What is the most successful reunion album ever made?
The reunion tour is now such a guaranteed cash grab that I fully believe that bands are building their careers around it. Start with a bang, album-tour treadmill for a few years, then, rather than just taking a break to do your own thing, say you’re splitting up. Milk the punters with a farewell tour, do your dodgy solo albums, operas, or artisanal coat hangers for a few years, then get right back to it.
Cryptic teaser video on the socials, then a reunion tour and boom, all the relevancy and lucre in the world without even having to try. It’s worked for everyone from The Maccabees to My Chemical Romance to Outkast, but at some point, people start asking, “What comes next”? There are only so many tours you can sell out off the back of a legendary return before the shine starts to fade; just look at the Pixies.
With Frank Black’s mob in mind, the reunion album is territory as shaky as the reunion tour is reliable. All joking from earlier aside, most bands split up for a good reason. It’s one thing to put up with the people from your old band for a tour, but to actually make something with them, let alone make something good? That’s a whole other task entirely, one akin to not catching lightning in a bottle but with your bare hands.
The vast majority of post-reunion albums are truly sorry. Futile exercises in rock stars conning a fanbase into believing that the killer combination of success and resentment hasn’t made them a shell of the musicians they once were. What of the ones that succeed, though? Who has caught that lightning and turned it into music that isn’t just worthy of what came before it but actively challenges it for supremacy?
Who got their reunion right?
The first thing to do is define success. Do you want to talk about sheer popularity? A reunion album that turned a big deal into an even bigger deal? Then the answer is Take That’s Beautiful World, and it’s not even close. Arguably the 1990s’ premier boyband (at least in the UK), Gary Barlow’s crew were so huge that their split in 1996 led to a surge of calls to The Samaritans. Upon their reunion in 2006, tracks like ‘Patience’, ‘Shine’ and ‘Rule The World’ made them even bigger.
Their 2011 Progress Live tour saw them sell out eight nights at Wembley Stadium, breaking a record set by none other than Michael Jackson. They might have had an assist by their ex-dancer Robbie Williams coming back into the fold, but by that point, Barlow’s “manband” were basically the biggest band in the country with or without the ‘Rock DJ’ hitmaker. Considering they all but split because Rob left last time, that absolutely wasn’t the case before their reunion.
However, commercial success is still only commercial success. That doesn’t stop half of the music Take That made post-reunion from sounding like what you reach for when Keane get a bit too heavy. In terms of critical and musical success, there’s an album that had a truly unimaginable level of expectations surrounding it. The first album in nearly two decades from one of the most influential and respected hip-hop outfits to ever pick up a mic. In 2016, A Tribe Called Quest released We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service and, in doing so, released one of the best albums of the decade.
Now, while the band split up in 1998, technically, they’d got back together in 2006. This was a purely touring concern, though, headlining festivals around the world to help out with Phife Dawg’s mounting medical bills while he, Q-Tip, Jairobi White and Ali Shaheed Muhammed all worked on their solo careers. Each of them were open about how they owed Jive, their record label, one more record for their contract and swore it would come eventually. That wouldn’t come until ten years after their initial reunion, but it was worth the wait.
The resulting record was immediately hailed as a masterpiece rivalling their previous magnum opus, 1991’s The Low End Theory. Its dazzling blend of East Coast hip-hop, rock and jazz, not to mention its murderer’s row of guests like Kendrick Lamar, Andre 3000, Jack White and Elton John, hurtling the record to the top of the Billboard albums chart. Above all, though, it was seen as worthy of Phife Dawg, the heart and soul of the band whose diabetes took his life eight months before the album’s release.
Those two records, in very different ways, show that it is possible for bands to reach the heights they rose to previously. In some cases, they can better them. So if your favourite band gets back together and release a record of total half-arsed bilge, don’t shrug, reason that’s just what reunited bands do and buy another ticket for their show. Stick on We Got It From Here… and demand more from your heroes.
