The music business still doesn't get The Divine Comedy, so some more 'smashing' tunes were required, Neil Hannon tells Davin O'Dwyer.

'A warning to all young bands: even at the grand age of 35 you have to do showcase gigs to the industry," explains Neil Hannon in his unmistakable voice. "It seems that you have to persuade the business that you're class before they will persuade anybody else."

Despite more than a decade of critical acclaim and a number of radio hits and successful albums in his guise as The Divine Comedy, it seems that Hannon will never be considered a conventional pop star. With his sumptuous melodies, knowingly witty lyrics, too-rich voice and louche sex appeal, it is Hannon's fate to be a singularly hard-to-define kind of artist, which is probably why, shortly before the release of his ninth album, Victory for the Comic Muse, he is still playing showcase gigs to the industry.

"They know lots, they're very cool, and I love them," he says, with just the right hint of deadpan sarcasm, of the music industry types he will be performing for. The Derry-born, Enniskillen-raised and Dublin-based singer has been finding success with his own brand of cerebral orchestra pop for long enough now, yet the vagaries of the music business mean he still has to prove himself. His last three albums have all been touted as refashionings or new beginnings - the titles of both 2001's Regeneration and 2003's Absent Friends say a lot about Hannon's situation at the time of each recording. After a mere three-year break, hardly exceptional in music industry terms, Victory for the Comic Muse is also being labelled a "comeback" and a "return to form". Yet Hannon did contemplate killing off The Divine Comedy.

After Regeneration, he dissolved the band he had assembled in 1996 for his breakthrough Casanova album.

"With Absent Friends, it was about gathering myself up again," he says. "The fact that that sold a decent amount of copies gave me the licence to keep going. If that had sold zilch, I'd have packed it all in. The truth is, if people don't buy your records, people don't want to hear you, so you stop. That's the same with this one. Obviously I didn't want to give them the opportunity, so I've packed it full of 'smashing' tunes."

He says "smashing" with an arch irony, as if he's singing one of his innuendo-laden lyrics. Did he ever consider reinventing himself, leaving the Dante reference behind?

"I thought about ditching the Divine Comedy name, but I kept coming back to the same brick wall, which is Neil Hannon is not a very good name for a pop star," he says. "Divine Comedy is just a great name, and it always suits the music that I make. So it stays."

Not only is Hannon sticking with his Divine Comedy nom-de-pop for the future, he is also revisiting the early years of The Divine Comedy. Over the next year he's reissuing his earlier albums from his time with the Setanta label. He set up a new label to release his work, and after a protracted legal wrangle with Setanta to get control of his back catalogue, he plans to repackage albums such as Liberation and Promenade. Was there a perception, perhaps, that they didn't garner the attention they deserved?

"You can't say they didn't get the attention they deserved, because it's all a question of growth," says Hannon. "When Liberation came out, it sold 10,000 copies that year, and I was thinking 'my God, I'm a star'. It got great reviews all round, just not very big ones. It got exactly what it deserved at the time, in proportion, and Promenade likewise. With all the problems [at Setanta], a lot of them hadn't even been stocked, they hadn't even been on the shelves."

Hannon will try to more than compensate for this initial scarcity.

"We'll gradually reissue all the old records, re-package," he says. "We'll try and grub up some interesting old stuff, copious liner notes that people will be bored by. Instead of re-manufacturing the old ones, we thought we could take this opportunity to do something interesting and talk to the people who were involved at the very beginning, and have interesting takes on how it happened. Because I have an appalling memory, and I'm constantly laughing at stories of what we did which I've completely forgotten."

Indeed, it is fitting that Victory for the Comic Muse will presage the re-release of Hannon's earliest work, because much of the material wouldn't seem out of place on any of his albums. It features the same mix of dreamy, swirling songs and brassy, catchy tunes with jokey titles and playful lyrics that characterise all his work. Lady of a Certain Age would be right at home on A Short Album About Love, while the jaunty Mother Dear and single Diva Lady could be from Casanova. What it demonstrates is that The Divine Comedy is a unique creation - with perceptible influences, certainly, but scant peers. Few so effortlessly pair lush classical instrumentation and radio-friendly hooks.

One who could compare is French multi-instrumentalist Yann Tiersen, with whom Hannon has worked, but whose music can be wilfully eclectic.

"Yann Tiersen is an unbelievable instrumentalist," says Hannon. "But he doesn't want to be a pop star. He doesn't care about that end of things, so he just does what he wants, which is a nice position to be in. I've never been able to put myself in that situation, because I want to entertain people. Much as I want to entertain myself, I also want to entertain everybody else."

This desire to entertain appears to be Hannon's defining trait. When many with his musical talents would turn their noses up at anything as populist as a catchy hook, Hannon wants nothing so much as to be a huge pop star.

"I've never thought too much about the accessibility, I've always just assumed that people were just going to dig it, which is probably rather naive of me," he says. "Every song I make I think is going to be a 'world-beater'. That's probably the best way to approach them. It's only in the cold light of day that you think about it in terms of what people might play on the radio.

"A lot of the time I'm making music in the first place because it's not there, the sort of music I want to hear doesn't exist, so I make it myself. I take cues from all sorts of things and mix them all up. I listen to a lot of classical music, jazz, dance music, very old music, an awful lot of pop music, indie-shmindie guitar music, everything except reggae really. It all gets interwoven, and hopefully makes some pop music that's interesting."

A lot of those influences are apparent on Victory for the Comic Muse. The title is taken from EM Forster's Room With a View and Hannon had earlier adapted the same quote for The Divine Comedy's long-disavowed first album, Fanfare for the Comic Muse.

"There were hundreds of titles floating around," Hannon explains. "Though I'm quite glad I didn't go for Jiggery Pokery. A good reason for this title is that it's a victory that I'm here at all. It's a victory for comedy. I find it faintly hilarious that people kind of accept me as a pop star, and the music as being pop music, and I'm very pleased and delighted. Thank you all very much."

That archly ironic voice again.

"And I also hope it's a self-fulfilling prophecy and it sells multi-platinum."

• Victory for the Comic Muse is released by EMI/Parlophone on Friday.