Divine Comedy - The Revenge of the Dandy

In the autumn of 1993, a tiny little record titled Liberation appears on the shelves of Tower Records. On the cover, a lemon-yellow photo of a besuited, be-tied accountant type, with very short platinum-blond hair and enormous sunglasses: the quintessence of sobriety and understatement, in short, but with a pinch of thoroughly English snobbery that cries out for revenge. It's the new – the first, really – Divine Comedy album, on this occasion represented by Hannon alone (the aforementioned accountant), who produces, composes, arranges and, barring rare exceptions, plays all the material on offer.

How did this abrupt change of image come about, and, as we'll see, of music too? Simple: Neil has spent the past year shut away in his parents' attic, “regenerating” himself with massive doses of Scott Walker, Kraftwerk and Michael Nyman (particularly his soundtracks for Peter Greenaway's films). But it was Merchant-Ivory's film “A Room With A View” that's to blame for the decisive swerve the man behind the Divine Comedy name has made away from his former ego. “E. M. Forster changed my life beyond all imagining,” he admits. “Without ‘A Room With A View' I probably wouldn't have written anything I've actually written. After seeing that film I devoured every one of Forster's works, threw off the leash of indie-pop, and realised I knew how to write music. It was a liberation in name and in deed.”

More than thirty songs were conceived during that prolific isolation (enough to fill the following Promenade too): all of them expressions of Hannon's new infatuation with polyphony and a “Kinks-ish” brand of pop dense with instrumental flourishes (the sonata “Festive Road”, the baggy little organ of “The Pop Singer's Fear Of The Pollen Count”, the tear-jerking violins of “Timewatching”), which doesn't shy away from the Jam's corrosive Rickenbackers (“I Was Born Yesterday”, the thoroughly charming “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”) but doesn't hesitate either to revive the glories of Pet Shop Boys-style techno-pop in the restyling of the single “Europop”, all dazed synths and scratchy guitars that, for anyone who hadn't noticed, anticipate Blur's “Girls & Boys” by a good six months.

Even more evident is the (unlawful?) appropriation of the “Nymanesque” gesture, that suggestive trait d'union between sixties minimalism and seventeenth-century baroque, flipped into a pop register and inserted into the continuum of the baroque songbook tradition. “Death Of A Supernaturalist”, a counterpoint for string quartet and well-tempered harpsichord, is one of the earliest examples of this; even better is “Your Daddy's Car”, the first great Divine Comedy classic, a bittersweet gallows from which a secret joy radiates, a spark that floods the heart and sends its beats soaring the moment “the key turns and the engine starts”. “Can you feel the sadness in our love? It's the only kind we're worthy of,” Neil confesses to the accomplice in his “boozy affair” destined to end in tragedy, while all around them keyboards croon soft as whipped-cream petals and fragrant jingle-jangle embroidery swirls: it's the climax of an intimately handmade record, still a little confused in places, but undoubtedly important – perhaps more for Hannon than for his audience.

The critics, however, take to the release, and in some cases applaud wholeheartedly: Stuart Clark of the patriotic Hot Press (a rather predictable champion, wouldn't you say?) sings its praises with real passion, concluding that “if this LP sells even half a dozen copies, it will still be a triumph.” He wasn't far off: in its first six months, Liberation sells four hundred copies.

The follow-up, Promenade (Setanta, March 1994), will do considerably better in commercial terms – a genuine novelty in which Nyman and Schubert walk arm in arm. Ten thousand copies were sold of this – admittedly rather pedantic – musical transposition of an imagined nouvelle vague, into which, with scant sense of proportion, pour “Godardian” references from every artistic and literary field (“The Booklovers” is, in essence, a roll call of illustrious writers: from Gogol to James Joyce, from William Faulkner to Virginia Woolf, from Thomas Mann to Umberto Eco) alongside architectural “constraints” of frigid bulk. The plot sets out to depict a single day, 31 December 1999, in the life of two lovers, but in the end it remains a miscellaneous jumble brimming with gratuitous pretension, in which it's hard to find much sense.

“I've only read 20% of the authors on The Booklovers' list,” Hannon confesses, “but who could have read them all? I was braced for the ‘Oh, how pretentious!' complaints, and that's precisely why I made this song and this record: they're the absolute peak of pretentiousness, turning it into an art form. Oddly enough, that doesn't bother people on the Continent, only the British and the Americans.” Well, fair enough, so long as there's substance behind the ambition; here, though, the memorable tracks can be counted on the fingers of a three-fingered hand: “Neptune's Daughter”, steered through Marc And The Mambas-style expressionist cataclysms, mermaid choruses and chansonnier delicacy; John Cale resurrected in the piano sketch of “Ten Seconds To Midnight”; and the other big classic, “Tonight We Fly”, a trotting bijou from some lost era, amid muttering bassoons and fox-hunting French horns. It may well be a must for many fans, this Promenade, but to this writer's mind it remains one of the few subpar entries in the Divine Comedy catalogue. A yawn, call it what it is.

Meanwhile, Hannon has to face the public and quietly begins to dole out samples of his live prowess. His first appearances see him working with acoustic guitar and keyboards, aided by a violinist (Joby Talbot, his key collaborator from that point on) weaving curling baroque textures in the background. It might seem like a risky move, given the anything-but-intimate nature of the studio recordings, but instead… Bingo! “Touched by the presence of the touched,” declares the NME reviewer who found himself amid a horde of two thousand ecstatic spectators during the duo's performance at the London Highbury Garage.

A long European tour also gets underway, supporting Tori Amos, which will keep Hannon busy throughout 1994 and give Divine Comedy a measure of recognition on the Continent. Neil, however, wants a band of his own; he's not content with being a two-man band on stage too. How to flesh out the line-up? Why, naturally, by exploiting the appeal of the most potent “social lubricant” around! It's precisely at the tables of a pub, with a few dozen pints of stout quenching the thirst of those present, that Hannon recruits old companions from his student days (bassist Bryan Mills, previously in “Lady Macbeth”), friends of friends (guitarist Ivor Talbot – no relation to the other Talbot – already a veteran of Mills's defunct band; Joby's flatmate and keyboardist Stuart “Pinkie” Bates) and a few perfect strangers who happened to be a bit tipsy, such as drummer Grant Gordon, replaced in '96 by Venezuelan Miggy Barradas. The cohesion of the line-up thus assembled – which would remain virtually unchanged until 2001 – confirms a simple but profound truth: Divine Comedy ought to be held up as the perfect textbook example of how to (re)build a band. Cheers to that.

IV – “What we have here? Mmm, a young lady…”

“Wake up, America!” exclaims a cocky Damon Albarn from the podium at the Brit Awards, after thanking everyone for the five statuettes just won. Around him the crowd is in raptures: banners, football-style chanting, girls barely past their milk teeth clutching heart-covered teddy bears to their chests, journalists with notebooks ablaze, ready to extol the epic deeds of pop's new “Fab Four”.

It may well be true that, years on, the treatment reserved for britpop will look anything but kind (an unjust punishment for the swagger of so many of its disciples?), but in 1994, when our man Hannon comes out with the neoclassical strolls of Promenade, the phenomenon is already on everyone's lips, filling the pages of the Sun as much as, if not more than, the latest royal scandals. Hence the crowning of a handful of symbol-bands (the era-defining trailblazers Suede, the “reborn” Pulp, Elastica, and of course Blur and Oasis) to fix the imagery of a “cool Britannia” that, having distanced itself both from the ecstasy culture of Madchester and the anaemic pallor of the shoegazers, finally cries revenge and thumbs its nose at the dishevelled grungers across the pond.

Centre stage, vast throngs of common people start to feel important again, not through the escape hatch of dissociating from reality, as was the rule for the new romantics, but by sublimating themselves into the product — not the distorted image — of the “English way of life” so fiercely opposed in the past. A generation of thoroughly unspecial people who “drink, dance and shag because there's nothing else to do”, who fantasise about their own miseries with a mix of narcissism and hidden self-pity. Normality — dare I say the banality of the gesture — suddenly becomes a source of pride again: family barbecues, Union Jack-liveried Minis, greasy packets of fish'n'chips, weekends of “non-stop fun” after a hard week's work, and all the other small and large rites of the working class, once “out”, now back “in” — rites that Blur were perhaps the most faithful interpreters of.

Naturally there are also those who take an “other” point of view, and that alone is enough to confirm the many different guises of the britpop phenomenon: see the arty, philosophising attitude of Pulp themselves, the prodigious freak megalomania of Super Furry Animals, the vaguely fairy-tale space-synth-glam of Mansun, the timeless, sexless abstraction of the Anderson-Butler duo. The gist, however, remains one and the same: to reaffirm one's own “Englishness” above all and everyone else.

So, in this glittering kingdom of the working class, what part does our Neil Hannon play? None, for now. Or rather, his guiding lines aren't even so opposed (“Liberation”, after all, was britpop in its purest form), but the “Mr Divine Comedy” prefers to flaunt detachment and vain indifference towards the whole bandwagon: “Most of the bands currently around are trapped in the Sixties. I'm trapped in other eras.” Cheeky, the lad. Not very credible, but cheeky. In truth, that 1995 universally regarded as the apex of “Brit” fervour is, for Hannon, a year of commissioned work (he writes the music for the hit sitcom “Father Ted”, later folded into the folkie ballad “Songs Of Love”), as well as days spent holed up in the studio with co-producer Darren Allison, shaping the new album. Expectations are high: Setanta gives Hannon carte blanche (read: unlimited credit) and he takes all the time and money needed to do things properly. The sessions, split across three different studios, drag on for eight months, involving legions of musicians and orchestral players (all to be paid, of course). By the end of the sessions, the bill comes to around £100,000, and Cullen, revived with smelling salts after what, at first glance, looked very much like a cardiac arrest, swears that if the album doesn't at least cover its costs, it'll be the end for that blond boy.

Casanova (Setanta, 29 April 1996) is the carnal operetta, almost a “Don Giovanni” (the record was originally meant to be titled “Don Juan”) tailor-made for British youth. The soundtrack to the exploits of a refined show-off who — forgive the provincialism — visits the Riviera and plays the cut-price seducer with Swedish girls fleeing their “arctic sorrows”. The one difference: instead of flaunting noble lineage à la “Serbelloni Mazzanti Vien dal Mare”, there's a proud sense of belonging to a middle class suspended between Jarvis Cocker's “aristocracy of the spirit” and the cockney populism of a Damon Albarn freshly weaned onto pop. The result is cynicism on a massive scale, a gallant concentrate of misogyny and proud libertinism. Almost the diary of a heterosexual Momus, just a touch more courteous and less necrophiliac. “Actually, I'd wanted for a long time to write an album you could get turned on to, but the thing is I hadn't had much experience of ‘the field', at least not until the first two albums,” Hannon chuckles. “Then came the ‘Promenade' tour and the advances of all those French women… that's when the change happened, let's say. On the whole I've always wanted to write songs about my personal life, only up to now my personal life had always been too damn boring to allow it!”

Amid all this prurient merriment there is also — and above all — a splendid record. Once again the hinge is a concept, and the art-pop sophistication achieved on the previous record is likewise preserved intact, but everything flows far more loosely towards a decisive brit-centric realignment, allowing Hannon to cultivate a persona that is both a summary and a reworking of poses belonging to his forebears. Here he is, a new James Bond grappling with the (octo)pussy of the moment, caught juggling ragged wah-wah à la Curtis Mayfield, echoes of spy stories stamped Lalo Schifrin, and the gothic touches dear to Peter Hammill (the astonishing mini-suite “Through A Long And Sleepless Night”). Here he is again, Burt Bacharach's terrible little grandson, popping up arms-folded amid the whistling of “Woman Of The World” and perfecting, in the glam-orchestral guerrilla warfare of “Charge”, his own cartoonish plan to dominate the female sex. He then pays homage to the great Serge Gainsbourg and his erotic-existential babbling (“Middle Class Heroes”), but does so within an entirely anglophone frame, awash with bloated strings, little soul guitars, vintage kitsch, and crooner proclamations that for one moment forget their manners (“Elegance against ignorance! Difference against indifference! Wit against shit!”). Only the closing “The Dogs And The Horses”, fittingly split off from the rest of the record by the closing credits (the micro-soundtrack “Theme From Casanova”), regurgitates all the malaise so skilfully concealed until then: if before it was Dorian Gray speaking, now he passes the baton to his decrepit image in the mirror, busy reeling off the usual rosary of death, cruel fate and mal de vivre. The whole thing can't help but evoke a Jacques Brel bent over his own grave, with the levitating orchestra (arranged for the first time by Joby Talbot) forming a canopy of black sky.

Reactions to the record are lukewarm, at least until Setanta starts pulling singles off it (sacrilege!) and giving them airplay. The first is “Something For The Weekend” which, duly pumped up by DJ Chris Evans on Radio One, becomes a smash hit (number 13 in the charts): a dazzling squeeze of ornamental hooks, metronomic snare rolls and generous brass, the song embodies in full Hannon's “new world”, his (re)discovery of sex and vice. The brisk “Becoming More Like Alfie” does slightly less well, and that's a shame, because its hypothetical crossover between lounge music and the sly tomfoolery of a Ray Davies is, if anything, even more thrilling.

Hannon's stock rises further when “The Frog Princess”, a cruel serenade marked out by a fizzy drum machine, debuts straight in at number 15 on the British chart, with the public once again rewarding the verbal wit of the Casanova of Ireland — here a willing apprentice of Bryan Ferry — ready to kiss his frog princess only to dissect her later during science class (“I met a girl, she was a frog princess/ Yes, I do regret it now/ But how was I to know that just one kiss/ could turn my frog into a cow?”).

With media attention sky-high, Hannon throws himself into the fray to leave his mark. His irresistibly smackable face appears on the covers of NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and… name any British music magazine at random and it'll be there. In interviews, he plays the card of the “accidental seducer” in response to questions mostly aimed at digging up details of his sex life (him, of all people, who until a few months earlier had been perceived as almost “asexual”!). Jokes and wisecracks aside, Neil is keen to make clear that his is above all a self-parody: “Lyrically, the central theme of the album is to expose, through caricature and paradox, the laughable nature of male ‘machismo'.” The whole thing smacks of a well-built trick pulled off to perfection, but it's also thanks to this shrewd promotional strategy that Casanova will go on to sell 60,000 copies in six months and land among the top forty albums of 1996 in the Melody Maker chart, as well as being voted album of the year by Q Magazine readers.

Cementing the Comedy's following, a spectacular show at London's Shepherd's Bush Empire (20/10/1996), where the band is backed by the thirty members of the Brunel Ensemble: the very first (and thoroughly successful) live attempt to dress the permeable silhouette of their music in “symphonism” — avoid, if possible, any comparisons with New Trolls, Procol Harum and Moody Blues. Then more touring on English soil as support to Radiohead, Supergrass and Gene; but also in France, as headliners, all the better to enjoy the attentions of ravenous French fans and confirm their status as a “divine” band in name, but in fact about as far from the concept of sainthood as can be. Hannon, however, answers these barbs with the innocence of a child you'd forgive anything, even the most blatant filth: “At the risk of sounding a bit stupid, the real meaning of the band's name is what I'm now trying to put onto record: namely the battle between the sacred and the profane that endures in each of us. We all aspire to be monks, but at the same time we want to, erm… be naughty, do you follow me?” You bet, Mr Hannon. You bet.

The songs I find most interesting touch on fairly unusual themes. Even if you're writing about love, you have to come at it from a strange angle. You have to catapult the listeners into something that ends up confusing them.

(Neil Hannon)

V — In heaven everything is fine

The Shepherd's Bush Empire show, besides capping off what was already a magical year, is a sweet chance for revenge for Divine Comedy: a good two thousand spectators turn up, compared to the barely dozen or so counted back in the Cherry Orchard days, all in the space of just (!) five years. As if that weren't enough, the second half of the show is used to “road-test” a handful of brand new songs, marked by a delicate, ironic and entirely digestible veneer of sentimentality. It's precisely these six tracks (plus a revised “Timewatching”) that will make up the tracklist of A Short Album About Love, recorded live during the afternoon soundcheck at the Shepherd's — though the vocal parts would actually be re-recorded later — and released, with perfect timing, on Valentine's Day 1997.

If “Casanova” was an ode to sex “with class” (not in the sense of “refined”, but of “class-based”), or alternatively the equivalent of an aphrodisiac jacuzzi with Piero Umiliani's “Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso” playing in the background, on A Short Album About Love the senses are purified in the waters of an orchestral singer-songwriter style increasingly inclined to look back over its own shoulder with calm and (believe it or not…) decorum. Here is courtly love triumphing over lust, puritanism driving out the sins of the flesh. Hannon himself, now sporting beard and moustache, is no longer the same: the subtly depraved crooner gives way to a medieval troubadour, a noble knight ready to defend his lady's virtue with his sword. Let's not, though, mistake this for a full repentance, since there's no trace here of a Kieslowski's moral dilemmas (explicitly nodded to in the title); rather, it's a dive into muted colours, a withering of forms in the face of a newfound inner sobriety. And the record, it must be said, works beautifully. At least three absolute masterpieces, plus another four tracks only slightly inferior: enough to earn it a flat 8, if I still remember how to do the sums.

“Everybody Knows (Except You)” steals the chord progression from ELO’s “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head” and builds on top of it one of those melodies capable of reconciling you with the world (a disarmingly simple ascending scale, dressed up with “Bacharachian” backing vocals and pa-pa-pa-pas stretched out on the ironing board, yearning for the hot steam of the strings), rescuing you from ancient disharmony. “If”, on the other hand, borrows its title and lyrical setup from Roger Waters's “Atom Heart Mother” to put together the quintessential unconventional love song. While the harmonic design is a hazy glide between Neil Diamond and the best of solo John Lennon, the lyrical register shifts with disconcerting skill from the elegiac to the manic (“If you were a tree I could carve my name into your side and you would not cry, because trees don’t cry”), lingering more than once in the farcical (“If you were a horse I’d clean the crap out of your stable”) and finally landing one of the cruelest lines a poet has ever dedicated to his beloved: “If you were a dog I’d feed you scraps from off the table, although my wife complains” (sublime, isn’t it?). A sudden surge of paranoia, underlined by a dissonant orchestral crescendo – like “A Day In The Life” raised to the umpteenth power – disfigures the ending and cuts short any reasonable attempt at analysis or melodic reconciliation, leaving a gigantic question mark hanging over one of the masterpieces of the entire 1990s.

For the new version of “Timewatching” (a song that had already appeared on Liberation), Hannon locks minimalism away in the cupboard and crafts a post-Romantic lied that not even the “chamber” Mahler of the “Kindertotenlieder” could have orchestrated with more restraint and feeling. The meter is now elastic, no longer a cuckoo clock, stretching and contracting according to the inflections of the vocal – here Hannon’s delivery is vaguely nasal (perhaps his most masterful performance ever). The voices of the ensemble emerge one by one, tracing their shadowy movements and sharpening their ellipses, before dissolving into the “full” arrangement like kamikazes drunk on love, while backstage the ghost of Nat “King” Cole seethes at hearing that devilish Irishman twist the words of his “When I Fall In Love” at will and glue them onto a new score. This version of “Timewatching” is the essence, the distillate of every torch song ever written by humankind. Unsurpassable.

As mentioned, these three tracks alone would deserve to be ranked among the greatest pop creations of all time. Half a notch below (but only half, mind you…) sit the noir romanticism of “Someone”, smeared with the lush strings of the Tindersticks and twangy guitar, the chivalric, flamenco-tinged triumph of “In Pursuit Of Happiness”, a baroque-leaning take on Blue Nile in “I’m All You Need” and, above all, the sly bossa nova of “If I Were You (I’d Be Through With Me)”, softened by the “tweet-tweet” of the woodwinds, like sobbing, drenched little chicks.

Buoyed by the buzz generated by Casanova, A Short Album About Love enters straight in at number 13 on the UK charts, to reviews that are nothing short of rapturous. Amid the open applause, though, a few doubts linger, especially regarding the frontman’s shift in lyrical perspective: “So is Hannon the sleazy worm of 'Casanova' or the refined suitor we find here?”, the perplexed NME reviewer asks. Impossible to answer, and probably pointless; if it’s true, as Freud taught, that the Irish are the one people who can’t be psychoanalyzed because they’re “too prone to fantasy”, then it’s best to turn a blind eye and read this (relative) about-face as yet another challenge, the perpetual urge to absorb every possibility, however fake or implausible on paper.

And what more tempting a challenge for Hannon than collaborating with Michael Nyman, his old source of inspiration? Legend has it that back in 1994, after a London concert by the composer, Neil handed him a copy of Promenade, taking care to warn him: “Here, this is my record. If you want to sue me, here’s the address.” Nyman, interviewed in ’97, claims not to remember the incident (which says a lot about how closely he listened to that record), but says he enjoys Divine Comedy’s music and would like to work on something with Hannon. That “something” materializes into three “Edinburgh concerts” in which the band and the Maestro’s string quartet, side by side, gracefully raid each other’s repertoires (“Your Daddy’s Car” sung by soprano Hilary Summers sounds like pure bliss…) and close out the show unveiling the unreleased “Grizzly Knife Attack”, co-written by the two bandleaders.

Of a very different caliber was the decision to pal around with Robbie Williams – met at the launch party for “Twentieth Century Blues”, the Noel Coward tribute album – and support his post-“Millennium” tour in 1999, but by now it’s clear Hannon will seize any opportunity to spread his gospel to the masses. That doesn’t mean his art should be mistaken for crass commercialism, since that would be wide of the mark: “There has never been a single, isolated moment in my creative life when I wrote a song purely to achieve success”, he explains. “There’s only one reason I make music, and that’s to write the best song my abilities allow. But it’s equally obvious that, once it’s time to sell that song, I’ll do everything within the bounds of reality to sell it. It’s part of my job: I have to make money for myself, for the record label and for my band.” No mincing words from our poet of the middle classes.

VI – Stupor, death and public transport

At the end of 1997, Casanova is finally released in the United States (the first single, “Casanova 1”, even features a delightful cover of the Magnetic Fields's “Love Is Lighter Than Air”), but in Europe Hannon is already two steps ahead, having recently finished work on the follow-up to A Short Album About Love. The rumors circulating are rather vague, but the record is said to introduce even more “serious” (ugh!) themes into the Comedy’s pop conclave. Those suspicions are confirmed with the release of Fin De Siècle (Setanta, August 31, 1998), their most acclaimed and best-selling album to date (“A record dangerously close to being a masterpiece…”, Melody Maker will proclaim), the crowning achievement of a track record that earns the band top billing at the Glastonbury summer festival.

I remember approaching it with the utmost trepidation when it first came out. After all, the title alone conjures up an overdose of fusty, time-worn Mitteleuropean glitter; and when you add musings on “the end of time” delivered in intimate conversation with Charles Baudelaire, flashes of Jarman-esque epic and biblical hints of Armageddon, all that’s left to do is light a candle to St. Patrick and hope the whole thing at least steers clear of the phony intellectualism of Promenade. This time, to great relief, those prayers seem to have been (partly) answered: although bogged down in conceptual baggage and clouded by the fear of finding nothing beyond history’s “Christian” finish line, the album turns out to be a surprising grab-bag of little songs, precariously balanced as ever between sharp wit and cliché.

It opens with “Generation Sex” (the first single, which made headlines for its scornful cynicism about the death of Princess Diana), a Motown up-tempo number dressed up with harp flourishes and harpsichord plucks, but it quickly plunges into the schizophrenia of “Thrillerseeker”, mixing hard-rock riffage (echoes of Alice In Chains keep bouncing insistently through my brain, don’t ask me how or why…), space-rock vertigo and John Barry-style scoring, ending up resembling some of Mansun’s sci-fi visions. From there it’s a short step to the panzer-like march of “Sweden” (Wagner über alles), and an even shorter one to the emotional drift of “Commuter Love”, whose delicate ballad frame is repeatedly deflowered by percussive interludes and hysterically “Frippian” guitars.

The ticket to the charts here goes by the name “National Express”, a locomotive of vocoded Kraftwerk-like choruses and “swinging” flutes (a Dixieland big band catapulted onto Broadway during an episode of “Futurama”?), though the crème de la crème remains the eight minutes of “Eric The Gardener”, an absurd foray into orchestral techno, with acoustic instruments mimicking Detroit idioms: four-on-the-floor bass drum and syncopated hi-hats, string flourishes lost in celestial swirls, the rosy babble of synths. An unlikely yet thrilling cross between Carl Craig and Ennio Morricone, and one of the most “experimental” things in the Divine Comedy catalogue.

Starting from the seventh track, though, something starts to crack. Maybe it’s the fault of co-producer Jon Jacobs (brought in for his work with ELO’s Jeff Lynne), who up to that point had actually done a good job trimming the excess fat; or maybe not even he can rein in Hannon’s megalomania, who knows. The fact remains that the last four tracks reveal some thoroughly gratuitous pomposity: take the bland chanson “Life On Earth”, the cumbersome choral masses of “Here Comes The Flood”, and the limp “The Certainty Of Chance” – despite the Viagra of a Bob Erzin-style production. Even “Sunrise”, surprisingly the track most praised by British reviewers, remains a merely passable ballad, light years away from the peaks of pathos reached on the previous album.

Despite it all, the triangle (oops) is now complete: starting from comic operetta (Casanova), passing through romantic comedy (A Short Album About Love), and arriving, without a hitch, at tragedy (“cyber-Shakespearean”, in this case). A trajectory symptomatic of an all-too-“mannered” weariness, with decadent stylistic flourishes overtaking the pastel outlines, and steel now forming the frame around a heart once wrapped in silk and organza.

Fin De Siècle is a glacial pulse radiating a metallic sense of alienation. An “Ok Computer” composed in the language of someone who prefers the typewriter to the PC (not to mention the quill pen), and absinthe to MDMA: the same malaise, expressed through different means. The collaboration with German singer Ute Lemper should be read in the same light, with the “Hannon & Talbot” dream team writing material and taking part in the recording of the album “Punishing Kiss”: an eccentric way of resurrecting Weimar Republic cabaret and marrying it to Las Vegas sleaze, after all. But Fin De Siècle is, above all, the point of no return for Divine Comedy. Almost their (our) funeral – but a funeral from which it’s possible to come back to life. Because if it’s true that the Apocalypse has arrived and swept everything away, then now really is the time to start over. To regenerate.

VII – “Be Kind Rewind”

Fortunately, Hannon's regeneration doesn't translate into a flirtation with Buddhism or one of those hopelessly inflated trips to India: all he needs is music and family — in September '99 he married his girlfriend Orla Little — to find himself again. Alongside this stability on the romantic front, the horoscope foresees big changes on the work side: first and foremost a change of label, since the Comedy had by now become too much for the "little" Setanta to handle. Parlophone wins the bidding war, but before waving goodbye to his protégé, crafty old Keith Cullen doesn't miss the chance to pile up singles plus two mediocre unreleased tracks ("Gin Soaked Boy" and "Too Young To Die") to put together A Secret History (Setanta, 30 August 1999), a worthy but overly compact summary of seven years spent chasing the Holy Grail of the perfect pop song. The new "Too Young To Die" perhaps has the most revealing lyrics about what the former Casanova's priorities are at this point in his life: "I must break free from that part of me/ that values the art over the humanity". Say what? Is he kidding? Throwing away just like that years and years of work spent estranging himself from reality, holed up in a magnificent papier-mâché scenario? Ah, the young…

To be honest, the Irishman has a plan in mind. The gist of it? Going back to his roots, except this time Scott Walker and the chansonniers have nothing to do with it. Hannon is looking even further back, to when Divine Comedy sounded "like a band", rough and free of frills. Needless to point out how decisive Radiohead were in prompting this shift, especially given that the producer being floated is none other than Nigel Godrich, the sonic wizard behind the sound of "OK Computer". The gossip, of course, is rife: some say Hannon, sharp-nosed as ever, sniffed which way the wind was blowing and acted accordingly, taking the turn-off for Oxford; others brand him a "sellout" given his new scruffy look (long hair, t-shirt and jeans), in truth more contrived than Cristiano Malgioglio's quiff; and then there's yours truly, who begs to differ.

Setting aside the more than plausible parallels with Thom Yorke's band, Regeneration (Parlophone, 2001) remains a fascinating work, all the more personal where it's famous echoes making their way through the grooves (beyond the "Radiohead-isms" scattered more or less everywhere, the stately "Dumb It Down" with its Waters-esque "Is there anybody out there?", or the Suede-style neo-glam of "Bad Ambassador"). Truth be told, rather than giving Divine Comedy the shape of a genuine rock band, the record marks Hannon's consolidation as a songwriter whose pen is too inspired to allow for missteps, or conversely to stay fenced in by a "stylistic consistency" that, frankly, was never really necessary (when has it ever been, really?). Whatever context you put him in, this guy cuts a hell of a figure. That's no small thing.

Talking about production aesthetics, the album's guiding idea is simple: isolate a handful of instruments to keep in the foreground and work meticulously on the backdrops, blurring them until they become hazy and dreamy, or conversely decidedly leaden. A process of refinement that, as if on purpose, ends up reaching levels of baroque subtlety, a crystalline purity streaked with post-apocalyptic rough edges (jaggedly new wave keyboards, feedback drones, drum machine punctuation and the like). "Note To Self" — perhaps the only Comedy song to bear any relation to the concept of groove — is exemplary in this sense: nothing more (so to speak) than a thread of bass and drums from which hang clusters of Smiths-like guitars, strings of gurgling synths straight out of Japan's "Ghost", Siberian reverbs stiff as starched socks, sudden electric convulsions and found sound (specifically: noises from a ping pong match).

Not all of the record, though, stays at the same level of eccentricity. The bulk of Regeneration is in fact made up of livid ballads, mostly (acoustic) guitar-driven, post-Floyd hives oozing sweet, contagious pain: "Timestreched" and its slow "unveiling" through glockenspiel and acoustic arpeggios, the almost obsessive circularity of "Lost Property", the (anti?)liturgical lament "Eye Of The Needle", a "Mastermind" that, amid brushed drums and piano shading, for once finds comfort in strings. Standing apart, the sunny chorus of "Love What You Do" (rightly chosen as the first single), the eminently palatable "Perfect Lovesong" (business as usual, for a man like him…) and the elegiac "The Beauty Regime", through which a modicum of hope — one can't quite tell how sarcastic — shines through for the future.

Besides, it's precisely the disarming immediacy of the lyrics, almost the live commentary of a heart laying itself bare, that leaves you speechless. If regenerating means becoming aware of oneself and of others, clashing with the flattening of perspectives (“Every pupil in the classroom will answer the same if you ask them/ Every mouth shout the message out as one (…)/ Every nose is a vacuum cleaner in the loved-up London arena/ Every eye flies a dollar sign for me”, from "Mastermind") and with the nightmare of that "single way of thinking" that is more trendy today than ever, then one thing can be said of Hannon: he truly did try. His sense of disorientation, in fact, puts him in the same boat as anyone who has, for once, found themselves facing an "old world seen with new eyes", a Curtis-like disorder in front of which it becomes essential to feel reassured, to have the certainty of being able to map a correspondence of ideas and feelings with one's fellow human beings ("Tell me that I'm normal and tell me that I'm sane/ Tell me that you feel this too…").

Unfortunately — or maybe not, given the artistic glories of the near future — putting so much vulnerability on display doesn't produce the hoped-for effects, and the record, despite debuting at number fourteen on the UK chart, fails to reach the expected sales (the third single, "Perfect Lovesong", won't even crack the top 40); hardly surprising, given the attitude with which the most uncompromising fans — who adore Hannon precisely because he isn't "rock" — had greeted this change of clothes and sound. His countermove, at this point, is simple: finish the European tour and, in November, disband the group. "I simply realised the whole thing wasn't fun for me anymore the way it used to be," he will say, presumably with some regret. "I missed the freedom I had in the old days and felt I was watering down my ideas to make other people happy. It wasn't a huge problem, I wasn't losing my mind over it and the band could easily have carried on like that, guaranteeing itself a decent level of success; unfortunately life is too short to spend it putting up with things. It was awful having to do something like that to my friends, but I think I made the right decision for everyone."

He's not being straight with us this time either… The fact remains that the group falls apart (I've got a strange sense of déjà vu, don't you?) and, just as had happened almost ten years before, Hannon finds himself alone again. Actually, no: Talbot stays loyal to him, and that alone is a big step forward. "No great loss," the boss must have thought, "I don't need a band anyway, not these days. Too many dividends to split and too little satisfaction." So it's back to the days of Liberation, treading the stages again with his old mate Talbot and, after years of an almost pathological Europeanism, visiting the New World for the first time in support of Ben Folds. Not that this unusual openness to the States has suddenly turned Hannon into a cosmopolitan: in that very year, 2002, he packs his bags and moves with his family from London to Dublin, into the Irish hinterland. A desire to return to his own roots and not let himself be corrupted by worldliness? It would certainly seem so, but add to that the fatherly anxiety to raise his newborn daughter Willow Mary Erin in an environment as close as possible to the tender, princely dream world his father Brian gave him, rather than in the metropolitan chaos that snatches your dreams the moment you let your guard down.

The gestation of the new album drags on through all of 2003, between the rooms of Abbey Road and those of Konk Studios, both in London. Outside contributions are few (even Godrich gets demoted to mixing duties): vocalist Lauren Laverne, accordionist Yann Tiersen (the one from "Amélie", to be clear), Rob Farrer, and the returning Miggy Barradas on drums and percussion. For the rest, just Hannon, Talbot and the orchestra. A working method that seems to bring out the best results, since it pushes the author to self-produce and try his hand — like in the old days — at every instrument he can get his hands on. The results? What can you say… There'll be joys, there'll be sorrows. There'll be eleven masterpieces.

VIII — Of the Absent Universe

Ten neo-baroque pop songs of unreachable perfection and bold creativity, plus an instrumental, "Laika's Theme", which, as it embroiders Colleen's "folktronic" little flowers onto Vangelis's electronic canvas, grips your heart in a vice and won't let go: this is Absent Friends (Parlophone, March 2004), the eighth studio album by Divine Comedy, by now a moniker for Hannon and Talbot alone. What's surprising, besides the rather cool reception from the press (along the lines of: "Oh no! Here comes the orchestra, Scott Walker and all that stuff again…"), is the modesty the new father displays in interviews, as if to stress that the days of Casanova's promiscuous frenzy are gone for good. "My aim now is simply to create an emotional resonance with the listener," he says. "It's nice to come across as clever, but that's certainly not my raison d'être. With 'Absent Friends' I just wanted to make something beautiful, something that would sound good on my stereo while I'm sitting by the fire, with a glass of sherry in hand and a labrador curled up at my feet."

"Something beautiful"?! Absent Friends is one of the three or four most important pop albums of the decade, whatever the naysayers might say. A record with the lace-trimmed contours of something precious, a cathedral whose rococo flourishes don't induce nausea but rather suggest a serene richness; a work splendidly detached from its own time, and precisely for that reason representative of it, setting it in stone as a classic. The sound by now is something extremely distinctive: a form of baroque pop sui generis, with Talbot "painting" the orchestra like some Michelangelo of the stave, and Hannon shaping sounds, chiselling timbres (you can hear electronic manipulations in almost every track), composing with the grace of an author who's by now a classic, and, the icing on the cake, singing with one of the most intense "trained" voices you're likely to hear in ages.

In a sense, Hannon is conversing with a distant universe turned into a projection of dreams and illusions, an idealised past to reconnect with and seek comfort in. Characters swarm about, fictional stories tasked with revealing this or that trait of our man: the little child and his imaginary friend, the happy little goth girl who won't speak to mum and dad, the businessman who, like a modern Ulysses, crosses the seven seas to be at his son's baseball game. And yet it's here, not in the previous record, that the true regeneration of Divine Comedy takes place; because that album hastily cut short a discourse that Hannon still needed to perfect: Absent Friends restores continuity (musical and conceptual) while still sounding "different", and in doing so truly rekindles hope for a new dawn (the sunrise longed for in Fin De Siècle).

Everything in the title track is designed to sublimate the epic nature of the gesture, starting with the French horn incipit that opens the chest of memories and sets off the parade of names and events. "To the happy days we thought would never end!", Hannon toasts, with a glass of brandy aged — like him — and a table full of illustrious guests: Steve McQueen, Oscar Wilde, Jean Seberg, the little dog Laika (she, I imagine, had to settle for a bowl on the floor), all childhood heroes here elevated to sacrificial victims, idioms destined to be defeated in the "face-off" with the real world. Martyrs like the glorious vessel of "The Wreck Of The Beautiful", led mournfully to the scrapyard amid an aura of myth and daring sonics: skeletal acoustic textures and prepared piano for the verses (one thinks of Arvo Pärt's "tintinnabuli" music paired with King Crimson's "Moonchild"), an operatic 78 rpm record on the gramophone for the chorus, and a hazy ending, lit by that final bassoon note which, warped through the mixing desk, sounds just like the lament of the vessel, swallowed by the jaws of the ocean. Yet there's no heaviness, no overblown rhetoric: everything remains incorporeal, fleeting, stickily funereal.

Every single track, taken on its own, is breathtaking: "Sticks & Bones" and its Bernard Herrmann-esque string serpentines; the irresistible fifties-style backing vocals of "Come Home Billy Bird", almost like a David Bowie "acting" under Phil Spector's direction; childhood told on tiptoe in the superb vignette for acoustic guitar, dobro and Rhodes of "My Imaginary Friend", a tableau vivant as light and moving as a cotton-candy sky; the endless, indescribable melodic inventions of "The Happy Goth" ("the" pop song of the last ten years?), which opens like an acoustic psalm by Louis Philippe, immediately turns into an elegant ethno-jazzy bossa nova and, tuning its strings into Chic's seventies frequencies, arrives at one of the most memorable choruses in the whole history of popular music.

Others are 'black holes' that swallow everything whole, projecting the sonic material toward new shores of tension and organic feel. First and foremost, the supreme orchestral minimalism of "Our Mutual Friend", whose seemingly banal love story of a wild night out actually holds the entire range of human emotion: from obsession to momentary fulfilment, from the sudden joy that springs from sharing a slice of "lived experience" (“We played old 45’s/ I said ‘it’s like the soundtrack to our lives’/ And she said ‘true, it’s not unusual'”) to the impossibility of truly living in the moment, right through to betrayal and inevitable abandonment (“I woke up the next day, all alone but for a headache/ I stumbled out to find the bathroom/ but all I found was her, wrapped around another lover/ no longer then is he our mutual friend). Non dimentichiamo poi una “Freedom Road”, which captures Lee Hazlewood hitchhiking on Kraftwerk's electronic autobahn (great, great, great…), nor that "Leaving Today", so Scott Walker-esque that it ranks among Hannon's most personal songs: the static strings hovering like drones suspended in space, the classical guitar dripping onto the floor like a leaking tap, the cowardly bass-baritone ready to leave at first light, with the taxi already waiting outside… A sort of "(S)He's Leaving Home" told in the first person; except this time it's not a sixties teenager with teased-up hair fleeing the family routine because she's sick of her "old folks", but a sad middle-aged man, perhaps in the grip of a seven-year itch and by now resigned to never finding a space that fits him.

The closing, philosophising "Charmed Life" (dedicated to his daughter), on the other hand, is a splinter of music-hall grabbed by the ears, set to a lullaby cadence and thinned out with a half-speed ragtime, right up to the "Nino Rota meets Judy Garland" finale complete with big band, clowns, acrobats, tigers leaping through rings of fire, Henry the horse waltzing, and whatever else you could want… But when the commotion dies down, there remains a handful of seconds in which the unease becomes palpable again, like the mocking smile of a ghost who tried to fool us with a deceptive show, since "living" is a far more arduous - and empty - concept to grasp. The tears come, and there's no point holding them back. A real triumph.

Just as triumphant is the show Hannon takes around Europe throughout 2004, backed by a fifteen-piece ensemble, a great deal of patience, and the usual, unmatched showmanship guiding him on stage. What ends up on Live At The Palladium (released October 25), the first and so far only Divine Comedy DVD, is precisely the record of the performance at the legendary London concert hall, even though the real highlights are two sold-out shows held respectively at the Folies Bergère in Paris and London's Royal Albert Hall. After all, with material like this, Hannon wins easily. Indeed, the emotional baggage carried by Absent Friends is immense: an archaeological tenderness, the weight of regret, the idea of time that "runs along the edges" and that one tries in vain to outwit, dodging its ticking or setting the clock's hands wherever one pleases ("Laika's Theme", from here to eternity). Positivity wins out nonetheless, a new life at last. Because even if his friends are "absent", Hannon is still here. No one knows for how long, but he endures. And, between one drink and the next, he's even found time to hand down his artistic testament to posterity. Applause.

IX - The (Tragi)comic Muse

Between one commitment and another, Hannon's 2005 diary fills up, and, regretfully, the Divine Comedy get put in storage awaiting new orders. It's certainly no time wasted, given the sheer volume of collaborations and side projects our man embarks on: two tracks written for the soundtrack of the much-vaunted "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (the rest of the soundtrack entirely by Joby Talbot), others gifted to a resurgent Jane Birkin and her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg, still others put away in the pantry for winter. He even toys with the idea of making a covers album, but then changes his mind and, against all expectations, opts for a new Divine Comedy album, this time without Talbot's help. He thus assembles a small group of collaborators (sound engineer Guy Massey, bassist Simon Little, guitarist John Evans, pianist Andrew Skeet, drummer Tim Weller, percussionist Rob Farrer) and books the studio for just two weeks of almost-live (!) recording using analogue technology (for a while he even plans to do without headphones and metronomes… Good luck with that!). The result is another fine record that, inevitably, pays the price of following a colossus like Absent Friends, but still manages to shine with its own light.

Victory For The Comic Muse (Parlophone, June 19, 2006) is likewise a fragmentary work, deliciously imperfect and heterogeneous, making room for the robotic, Brian Eno-esque nursery rhyme "To Die A Virgin" and the surreal country of "Mother Dear", the ménage à trois between pianos on "Threesome", and a vignette like "Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World" that piles up orchestral fanfares, Four Tops-style soul choruses and folk-rock accents (the closing guitar could well be Roger McGuinn's electric twelve-string, for all we'd like to believe). There's a particularly cultivated nostalgia for the 1980s, and not just because of the cover of "Party Fears Two", a joyous tribute to Billy MacKenzie's Associates, but also thanks to the sparkling "Diva Lady" and its melodicism worthy of ABC - as shown by the sparing synth touches and the bouncing disco-music bass - though teleported into an "alien" habitat of acoustic guitars, congas and Philly Soul strings.

The three "major" panels, by contrast, exude a resigned, decaying aestheticism, whereas Absent Friends was more of a heartfelt celebration of an ideal. Those characters, once physically distant but more alive than ever in the imagination, are now simply "forgotten": wilted petunias, dusty furniture, Bohemian crystal on which time has left its dull breath. Casanova's "Woman Of The World" has thus become "A Lady Of A Certain Age": from a young woman armed with a fat chequebook and an excellent family tree, to a ghost tinged with absinthe, an aging courtesan more uncomfortable than ever accepting the gallant invitations of younger men. A cinematic portrait among his most dramatic, since it's the film of an entire life that Hannon compresses into a few verses, and in the process he brushes against unimaginable peaks of pathos. Same script for the weathered wood of "The Plough", almost a nod to the millenarian Nick Cave of "The Carny", except here the perspective is distinctly European (that is, French) and even more "Dostoevskian".

Closing the triptych is the definitive (in every possible sense) "Snowball In Negative", a typically "Hannon-esque" mechanism distilling tears with every turn, an interlocking structure elevated by images of extraordinary power (“Wandering home along Marlborough Road/ I realize in amazement/ that I have been for how long I don’t know/ avoiding the cracks in the pavement”); then comes the entrance of the musette, echoing the Parisian squalor of Cortázar's "Rayuela", and the already-smoked cigarette of Bowie's "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", elected as the unit of measure for our obtuse "existing", a faint - and pitilessly washable - trace of our earthly stay. Another one of his ten (let's make it twenty or thirty, why not…) finest compositions ever, almost his epitaph. A whole world contained in five minutes of tape. A sad world.

That absolute melancholy which in Absent Friends flowed into a desire for the future, in these three episodes translates into the raw realisation of the cruelty of a time that sows corpses in the rich earth; torments in the face of which one doesn't know whether to laugh or plunge a dagger into one's side: "You see, everything can be either ridiculous or catastrophic, it all depends on your preferred point of view", he says. "Even though I chose it almost by chance, I've come to realise just how fitting a name The Divine Comedy is, how well it suits my style. Deep down, everything is a joke and everything is serious, and that's virtually how I look at what surrounds us. You, for instance, can't explain to me why we exist, or why the world is the way it is, and that's rather funny; on the other hand, the matter is tragically serious, because we're the ones who are screwed. The whole point of my game is trying to express this ambivalence, both in words and in music".

That the tragicomic has always been his aim is well known, and in Victory For The Comic Muse those aspirations reach another peak. It's as if Hannon had fallen back on his "neoclassical" past ("Count Grassi's Passage Over Piedmont" could pass as a "decent" outtake from Promenade) and his dandy side ("To Die A Virgin" seems to spring straight out of Casanova), but with a different awareness: less playful, more reflective, and even more caustic (“She’s a diva lady/ She’s a hopeless case/ She needs extra make-up/ For her extra face (…)/ She’s got a famous boyfriend/ They go out in style/ She makes him look hetero/ And he helps her profile”, from "Diva Lady").

His private life is also affected by this gloomy mood, or perhaps it's the cause of it. Either way, in September 2006 Hannon separates from his wife Orla. Just a year later we'll see him beaming with his new girlfriend at Rufus Wainwright's Dublin concert; a "beaming" heavy with bitterness, though. Meanwhile, he records vocals for a track on Air's "Pocket Symphony" (the same song given to Charlotte Gainsbourg and included on the Japanese edition of her debut "5:55"), tours with fellow countryman Duke Special, and, in early 2008, collaborates with Stuart Murdoch (Belle and Sebastian) on his much-discussed musical "God Help The Girl", still in the works at the time.

Bang Goes The Knighthood (2010) marks the Divine Comedy's return after four years of recording silence. It's impossible, however, not to point out that in the meantime Neil Hannon never stopped indulging in pop's most endearingly superfluous and pretentious side: his stint with Thomas Walsh in the Duckworth Lewis Method convinced audiences that what Neil Hannon does better than any other pop musician on this side of the Channel is write songs. Bang Goes The Knighthood is an album of grotesque, pained little vignettes of social life, naturally alternating with more intense moments that allow for reflection and disenchantment. The characters in the songs are sketched with striking clarity, in a lean, sharp vocabulary.

The protagonists of his stories are the rich and powerful, stripped bare: observing with sharp cynicism the financial and social scandal that engulfed England, Neil tells of a generation of fake power-holders who refuse to give up their arrogance, clinging with twisted logic to their wealth and privilege.

Hannon brings together bankers ("The Complete Banker") and women forced into prostitution in post-war Italy ("Neapolitan Girl"), men and women who brush up against wealth and power while unknowingly losing their dignity. A Eurovision-style melody, a bouncing piano and a mournfully carefree voice power "The Complete Banker", while a sunny trash-pop with subtle disco undertones animates the brilliant "Neapolitan Girl". Nothing new, but each song is the right sonic backdrop for his stories. And so the futility of "At The Indie Disco" matches the laziness of its protagonist, while the sunny lightness of "Island Life" has the scent of the Mediterranean and calypso.

The harmonic perfection of "Have You Ever Been in Love" celebrates a stylistic marriage between light American jazz and proverbial English self-control; "Down In The Street Below" opens the album with passionate lyricism while its lyrics paint scenes of social life, but the album's lyrical and poetic triumph is "When A Man Cries": baroque touches and Mitteleuropean textures pay homage to Brel in telling of tears, where a child's crying and a man's crossover with fears and emotions. A handful of words capable of evoking an entire life.

The whole record is a seemingly disjointed stylistic journey, starting from the sumptuous title track, passing through the sparkling “Assume The Perpendicular” (a song about cricket), and arriving at the inevitable Beatles-esque inflection of “The Lost Art Of Conversation”.

It's worth noting the presence of no fewer than four bonus tracks, plus an additional CD in the first pressing, featuring cover versions of French songwriters recorded during the 2008 show at the Cite de la Musique.

To arrive at Foreverland took no less than six years of waiting, an eternity by record-industry standards. Granted, Neil Hannon isn't exactly the type who needs to offer any justification, having already proven under the Divine Comedy banner a level of authorial stature high enough to silence any grumbling from fans in advance, even in the face of prolonged hiatuses. Playing the role of the absent friend also allowed him to let off steam in healthy fashion through all manner of side projects. In 2010 he wrote the songs for a musical version of the acclaimed “Swallows And Amazons”, premiered at the Bristol Old Vic. A year later he set to music the words of German playwright Frank Alva Buecheler for a short but powerful chamber opera, “In May”, now included in the deluxe editions of this latest effort and described as an uplifting love letter to life, exploring the relationship between a dying son and an absent father through a series of letters. Then, in 2014, the Royal Festival Hall commissioned him to write a series of pieces to inaugurate a newly restored organ. “To Our Fathers In Distress”, the resulting choral work inspired by Anglican hymns (by the brilliant Ralph Vaughan Williams in particular), he dedicated to his father Brian, a Church of Ireland bishop suffering from Alzheimer's.

All this without forgetting the second outing of the Duckworth Lewis Method, troubadours in the vein of the Village Green Preservation Society, stubbornly intent on preserving a world that has survived a whole string of revolutions under the guise of gilded anachronism. To stave off the wait for his most celebrated creation, the lush 70s pop eclecticism of “Sticky Wickets” proved a more than valid diversion, with the muffled aura of a Victorian-magic carousel clashing with the kitsch hyperbole of someone who unreservedly weds elegant dreamlike atmospheres with low-brow jokes and swagger, elitist and populist alike, all in the name of art, of course.

And so, at last, here's the Londonderry crooner back in the fold, cinematographer fixated on damp, evocative moods, lush lyricism, and that touch of ineffable decadence always proudly displayed on the top shelf of his living room. This new album, the eleventh chapter of his dandy's breviary, celebrates that magpie-like sensibility he's spoken of before, the frenzy of hoarding glittering musical flashes and assembling them into a lovely jumble, according to his own whimsical fancy, to create something original. Take the delightful track that closes proceedings here, “The One Who Loves You”: a bit of banjo, some Ravel-esque orchestration, a nicely scrambled rhythm and well-placed key changes. It's just a random example from an album which, by his own admission, teems with nods to Noel Coward, the Pet Shop Boys, the Beach Boys, the Byrds and Johnny Cash, blended with piano studies, all sorts of retro flourishes, old-movie evocations, music hall and Russian symphonies.

Neil picks up exactly where he left off, since the opening “Napoleon Complex” was among the bonus tracks of the previous Bang Goes The Knighthood, refitted for the occasion with tasteful splendour and an admirable elegiac tone. The sparkling mood welcomes the listener back into the unmistakable realm of a pop craftsman whose art is timeless, growing just slightly more subdued on the following track, the one that lends its title to the record. Introspection takes hold, stirred by a mournful fanfare but soon elevated by the unmatched brilliance of this artisan of melodic ornamentation. It's the classic moment that ignites his outlook as an indefatigable observer, that twilight temperament unrivalled in this day and age. “Maybe this is my imperial phase, or maybe I just like glorifying the everyday”, Hannon said of an album that is, at bottom, “one big love song”, extolling ordinary life through exuberant musical backing and references to decidedly larger-than-life figures, one for all “Catherine The Great”, subject of “the most historically inaccurate hit of the summer” as well as the classic “romantic song written by someone who's watched too much BBC Four”. With its harpsichord and an almost sunshine-pop freshness, that very first single manages to make even a chamber-music grandeur, which in other hands might have sounded disastrous, go down easily. With Foreverland, the Northern Irish dandy has effectively returned to what he does best: making smart, hook-laden pop music capable of drawing from a myriad of different and sometimes unlikely sources, so as never to let the album rest on its laurels and to keep it constantly evolving, “with arrangements that change from verse to verse”, and with lyrics as allusive as they are elusive, open to multiple interpretations.

While, with its accordions and candid melancholy, “The Pact” draws on French chanson (Edith Piaf in particular) and “To The Rescue” harks back to the early seventies and the sophisticated moods of records like Casanova or Promenade (with an inevitable rekindled flame for Serge Gainsbourg, “a man who has much to answer for”), elsewhere the album moves with ease from Irish traditional evocations (the title track) to the Broadway-style duet of “Funny Peculiar”, skittering, sparse, even minimalist considering who wrote it, a carefree and sugary nursery rhyme that never turns cloying, helped along by Neil's better half, singer Cathy Davey. “Other People” seems to be the exception, recorded a cappella on an iPhone in a hotel room and boasting a metallic aftertaste, later backed by understated orchestration without losing an ounce of its original intimacy. “How Can You Leave Me On My Own” moves to the opposite extreme, a bouncy seventies soft-rock number that marries beloved 10CC and Supertramp influences with exuberance, backed by a saucy lyric that invites listeners to see themselves in it. It opens with the bray of Wayne the donkey, recorded in a field outside the studio because it perfectly summed up the meaning of the song. Pitched somewhere between nonsense and wry self-pity, it restores the verve of certain delightfully farcical passages from the previous record, thankfully keeping the caricature-like implications of an as-always highly enjoyable digression in check. “I Joined The Foreign Legion (To Forget)” follows suit, treading the same line with well-disguised bitterness.

After an excellent start, the second side shows a moderate step back. With its almost domestic candour, “My Happy Place” makes a certain preciousness in our man's pen forgivable, especially in a particularly saccharine refrain, while the subtle exoticism and certain swollen flourishes in the production of “A Desperate Man”, redolent of a vintage soundtrack, liven things up quite a bit through sheer eclectic drive, even if they don't quite win you over. What's perhaps missing is the heart-wrenching knockout blow of a “Tonight We Fly”, and Neil once again, rather noticeably, foregoes the more intense, melodramatic registers, pressing on unwaveringly down the path of fragmentary whimsy and serene detachment. He dawdles in a sort of cosy thinking-room and roams about quite a bit, without ever losing the thread though, in his hobbyist explorations on the way back.

Expecting more from a talent like his feels almost like an involuntary reflex but, at this point, it could even come across as ungenerous. We're among those who, smiling, are happy to settle. And settling, when it comes to Divine Comedy, still amounts to a sumptuous return.

In 2019 came his thirteenth studio album: Office Politics, this time immersed in the world of work and in the paradise of love and hate represented by the office as a micro-cosmos in which to study humanity. It's perhaps not a true concept album, but it is a work that allows Hannon to do what he likes best: put on a brand new mask and try his hand at the small-yet-grand theatre of human nature, picking his way through a thicket of virtues and flaws to highlight and mock. To do so, he enlists the help of machines. Indeed, the synthetic component has never been so present in Divine Comedy's fabric, nor has the reflection on the role and use of machines, not coincidentally labelled "infernal" in the song of the same name.

But if Foreverland was a shelter nestled within the borders of a proudly twentieth-century, decadent classicism, Office Politics, by the Dantean law of contrapasso, is the most avant-garde response Neil Hannon has ever given to the world out there, and before that, to himself. The off-the-cuff rap of "Psychological Evaluation" stages a dialogue between man and artificial intelligence. "The Synthesiser Service Centre Super Summer Sale" stands roughly midway through the tracklist as the outpost of a new, fleeting politics (indeed) that seems to want to look to the future through the lens of an Eighties past. And what to make of the pseudo-industrial march of "Infernal Machines", that sort of three-dimensional nightmare that seems to want to swallow the listener into its gears? And finally, how to receive the oriental chimes that follow the vocalising and then the choruses of "Philip And Steve's Furniture Removal Company"? These are moves that only Hannon could pull off, for the simple reason that only he could have thought of them. But that doesn't necessarily mean the results always live up to the almost unlimited credit our man has enjoyed for a long time now.

And indeed, brand-new flights of fancy aside, and certainly not mysteriously, Office Politics works best where good old Neil stops dabbling in territories alien to him and goes back to taking centre stage under the spotlights that suit him best. "Norman And Norma" is a new pop classic from the Northern Irish workshop, recounting the story of a perfect middle-class couple, now well on in years and fully content with the normality life has granted them. Conversely, the breezy pop of "Queuejumper" doesn't quite win you over completely, even as it invites you to skip along over the rubble of a humanity that has stopped having any qualms.

For "You'll Never Work In This Town Again" he dusts off the tailcoat amid a crucible of small orchestrations that wink at a barely-there swing. Even more "classic" is the reflection on everyone's worth found in "Absolutely Obsolete", itself fitted with precise orchestration in a game of mirrors between mockery and seriousness.

"The Life And Soul Of The Party" rekindles the urge to celebrate, but without overdoing it, since restraint remains another unshakeable dogma of this calculated madness. The slot reserved for the big ballad goes to "A Feather In Your Cap", once again steeped in synthesizers and Eighties atmospheres, but honestly rather slight compared to any other throwback of the past. And then there's the small, precious lyricism of "I'm A Stranger Here", steeped in that démodé existentialism which Hannon has managed to elevate into an art form.

In February 2022 came Charmed Life – The Best Of, a 24-song collection (35 in the deluxe edition) gathering the best of The Divine Comedy's career, including a brand new, previously unreleased track titled "The Best Mistakes".

I liked it when, back in the 50s, mothers and daughters would whistle the same tune together as it played on the radio. That's my idea of pop music: something that speaks to everyone, without distinctions. Besides, I don't feel like an elitist, I don't aim at a specific target audience – like the masses of young people the immaculate "indie" world relies on – nor am I uncomfortable with my increasingly shrivelled image.

(Neil Hannon)

Don't expect one of those "Lifestyle & Society" pieces buried on page twenty-four of a newspaper, the kind that trot out the usual arsenal of percentages meant to illustrate the progressive ageing of Italy: declining birth rates, rising average age, the mirage of a pension that, for people like me, grows ever more spectral, and so on and so forth. The title is merely a pretext for a brief reflection on the relationship between Divine Comedy and what decades of literature have established about the sociological nature of youth music: namely, rock 'n' roll (or hip-hop, house, techno, take your pick...) understood as a tool for marking the stages of adolescence and, more broadly, for governing the flow of generations; a legal vocabulary lent to "chosen" young people so they can build their case against their own "opposite", convey new systems of values (which can also be perceived as proud anti-values, or coincide with the very negation of "system"), and, ultimately, pry strapping young lads loose from their mother's apron strings.

Viewed in this light, the pop operation of Hannon's latest album is deeply unnatural, and that is itself part of its appeal. Unnatural because it removes the biological impulse toward conflict, the inevitable struggle through which the "new" asserts itself as a function of "no longer being something else". An (anti)tension that smacks of a return to the domestic hearth, to a "pre-rock" era in which the whole extended postwar family, eh?, sat together in front of the television; a place where two or three generations felt at ease and, unable to find any outlet for their frustrations, perpetuated an "elective" continuity that is a human creation and therefore artificial, just like law (natural-law theories aside), marriage (ditto, with the added religious variant) and football.

Here again, albeit in a different context, we find that eternal present so often invoked – usually with disparaging intent – whenever someone tries to define the current musical landscape: an open field in which the concept of (re)creation draws into its orbit every sonic trace perceived as a potential object of analysis, with no distinctions based on ideological or hermeneutic criteria. A landscape that, despite appearances, suits our man's "junk-shop" poetics remarkably well.

Summing up within himself four decades of stylistic exploration, Hannon pushes pop material to a limit beyond which lies only the "retro trash" mentioned at the outset. He walks a tightrope, making himself a container (and converter) of virtually the whole of popular knowledge, not in order to play around with it but to submit to its grandeur, to recreate its effect. It is this "everything" that gets led back into the fold, namely the baroque matrix to which the dandy has sworn allegiance. Because he is both entertainer and artist, jester and twilight poet, himself and his own nemesis. A master of disguise (the hilarious impressions of Prince and Barry White at 2:35 of "Charge", on Casanova) who revives the illustrious tradition of detachment from life – that is, the wish to handle it as a transitory and intransitive entity – and claims the right to comment on tragedy dry-eyed, perhaps raising a glass of white Martini to His Holiness "Decadence".

Looking closer, though, Hannon is by no means immune to the emotional potential inherent in his own work. Quite the opposite: he's a sentimentalist who mocks himself, making fun of his own sentimentalism. Even his legendary irony, massive as it is, never leads him to deride stylistic devices that, on the contrary, he still perceives as vital and historically and critically significant. This is what was meant earlier when we spoke of his desire "to place himself within the tradition", unlike, say, a Stephin Merritt (aka Magnetic Fields, his friend and well-known American post-pop wizard), who wants to slice tradition to ribbons, entrusting himself entirely to postmodernism's project-based approach.

Paradoxically, what Hannon lacks is precisely the degree of detachment needed to view his art from the outside, from a position that would allow him to discuss it meta-textually. And that's because he himself is in thrall to it, knowingly in thrall to it. This, if anything, is his strength – along with a discography that, for consistency and quality, few other songwriters of the last two decades can boast. What wins you over is the way he always relies on feeling, even in his most impersonal, citational or anti-naturalistic moments; the fact that, for all his affectations, he is one of us, a standard-bearer for an old (and today extremely modern) way of understanding music: "Many of the most celebrated pop songwriters have done nothing more than write about what they saw, quite simply. Even 'National Express', even though it's a fairly silly song, is pure observation, there's nothing invented about it – I'm on a bus and that's what I see". All true, Mr. Hannon, but you're forgetting one detail: in putting your masters' teachings into practice, at a certain point in your career you made the mistake of merging with your own object of study, instead of keeping a safe distance. That's when you truly became great. Au revoir.

In 2023 Neil Hannon wrote seven songs for the Wonka soundtrack; thanks to the film's success and the resulting greater financial means, the artist recorded his new album at Abbey Road Studios, ten days of rehearsals and as many of recording, a fulfilling experience that returns the musician to the role of crooner in the style of early Scott Walker, an acolyte of Burt Bacharach but also of John Barry, as well as a man fascinated by symphonic-pop orchestrations in the style of Electric Light Orchestra. Rainy Sunday Afternoon is an album that sweeps away the excessive cheerfulness and eclecticism of Office Politics in favour of a coherent narrative; only the easy pop-jazz verve à la Randy Newman of the title track craves a more radio-friendly lightness, while the frivolity of "All The Pretty Lights" still pays tribute to his recent experience as a soundtrack composer.

What remains intact is the usual degree of romanticism, even if shadows and unease often take over, amid forays into the most theatrical and eccentric glam-rock ("Down The Rabbit Hole") and an atypical drum-machine-driven tango that pushes the clock back even further into the 50s and 60s ("Mar-a-Lago By The Sea"). The album reinforces the influence of sixth member Nigel Godrich, and it's precisely in the footsteps of Regeneration that one of the album's most heartfelt reflections unfolds, "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter", where Neil lays bare the joys and sorrows of the endless pursuit of happiness. The new Divine Comedy album isn't necessarily yet another masterpiece – many will be ready to call it that anyway, albeit with a thinly veiled nostalgia – but it is the one that comes closest to a literary and cinematic rendering of the Northern Irish musician's many metamorphoses, the most elegiac but also the darkest, a Hollywood version of Neil Hannon's most secret and romantic world. The opening trio of songs carries the album's most refined and intimate lyrics, starting with the single "Achilles", a song inspired by the tragic fate of the poet Patrick Shaw-Stewart and the horrors of the First World War, and death is once again the narrative thread of "The Last Time I Saw The Old Man", this time centred on his father, who died after suffering from Alzheimer's; the melody is gorgeous, touching. It then falls to "The Man Who Turned Into A Chair" to sweep away the melancholy with a bohemian atmosphere, a touch of irony, and a tale of everyday domesticity (an argument with his wife), but it only takes a few notes of "I Want You" to realise that this time Neil Hannon isn't afraid to bare his emotions, even at the risk of seeming downright mawkish, a trap the musician carefully avoids thanks to musically erudite songwriting and a constant attention to detail ("Can't Let Go"). This family album (father, wife and friends) closes with the presence of Neil Hannon's daughter on the record's final track, "Invisible Thread", another elegant page in an album that shows Divine Comedy in fine form, yet well aware that it's time to look toward new goals – and Rainy Sunday Afternoon is only the first step.

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