Starsailor bring Love Is Here back for its 25th

Starsailor have confirmed a 25th-anniversary reissue of their debut album *Love Is Here*, due on 2 October 2026 through Parlophone, and a matching run of UK and European dates on which the record will be played in full.

The package has been fully remastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road. For the first time, the album will appear on coloured vinyl in a gatefold sleeve; a two-CD edition adds alternative live and session recordings drawn from the BBC, bonus tracks, live imagery and written recollections from frontman James Walsh. Pre-orders are available via the band's official site and the label.

The live campaign opens on the release date itself, 2 October 2026, at the London Palladium. There, and on the nights that follow, Starsailor will perform *Love Is Here* complete with a string ensemble arranged and conducted by Joe Duddell. The itinerary then moves to Bexhill before crossing to Utrecht, Bruges, Turnhout, Hasselt and Bern, returning to the UK for Edinburgh, Manchester, Poole and Birmingham.

The debut that opened the door

Formed in 2000, Starsailor have kept the same core four throughout: James Walsh on guitar and vocals, Ben Byrne on drums, James Stelfox on bass and Barry Westhead on keyboards. They emerged in the post-Britpop moment, and *Love Is Here* — issued in 2001 after the *Alcoholic* EP and the single *Lullaby* — was the statement that put them on the map.

The follow-up era brought the wider hits. *Silence Is Easy*, the 2003 single and the album that shared its name, reached number 9 on the UK chart. *Four to the Floor* reached number one in France and the top five in Australia. Those songs fixed the band in the memory of a generation that still fills rooms when the early material is played. Later albums kept the group active rather than frozen as a nostalgia act: *All This Life* arrived in 2017, *Where the Wild Things Grow* in 2024, and in 2025 the live album *Starsailor with Strings: Live from Liverpool* already showed how the songs sit with an expanded arrangement.

A 20th anniversary edition of *Love Is Here* is already part of the catalogue. The new 25th-anniversary set returns to the same source with a fresh Abbey Road remaster and a deeper dive into session and BBC material, framed by Walsh's own notes on the period. The continuity of the line-up matters here: the four musicians who made the record are the four who will take it out again.

Why the full album, and why strings

Playing a debut front to back is a familiar anniversary move; doing it with strings gives this run a specific colour. Duddell's role as arranger and conductor links the stage show to the 2025 live release and underlines that the band are treating the anniversary as a musical project rather than a simple run through the hits. For an audience that has followed Starsailor from the early singles through the quieter years and the recent return to the studio, hearing *Love Is Here* in sequence, with the original line-up intact, is the point of the exercise.

The Palladium date anchors the campaign. What remains open is whether further dates will be added once the listed run is under way; nothing beyond Bexhill, the Low Countries and the Swiss stop, and the later UK cities has been published. The reissue itself lands the same day the tour begins, so the physical and digital editions will be in shops while the band are on the road.

Pre-orders for the coloured vinyl and the two-CD set are already live. The tour page on the band's site carries the full list of confirmed cities.