The Divine Comedy
Muses Working Overtime
Published by Under The Radar

Neil Hannon wasn’t planning on making a Divine Comedy album at all.

“I was a bit bored of it and wanted to do other things,” he says. “I was writing songs with and for other people and doing a sitcom theme and trying to work up the motivation to do a musical. All of the above released a lot of blockage in my brain, and I suppose I just wrote an awful lot of music—just music for the sake of writing it, really. I thought that maybe this would be a good opportunity to make a record without my usual degree of over-analysis and trying to perfect it when actually that tends to make it worse.”

Those other people Hannon was writing for included Laura Michelle Kelly, Jane Birkin and Charlotte Gainsbourg. The latter’s album is a sophisticate-studded effort involving Air, Jarvis Cocker and producer Nigel Godrich, two songs from which feature Hannon’s lyrics. “I’m really pleased, actually, to have had anything to do with it at all,” says Hannon, “because I think it’s a classic album. And I don’t actually say that often.”

By the summer of 2005 Hannon had uncorked 20 to 30 songs of his own, 11 of them ultimately comprising this year’s Victory for the Comic Muse, the ninth Divine Comedy long-player. Though a proper band from Northern Ireland when it debuted in 1990 with the R.E.M./Ride-influenced Fanfare for the Comic Muse, The Divine Comedy has since been essentially Neil Hannon. His sardonic brand of chamber pop in place by 1993’s Liberation, he rode the Britpop wave as something of a stylistic odd man out, scoring a hit in 1996 with Casanova opener “Something for the Weekend.” He remains relatively unknown across the pond from his Dublin home, where he lives with his wife and young daughter.

The new album is a decidedly Hannon-esque orchestral affair that finds its author at a typically refined level of writing and arranging, its narratives rife with the usual jet-set locales, lyrical smarts, and funny bits. It’s a Divine Comedy record to be sure.

“Sex, death and religion, the usual stalwarts of writing,” says Hannon of Victory’s varied subject matter. “Mortality, I dunno, it might be a default setting for any time you try and be creative. You start thinking about the fact that life is not limitless—there is that end to what we do.” He suspects that generally he’s writing about the exact same things now that he did 15 years ago. “I’m still interested in the interaction of men and women multiplied by society.”

Hannon says he’s been called a smartypants over the years, and Victory, although it doesn’t reference high culture like past efforts, probably won’t put an end to that. “It does drive me mad,” he says, “that people tend to lump the ‘intellectual’ tag on my stuff, a) because I’m not really very intellectual. I can read and I can string a few sentences together, but I know an awful lot of people who are a lot cleverer than I am; and b) because I write a lot of dumb songs. [Laughs] ‘To Die a Virgin’ is not a Ph.D. thesis or anything like that. It’s a song about a teenage boy who’s absolutely desperate to get laid.”

Hannon has tried to leave the name-checking life behind. (An actual verse from a 1994 Promenade track called “The Booklovers”: “James Joyce / Virginia Woolf / Marcel Proust / F. Scott Fitzgerald / Ernest Hemmingway / Herman Hesse…” But to hear Hannon’s pompous delivery is to know that the whole thing is a huge piss take.) Today’s songs merely involve characters that sun on the Cote d’Azur or know who the hell Sisyphus was.

“For years now,” says Hannon, “I’ve really tried to steer clear of overtly referencing other literary material or films or what have you, because I felt like it was too easy. It was fun, but it was maybe getting between what I’m thinking about and the listener, rather than enhancing it. It doesn’t stop me; I still stick things in that I find pertinent, but I try more to give vent to my own thoughts and feelings with my own words in my own way. The songs, I suppose are about other things, and not me, but then they’re always about my reaction to those things. Or even the very fact that I would write a song about such a thing, is me and my ideas and what I’m interested in.”

Stone-cold esoterica, a hallmark of pretension, is one thing you won’t find much of in Hannon’s lyrics. “The Light of Day” clearly speaks of rising from love’s lows; “A Lady of a Certain Age” is a story of longing and regret at life’s end; “Diva Lady” is about a diva lady.

“I’ve tried to write more poetic—or maybe, for want of a better word, metaphysical—lyrics in the past,” says Hannon, “because a lot of the artists I admired did do very vague lyrics that pointed you in certain emotional directions but didn’t really specify what they were on about. But then I couldn’t write that way. I always end up writing stories or at least saying what I mean. Sometimes I wish I could be a bit more vague, because people would probably think I was more mysterious and more interesting, but really I’m an open book.”

Perhaps here it’s worth mentioning Hannon’s hero Scott Walker’s latest offering, the impenetrable nightmare that is The Drift. What’d he think of it?

“Hard. I would kill for Scott’s right to be as out there as he is, but I just really can’t listen to it, to be honest. It’s not my cup of tea at all. And I’m the biggest Scott Walker fan in the world, and I’m not averse to his extremely artistic things. There are a couple of tracks on Tilt which I like, and bits of Climate of Hunter; and the three or four songs he did on Night Flights, the Walker Brothers album from ’78, I think, are some of the best things he’s ever done, and they’re extremely mental. But now it’s so willfully dark and obscure that I can’t get anything out of it. Only to be listened to when very depressed in the middle of the night.”

The music on Victory for the Comic Muse is unrepentant chamber pop, owing more than a little to Walker’s myth-making late-’60s albums while furthering those large-scale musical aims. Hannon employed a 28-piece rhythm section/orchestra ensemble that cut the songs, for the most part, together over the span of two weeks. Hannon calls the new songs “more traditionally structured” (pop-traditional versus classical in the wig sense), but he admits to getting more skilled as an arranger.

“It’s just trial and error, largely,” he says. “I’ve also been listening to an awful lot of music. You just hear things, and you think, ‘Oh yeah, I see what they’re doing there,’ and you try and do it yourself.”

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