The Divine Comedy frontman and Duckworth Lewis Method collaborator has a new album out, a string of live shows and is in a 'lovely relationship'. No wonder he's in good spirits
Towards the end of a gig earlier this month, Neil Hannon was about to play "Alfie",
the Divine Comedy's tribute to Michael Caine's dashing, womanising creation. He picked up his guitar and put on a pair of NHS specs. "Who do I look like?" he asked the audience. "Rolf Harris!" someone shouted.
A little harsh on a man who's only turning 40 this November, but Hannon has no fear of ageing. "I was born old," says the wiry, bearded Northern Irishman as he sits next to me, in a suit and trilby. "I was an old man trapped in a young man's body. Now I'm an old man trapped in a middle-aged man's body." He pauses wistfully. "So I'm getting there…"
It is 20 years since the Divine Comedy recorded their first album, Fanfare for the Comic Muse, and since then Hannon's wit-laden songs – with their blend of upbeat poppy tunes and romantic melancholia – have established their own place in Britpop history, peaking in the late 90s when every student in the country seemed to know the words to
"National Express". Collaborators have come and gone (Hannon split from the rest of the band after the flop of Regeneration in 2001), but his talent for clever wordplay and grand orchestral arrangements has continued, and last year with Thomas Walsh he created
The Duckworth Lewis Method, the world's first concept record about cricket which just lost out to Paolo Nutini in the best album category at the
Ivor Novello awards.
However, to promote the Divine Comedy's latest album, Bang Goes the Knighthood, Hannon is – for the first time – touring alone. "For about three weeks before I started doing it I thought, 'What the hell were you thinking? This is insanity!'" he says. "There's no one else to look at! I have to entertain people for, like, two hours!" He points out that he gave up learning piano at grade 2 and that his guitar playing has similar technical shortcomings. "I can't riff, I can't jam, I can't noodle," he says, modestly, before adding: "but I know every chord that's there."
To those who see Hannon as a songwriter in the tradition of Noël Coward, Tom Lehrer et al, the solo show makes perfect sense: at the London gig, his set had an intimate, improvised feel, the numbers punctuated with self-deprecating jokes and audience banter. During one song, his tie fell off and he had to keep playing while it snaked around the keyboard. At the end he announced: "What a fucking disaster. I've lost all credibility. You've seen that I wear a clip-on tie…"
The tie and its accompanying bowler hat are
Bang Goes the Knighthood's signature look. Its title track tells the story of a City gent who skulks around in fetish parlours (Hannon refuses to confirm that it was inspired by Max Mosley). "The Complete Banker", meanwhile, was written when "the Allied Irish bank was crumbling and the Irish government were propping it up with our money, and I was thinking this is so unjust," says Hannon. "It's one of the few songs I've ever written really angrily."
This is a rare political moment for Hannon, who describes himself as a "big woolly liberal" ("I dislike extremism in any way because I've seen what extremism does in Northern Ireland"). The rest of the album charts his more usual course between the absurd and the personal. It includes a track called "When a Man Cries"; I ask him when he last cried. He waits a long time before answering. "This is really pathetic, but it was when I was parting from my girlfriend the other day and I got a bit choked up."
I reply that it sounds like he was pretty loved-up when he wrote the album – it contains three hallmark Hannon love songs – and at first he offers "no comment", but there's a goofy grin on his face that gives him away. "I'm in a lovely relationship," he eventually concedes. "Very happy." He also has an eight-year-old daughter, Willow, with his ex-wife, Orla; he describes fatherhood as "hilarious and time-consuming and fantastic and sometimes completely dull". As an example, he offers their current bedtime reading of Swallows and Amazons. "She really enjoys it. Unfortunately, I'm thinking, 'Arthur Ransome, you dry old git, will you stop talking about reef knots and sails and shit and just get to the story?'"
He laughs: the punchline is that he has written a musical version of Ransome's book, which will be directed by Tom Morris at Bristol's Old Vic this autumn, after three years in development. It was written for the National theatre, which then turned it down; Hannon wonders, teasingly, whether it was too happy for them. "My favourite musicals are The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. I don't know whether Nick Hytner was looking for something a little more avant garde or 'political'…"
Hannon doesn't worry about labels; he's happy with his position as an "oddball" of the music scene. It is, he admits, a far cry from his 18-year-old self, who wanted nothing more than to be on Top of the Pops, and would have hoped – no, expected – to be filling stadiums by now. One new track, "At the Indie Disco", pays affectionate tribute to the scene that launched him ("Give us some Pixies and some Roses and some Valentines/ Give us some Blur and some Cure and some Wannadies"); it's a gentle, appreciative wave back at his own past. "A lot of indie music is about a fresh new sound," Hannon says thoughtfully. "Well, I'm afraid I don't really have a fresh new sound. I enjoy being contrary. It doesn't do much for album sales, but it's got me a certain niche. And it means I can carry on."
