The Divine Comedy, fronted and formed by the eccentric, self-deprecating Neil Hannon, are one of pop’s true cult acts. Hannon’s project has romped and ricocheted through an eclectic career of hits, mishits and everything in-between.
To the generation before mine, he’s known as the man behind Britpop classics ‘National Express’ or ‘Something For The Weekend’ (which, still, people mistake as ‘Something In The Wood Shed’). To my generation, he’s known as the man behind The I.T. Crowd theme tune (and the laboriously long phone number song – yes, that one). And to the generation forthcoming, he’ll be known as the man behind the whirly verses soundtracking 2023’s Wonka, starring Timothy Chalamet. Hannon makes his own fortune: “I do what I want. If it pays me… well, that’s just pot luck.” It begs the question as to what his accountant thinks about this mantra, but alas, it seems to have just about worked out for the Londonderry-born singer/songwriter.
I sit down with The Divine Comedy’s acclaimed songwriter to discuss his recent Hollywood ventures, his songwriting preoccupations, his attempts – and failures – at partying with the Britpop crowd, and his upcoming show in Sheffield’s Rock N Roll Circus. Neil Hannon covers all bases.
To have a career as bizarre as Neil Hannon has had, you’re bound to develop a sense of humour. The Divine Comedy frontman appears on screen, already sporting a wry smile as the interview begins with Hannon pointing out his newly-acquired wallpaper, “This is very cool, Swedish wallpaper. I recommend it… Boråstapeter”.
“It doesn’t matter how massive the project… if I didn’t think I wasn’t the best person for the job, I wouldn’t do it.”
Taste in homely aesthetics established, I ask about the recent involvement in the Roald Dahl- inspired feature film Wonka – a project as swirlingly colourful as the Swedish wallpaper sat in the background. Hannon doesn’t seem to mind the anonymity of the off-screen score-lender, in fact he embraces it.
He says, “I quite enjoy the fact that people accidentally hear my stuff. I mean, for example, right now with Wonka… they don’t know where these songs have come from, or who’s written them,” his face lighting up as he puts himself in the place of a child sitting in the darkened cinema rows, “but that’s exactly like when I watched Disney films as a kid, I never thought of the Sherman brothers, you know? Yet, now I understand that these two brothers were, like, the two biggest songwriting geniuses of the twentieth century! And I enjoy that there are kids seeing Wonka, singing the songs.. as if the songs have just appeared…”
The recent Hollywood venture, rather than a cynical cash-grab, feels like it’s been a sentimental process for Hannon, who, in spite of his dry asides, still becomes starry-eyed when discussing the art of songwriting. Hannon, undoubtedly aware of cynics who may see the Wonka venture as strangely careerist for such a contrarian, asserts the appeal of the project:
“Wonka came along and I thought, ‘oh my God, they read my mind!’ This is exactly what I can do, you know? Because It doesn’t matter how massive the project… or how remunerative… if I didn’t think I wasn’t the best person for the job, I wouldn’t do it, you know? Because it would be no fun, and everyone would go, ‘that’s sh*t’, at the end of it!”. Wonka is just another career left-turn, albeit on a bigger scale, for the musician who claims that doing things for the money is a “mug’s game”.
He laughs as he recalls his enthusiasm for being commissioned to write “Antony Newly-esque bangers” – a rare case of eccentricity and corporate filmmaking in harmonious synthesis, perhaps? Working with Warner Bros. is quite the step up from composing the theme for The I.T. Crowd (“all very lo-fi… I did that in an attic…”), but it’s one that fortunately seems to have accommodated Hannon’s quirks.
Over twenty years since The Divine Comedy formed, and Hannon still has a knack for keeping things fresh. A bookish, peculiar humour seems to be the one constant throughout the body work (“a mild, wry, kind of observational humour, I suppose”). From ‘The Pop Singer’s Fear of the Pollen Count’ on 1993’s Liberation to “The Synthesiser Service Centre Super Summer Sale” on 2019’s Office Politics, The Divine Comedy is no stranger to the joys of novelty and oddity.
Hannon reminisces on his youth as an avid bookworm, which informed his comic sensibilities: “That’s [humour’s] kind of what I like in all of the books that I read. I can never read a book that’s completely serious! Like, Cormac McCarthy, or something like that. I always liked, you know, E.M. Forster, Kingsley Amis, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh. And they’re always really, like, super intelligent and well-written… and, kind of, meaningful… but, yet there’s humour just all the time pointing up to the weird, surreal nature of our existence, you know?”.
The Divine Comedy’s body of work shows that a literary approach to songwriting is one that can, miraculously, be successful – not that Hannon necessarily recommends it as a vocation (“It’s not really the thing for pop songs…”).
And yet, time and time again, it has been the thing for pop songs. We discuss ‘A Lady of a Certain Age’, a sprawling, melancholy masterwork, and the detailed inspiration behind Hannon’s doomed, island-hopping heiress at the centre of the lyric: “There were a few things that went into the pot on that one. Part of the thing was that, to begin with, I was writing it for Jane Birkin… ‘cos she wanted some songs for her new album. And, so that kind of put me in mind of the ex-pat in France vibe.”
But then I was also, at the time, reading… incredibly slowly… this enormous tomb… it was Noel Coward’s diaries, and, you know, most of it is, like, ‘God, you’ve got an ego on you,”, but… there was a lot of interesting stuff about flitting about with the jet set in the fifties, and so a lot of the places mentioned in the song, like Cap Ferret and Capri… places like that… he mentions them in his travels… and I was always kind of fascinated by the… the appalling glamour of it all, you know?”.
This fascination helped develop the tragicomic character at the heart of the song: an ageing, bourgeois lady, gradually becoming less and less favourable in her attempts at drinking with young aristocrats. Hannon maintains an empathy for his character, however, never allowing the song to venture into the all-too-obvious allure of caricature. He elaborates on this, explaining an unlikely family link:
“I’ve got my own, sort of, family history a little bit to draw upon… my parents, although not rich at all, circled around that sort of Anglo-Irish establishment kind of deal. It’s hard to describe. Basically, the enemy if you’re in Ireland, you know? The awful, horrid people who owned all the land, and kind of ran the Church of Ireland, and, you know, although this is all very far back in my personal family history, my parents did kind of know people.”
He smiles at the fragmented memories of this alien class, and says, “My mum had a friend who would arrive up to the house in a little, sort of, spitfire sports car, wearing a beautiful headscarf and these enormous glasses”. He pauses for a second, and then, voice up an octave, imitates the lady’s lofty “oh, darling”: “I was fascinated as a kid by these people… so, yeah it’s sort of in the blood, weirdly.”
Photo: Kevin Westenberg
Hannon has always been drawn to character studies, whether it be via the first-person, smutty Modernisms on Casanova, or the third-person, whimsical narration of ‘Norman & Norma’. I ask if the character study song is dying out, and Hannon speculates the modern pop chart’s itch for self-attention: “my God, there’s a lot of folky-ish, country-ish, music in the charts these days… but it’s all of that sort of modern breed where they’re just talking about themselves. And how, sort of, melancholy they are. And I dig melancholy! But it’s the endless, sort of, just talking about yourself that is sort of boring to me.”
The songwriter, sipping a coffee that has no doubt gone cold by now, then muses on possible alternatives: “Yes, you can talk about yourself in music, but it’s always better if it’s obliquely, you know? But I like talking about other things, you know? Or the past, you know? ‘Cos talking about yourself in the past, that’s like a different person anyway.” Ultimately, he poses no fixed conclusion, mumbling, “maybe it’s dying… or maybe it’s just having a rest, they were all good at partying… I wasn’t”
It’d be hard to sit down with Neil Hannon without asking about the bubbling, perhaps over-covered, but undeniably entertaining, Britpop circle. A more original journalist would have stuck to The Divine Comedy and Hannon’s solo ventures, but I simply had to enquire into Hannon’s position within the bizarre mix of characters of 90s Britpop. I mention The Divine Comedy’s peripheral position within the scene, wondering whether it was Hannon’s orchestral arrangements, or European influence, that kept him at arm’s length from his contemporaries. He dispels this immediately: “No, I was just a weirdo”. He talks to me about spending evenings awkwardly observing parties in Camden from the corner of the room, the Gallaghers boozing at the bar, Blur’s Graham Coxon “hiding under the table”.
Hannon makes it clear that it was a social incompatibility more than a music one that kept him in the peripheral vision of Britpop fame (though tracks like ‘The Booklovers’ likely didn’t help): “I was never never able to just, sort of, hang out and be one of the lads. I wasn’t able to do that with anyone. Ever. They were all good at partying. I wasn’t.” Hannon laughs whilst becoming increasingly self-deprecating: “The thing that kept me apart from all of the rest of them was my complete inability to live in society, and talk to other people! I’m okay in interviews, I’m okay meeting people for the first time, but developing friendships? No…”.
The Divine Comedy were always in their own little bubble – even when stood at the same bar as Blur, Oasis and Pulp. As Hannon scrutinises his social ineptness at the height of Cool Britannia, one can’t help but think of the “lonely, posh” child growing up in Londonderry, nose firmly rooted in ‘A Room With A View’. Some things never change.
Of course, Britpop had its own idiosyncratic characters. Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, the corduroy-clad, Alan Bennet-meets-Phillip Larkin of indie music, was also outspoken in his outsider status. Hannon and Cocker seemed like an intellectual, kitschy supergroup in the making, but something always separated the two from becoming overly chummy: “Jarvis was obviously a few years older than, you know, most of us in the Britpop time… he was also a few years taller. And so between the age thing and the height thing, I just never could hold my own in a conversation with him”.
Height wasn’t the only thing that separated the two songwriters, Hannon beginning to gush as soon as Pulp’s discography enters the discussion: “I absolutely worshipped what he did… you know, I think, obviously, His ’n’ Hers, and then while I was making Casanova, ‘Common People’ came out, and I was like, ‘Oh, f*ck…’”. Hannon assumes the role of music-lover – I’m no longer talking to the frontman of The Divine Comedy, but a fellow Pulp fanatic. He goes as far as to dismiss his 1995 magnum opus Casanova as a panicked response to Cocker’s work, describing it as “desperately trying to keep up”. Modesty and Neil Hannon are evidently no strangers.
The mention of Sheffield’s resident raconteur of sex and class led to a discussion of the city itself, a place which Hannon has a lot of respect for in the way of music: “It’s just got an absolutely crazy amount of brilliant bands that come from Sheffield, you know, per head of the population, it must be up there with, like Liverpool. Arctic Monkeys, Human League…”. The list continues for at least a minute or so, including a “personal favourite”, ABC. Fortunately for him Hannon is performing at Sheffield’s Rock ’n’ Roll Circus 2024, joined by Richard Hawley (“Mr Hawley is another person who protects the art of songwriting”), The Coral, Gilbert O’Sullivan (“He’s written some of the best songs of the 70s… soundtrack of my youth!”), Bromheads Jacket, and many more.
A true spectacle of an event, Rock N Roll Circus ought to be a match made in heaven for a set from The Divine Comedy. Personally, I can’t wait to hear a rendition of ‘To The Rescue’ whilst acrobats dangle daringly from the top of Don Valley Bowl, or a run-through of ‘At The Indie Disco’ whilst the crowd plan their inevitable flock down to The Leadmill after the festival calls it a night (‘Give us some Roses, and some Pixies, and some Valentines…’).
They say don’t meet your heroes. I disagree – do meet Neil Hannon.
You can buy tickets to The Divine Comedy at Rock N Roll Circus, Thursday 29th August, at www.rocknrollcircus.co.uk
