Divine Comedy

It's no easy task building a fictional character: in most cases it takes time, imagination, dedication, a fair number of failed attempts before reaching the desired result. It's well known, for instance, that Georges Simenon tried his hand at dozens of stories featuring police officers before landing on the mythical figure of Commissioner Jules Maigret, and those earlier characters lacked the fully rounded physiognomy of his fortunate successor. Even harder can be actually inhabiting the character: or rather, becoming that character. It's a difficult symbiosis to achieve, and perhaps even more so to sustain and nurture over the years; yet some manage it with seemingly no effort at all.

Among these, without a shadow of doubt, is Neil Hannon. When dealing with Divine Comedy, one can say that the character's construction carries the same specific weight as the music itself. One aspect fits perfectly into the other, in the grandest and most ambitious project of a staged performance crafted for our pleasure and, even before that, for the pleasure of the man himself.

Neil Hannon's performance has been running successfully for three decades now, and if we keep enjoying it, it's simply because it still works. We've seen him wear the guise of the gentleman in jacket and tie, of the unrepentant tombeur de femmes, and so on through a string of roles and masks that have recently reached as far as Napoleon himself, the ultimate symbol of grandeur flaunted in every possible form.

Looking closely, though, all these metamorphoses are nothing but the countless possible variations on a single theme: that of the unrepentant dandy - modern yet ancient at once, cursed yet witty, aristocratic in spirit but bourgeois by birth, passionate one moment and bored the next - a figure we came to know precisely through "Casanova", and which from there crystallized in the collective imagination.

In the mid-Nineties, Neil Hannon stood at a career crossroads. He had already released three albums without achieving the success he craved, but he had worked tirelessly to develop a sound that was entirely his own, and no one else's. Whether or not it amounted to an act of assemblage hardly matters: it's from this bold cocktail of ingredients that something new and unique would emerge. What are these ingredients? A touch of intellectual sophistication (orchestrations borrowed from Nyman, the baritone vocals inspired by Scott Walker and Serge Gainsbourg) dusted over the Britpop foundations holding it all together, where "Brit" spans an arc running from the Kinks all the way to the Pulp of "Different Class", the album that, for both "ideological" and stylistic reasons, became Hannon's new touchstone - an influence he would soon openly admit. These were instincts already tested in his previous work, at times with more than commendable results - two songs above all: the austere "Timewatching" and the airy "Tonight We Fly" - but it's only in "Casanova" that they seem to find full and definitive fulfilment, together with the definitive shaping of the character himself.

And to think the genesis had been rather troubled. Hannon felt he had in his hands a batch of songs that could give him the leap in quality - and fame - he'd been hoping for. In the mid-Nineties, moreover, the British scene was riding higher than ever: it would have been a real shame to miss that train. Backed by trusty producer Darren Allison and a full-blown orchestra led by Joby Talbot at his disposal, good old Neil shuttled between three recording studios and had Setanta shell out £100,000 - exposing the label to considerable risk had sales not lived up to expectations - before arriving at the result he was after: a sophisticated art-pop that was nonetheless thoroughly commercial, a compendium of all of Neil Hannon's storytelling artistry - a showman gifted with almost divinatory powers.

What's more, "Casanova" is something of a concept album about sex - unlike its predecessor "Promenade" and its successor "A Short Album About Love", both devoted to nobler feelings of love. A handbook for apprentice seducers, then, devoid of practical advice but rich in vignettes, tricks and thoroughly enjoyable deceptions, helped along by Hannon's extraordinary knack for nailing a melody.

The marching pace of "Something For The Weekend", ushered in by the mischievous laughter of a small group of unwitting prey of the charming playboy, is the gateway into the Northern Irishman's new world - a world in which Hannon wanders through Venice between an expensive coffee in Piazza San Marco and a speedboat chase to (uselessly) escape his enchanting lover. The song was destined to become one of the project's most iconic singles, an anthem to carefree living that caught the attention of Chris Evans, who played it on his Radio One show and pushed it to number thirteen on the UK Singles Chart. The model for this heartbreaker might well be the Alfie played by Michael Caine in the film of the same name, paid tribute to in "Becoming More Like Alfie", a breezy uptempo pop number with Sixties-flavoured touches and orchestral backing, about how men so often fail to approach women the right way.

Even subtler is the operation carried out in "Songs of Love", a harpsichord madrigal reworked in a modern key and delivered in an unprecedented falsetto, whose almost enchanted tone belies a demolition of the stereotype surrounding young lovers, described as "pale, pubescent beasts" roaming in packs through streets and shops, while the artist fulfils his own role in solitude, writing love songs for them, arriving at the conclusion that destiny doesn't depend on making the right or wrong choice, but on the tone of your voice - for Hannon, this statement rings as an absolute truth.

As for "The Frog Princess", also released as a single (reaching number fifteen on the charts), it's a love song that alternates moments of pure grandiloquence with others of utter introspection, showcasing the man's vocal gifts across their full range of possibilities.

And what to say about the sheer class on display in "In & Out Of Paris & London", whose opening riff seems to anticipate Albarn's "Beetlebum" by a year, before turning into a tribute to Bacharach, or "Middle-Class Heroes", which has the lascivious delivery of a Gainsbourg and the intellectual and social posture of a freshly-printed Jarvis Cocker. Feats of balance, much like the stylistic exercise of "Charge", a rollercoaster of cabaret gags and spy-story flourishes (which will resurface in the enchanting "Through A Long & Sleepless Night") set against the backdrop of a bungled scheme to dominate the opposite sex. It's equally hard to remain indifferent to "A Woman Of The World", which sounds as if it were written specifically for some Broadway show.

The false ending of "Theme From Casanova", which reels off all the album's credits and sources of inspiration, sets the stage for the record's most heartfelt track, "The Dogs & The Horses", a sumptuous symphony that abandons the album's central theme to embrace that of death. An altogether bearable subject, once immortality has been achieved.

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31/05/2020