In the early 2000’s, Neil Hannon created his own label, Divine Comedy Records Ltd, which was officially launched in early 2005.
The label owned all rights of the Divine Comedy’s back catalogue from Setanta (1990 to 1999), and hopes to reissue all these albums.
Besides, since the end of his contract with Parlophone, Neil Hannon has decided to be his own producer and use this label for the new Divine Comedy albums as well as other projects such as The Duckworth Lewis Method. The distribution is actually ensured by PIAS which owns former Setanta distributor, Vital.
Here is a list of all the physical products that were issued by Divine Comedy Records.
During its activity period the label Setanta used various numbering schemes for its releases. The two main schemes both started with the prefix SET. The first historical range focusing on EPs had the numbering scheme SETnn or SETnnCD; while 7” releases had ranges with other prefixes. With the arrival of CDs and multi-format release, a main range was set up with the numbering scheme SETxxnn with xx being the format (LP, CD, etc.). Finally to stop confusion, after number 15 the former scheme would be stopped, and the SETnn convention would be used in the main range for 7” releases.
Regarding The Divine Comedy, the early 7” belong to some various ranges, the two early 12” EPs to the first range, and finally all albums and singles belong to the main range. Therefore, do not confuse SET011CD which is Europop with SETCD011 which is Liberation.
After Divine Comedy Records acquired the The Divine Comedy’s back catalogue from Setanta, their first release was a reissue of A Secret History… which coincidentally had catalogue number SETCD100. It was decided then, to make the job easier for distributors, that their naming scheme would be DCRLnnxx keeping the same release number. Therefore all new Divine Comedy releases on DCR would be above 100, and the back-catalogue would keep the same old numbers.
However, with the addition of the Parlophone albums to the re-release, the numbers 70, 80, 90 have been arbitrary chosen for them. Unfortunately 70 was also the release number of The Pop Singer’s Fear Of The Pollen Count and collides with Regeneration.
Alongside the DC release, another numbering was set up for The Duckworth Lewis Method with prefix DLM. To add more confusion, when The Divine Comedy came back with Foreverland, they counted the number of DLM releases (6) instead of (new) TDC releases (3), continuing at 107 instead of 104. And finally, no idea why number 115 was not used.
Here is a summary of the catalogue numbers for both labels on the main TDC/DLM releases.