at once and called the result an illusion in which every note had been placed.

Side one, The Rainbow, Eden and Desire, plays as a single twenty-three-minute piece. Side two holds Inheritance, I Believe in You and Wealth, which Tape Op's editor called one of his favorite sides of music. Friese-Greene later said they had thought they could turn back the tide of history to a world where the single was not king, and were sadly mistaken.

Reception

It reached nineteen in Britain and sold around half a million copies, without a tour. Record Mirror said they were now a law unto themselves; NME admired its fascinating disregard for commercial rules; the 1992 Rolling Stone Album Guide gave it one star. Time reversed the verdict. Q put it in its forty best albums of the 1980s, and Pitchfork's 2019 Sunday Review gave it ten, calling it a deep blue book of sound, humid with melancholy. A half-speed vinyl reissue overseen by Lee Harris and Hollis's son Charlie appeared in February 2026.