Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy: ‘I thought these songs suited Abbey Road’
Instead of continuing to bask in the glory of his very successful soundtrack to the film Wonka (it held the top spot on the UK’s official film chart for multiple weeks), The Divine Comedy – aka Neil Hannon – got straight back to work and released a new album.
In February 2022, three years after The Divine Comedy’s 12th album Office Politics saw them land their first ever top five position for a studio album, they repeated the feat with the career-spanning anthology, Charmed Life – and it was during that time that Neil last spoke to the Cambridge Independent.
Chatting to us again from his home in County Kildare, not far from Dublin – this time via a Zoom video call from his bedroom – the Northern Ireland-born musician/raconteur is delighted that the Wonka soundtrack knocked the Barbie soundtrack off the top of the UK’s official compilations chart.
“That makes me feel fantastic!” he says. “Like victory for real music! Or victory for old-fashioned music! I have nothing against Barbie. Barbie was a good film and I enjoyed quite a lot of the songs on it…
“I was just happy to be asked; it was a massive stroke of luck that Paul King, the director, was a fan, and when he thought this ought to be a musical, he came to me.
“I thought this was amazing, this was right up my street. I loved the original Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory – and the songs were a massive part of that.
“Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse [who did the music] were geniuses. So it was wonderful and challenging to try and do it again, in a way.”
September brought the release of the 13th Divine Comedy album, Rainy Sunday Afternoon.
Recorded at Abbey Road, the album has been written, arranged and produced by Neil.
This impressive new collection of songs covers his usual range of emotions: sad, funny, angry and everything in between.
“When I came to think about this record, in spring last year, I could have gone in various directions, really, considering the songs that I had that I’d started,” says Neil, whose track Songs of Love was memorably used as the theme tune to classic Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted.
“But I settled on this style and this mood mostly, I would say, because we’d decided to do it in Abbey Road and I thought these songs would suit that.”
Released in April, Achilles was the first single to be taken from Rainy Sunday Afternoon.
Neil, who rose to fame in the 90s thanks to memorable singles such as Something for the Weekend, Everybody Knows (Except You) and National Express, was moved to write the song after reading Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s 1915 poem Achilles in the Trench, which portended the author’s fate on a French battlefield two years later.
“The first one I wrote [for the new record] was Achilles, which is 11 years old,” explains the friendly musician, “and maybe five or six of the other ones I kind of had lying around for a couple of years, in various states of completion.
“And then when I’d decided what sort of style it would be, I wrote some more.”
One of the most poignant moments on the album is the second single, The Last Time I Saw the Old Man, which is about Neil’s late father, Brian, who suffered from Alzheimer’s for the last decade of his life and passed away in 2022.
“For maybe a year, The Last Time I Saw the Old Man was just a voice memo on my phone, where I sang, ‘The last time I saw my papa…’,” explains Neil.
“When I realised what to do on it, which was probably around July last year, then it all came quite quickly.
“It’s obviously about my dad’s last couple of years, but vast amounts of people experience this these days, for one reason or another, and I didn’t want to colour it with my own thoughts.
“I just wanted it to be a series of images, really, an honest appraisal of what was there and what was going on and let the music sort of colour that.”
I informed Neil that my favourite tunes on the new LP are probably the jaunty, piano-led title track and the wistful Mar-A-Lago By the Sea, which is described in the press release as sounding like “the house band in a Florida resort” – a pretty accurate description, I’d say.
“OK, each to their own,” says Neil, adding that he wouldn’t release the latter as a single.
“It’s too much – people would get all uppity about it,” he suggests. “It’s quite weird; we made it purposely quite ugly!
“Didn’t get the piano tuned in the morning, it’s got quite gnarly vocal sounds, and used a quite repulsive organ sound!
“I was trying to give off that wonderful, vulgar sheen of Mar-A-Lago!
“I kind of look upon the lyric as Donald [Trump] in his prison cell being nostalgic for his home…
“So it didn’t quite come to pass and now look where we are!”
I mentioned to Neil that the song reminded me a bit of the late, great Jimmy Buffett, an American singer-songwriter famed for his laidback songs celebrating tropical seaside living and island escapism.
“There’s a bit of that in there, that’s for sure,” he laughs. “I wanted us to sound like the slightly sick-making cabaret act in the corner of the ballroom.”
On the album’s title, Neil concludes: “I chose that title because I thought the song [Rainy Sunday Afternoon] seemed to reflect what the whole album was really about, which is basically personal and quite emotional, but with this overarching air of doom about the world!
“A bit like how we just generally are these days…
“Everybody’s just doing their thing and trying to get through life, but if you watch the news at all, you’re going to have this nagging feeling that everything’s messed up.”
The Divine Comedy will be performing at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Wednesday, 15 October. Tickets, priced £30.50-£102 (including booking fee), are available from cornex.co.uk. For more on The Divine Comedy, go to thedivinecomedy.com.