The Divine Comedy and the dreaded retrospective interview

When renowned politicians are long settled into their retirement, with press intrusion into their everyday lives all but behind them, at a certain point something strange tends to happen: interest in them suddenly starts to pick up again. This, depressingly enough, is what’s known as the obituary interview. While Neil Hannon may not be about to collect his bus-pass just yet - with May’s “more than satisfactory” Bang Goes The Knighthood testifying to the affable Northerner’s endurance - this latest album does mark his twentieth year of recording and, depending on which way you see it, his tenth outing under the The Divine Comedy banner. So, time for the, ahem... ‘retrospective interview’ then!

"Frankly, calling this the tenth album is very arbitrary,” Hannon tells Ragged Words in one of Dublin’s many barely-filled pubs.

“I did it myself of course - I just said let's call this the tenth one, even though we called the last one the eighth. You can count whichever ones you like really, because Fanfare (...For The Comic Muse, Hannon’s now-deleted 1990 debut under the DC moniker) is very definitely a mini-album. A Short Album About Love - well, it’s an album alright; it’s just short! It just seemed a nice symmetry though: twenty years in the business, almost forty in age, tenth album... It’s all very decimal. The Romans would be proud!”

Hannon confesses to not really being a fan of these kind of reflective interviews, pointing out that once you’ve released a certain number of albums, publications will tend to ring up asking specifically for such a set piece. Clever interviewers that we are, we’ve instead peppered such questions around discussion of the roaring success of the Derry native’s Duckworth Lewis Method side-project, his first real solo tour and starting his own label (more on this later). In fact, we’re so restrained that we don’t even bring up our total adoration for The Divine Comedy’s second full-length effort, 1994’s Promenade. Instead, he does it himself - in order to pan it!

"The ideas are amazing, but in terms of the actual fruition it doesn't make it at all. It sounds tinny and scrawny. 'The Booklovers' - I mean, c'mon! It's a great tune, but it's hilarious in its “look at me, look how intellectual I am, I can name all these authors” pretentiousness, whereas in fact I hadn't read about two-thirds of them. But then again, I'll be playing ‘Tonight We Fly’ until the day I'm done, simply because it's one of the best songs I’ve ever written. It does exactly what it ought to have done."

Hannon acknowledges that Promenade - a majestic concept album - is perhaps a favourite among uber, uber-fans, but it’s probably a good thing that he sees room for improvement in each album. This arguably helps to explain why The Divine Comedy’s catalogue is one of the most consistent out there. You hit the mark sometimes, he says, but there's no way you should feel you won’t get back to any given point ever again.

“I’ll never think some of those albums are perfect and can't be equalled. Victory For The Comic Muse (from four years ago) - I love that record; sure, it's a bit all over the place, a bit mid-life crisis, but that gives it a certain charm as well. Regeneration is a lot of people's favourite Divine Comedy album, but a lot of people say I was just trying to be Radiohead. I don't care! I was just trying to do what I felt was right at the time. After I did that, I thought ‘that was interesting, but it doesn't sound like my record’. So I sacked my band, ditched the producer and went about doing my own thing again. I just constantly work towards what I feel I have to do next, and ...Knighthood is what I thought I should do next, and I think it's a pretty damn good record."

He’s right: it is pretty damn good. When directly compared to its predecessor, it (mostly) marks a return to Hannon’s jaunty, playful past. Songs like 'Down In The Street Below', 'The Lost Art Of Conversation' and the very timely ‘The Complete Banker’ all serve up surefire playlist fodder for any true Divine Comedy fan. They also perfectly encapsulate what it is Hannon has always been best at: (very, very cleverly) telling it like it is. He’s quick to admit he can’t do it any other way.

“I think a lot of people have a great amount of difficulty writing about anything other than the usual relationship things, because with relationships you can be incredibly vague. My writing is a lot of things, but it’s definitely not vague. I think, generally speaking, you can tell what each individual song is about; there’s not a lot of mystery in there. For some reason I don’t want to be mysterious, I want people to know what it is I’m talking about, and with ‘The Complete Banker’ I tried to be as obvious as humanly possible.”

Bang Goes The Knighthood also marks the first Divine Comedy release on Hannon’s own label - the logically-named Divine Comedy Records. He says it’s been a sort of swings-and-roundabouts time since the move to a new home. There may not be the money that the major labels - or “glorified banks”, as Hannon calls them - provide, but then anything you do happen to make you get to keep. You get to make all the decisions yourself too, which he says means the right ones generally end up being made.

“It’s different for every act, obviously, but it makes sense for us. You won’t find my face on a massive poster in HMV, but at the same time we’ve had no drop-off in interest from the press and radio this time out. I don’t know how it works for young bands - I wouldn’t like to be starting out right now - but so far it’s been good for us.”

Next up for Neil is quite an extensive European tour, kicking off in Belgium tonight before coming over to Ireland in a couple of days’ time, and arriving in the UK a month or so later. It’s just him up onstage this time around, and as Ragged Words found out last May, that’s certainly no bad thing. Given the times we’re in too, he’s got a suitably apt name for the run.

“It’s the ‘austerity tour’! I’ve always wanted to do it on my own, just me and a piano. It reminds me of my favourite artists; I’ve always wanted to be Cole Porter, Tom Lehrer, Flanders and Swann or Noel Coward. Whether I can achieve that I don’t know, particularly if I keep on forgetting the words!...”
 
Click here for a list of Divine Comedy dates. To win a pair of tickets for his Dublin show on Thursday, just email your details to info@raggedwords.com