`What a strange looking person," said the young lady next to me as Neil Hannon arrived on the stage, to the fanfare of his conversely anonymous six piece band. Hannon may not yet be a household name but with a carefully cultivated image like a millenary Gilbert O'Sullivan - pudding bowl haircut, clothes harking backwards - he's well on his way. This was his band's first time at headlining the Ulster Hall and, amidst all Hannon's poise and mock-vaudeville persona, he was clearly and rightly proud to have made it this far with an image, personality and musical ideas that are not obviously in the mainstream.
As a handful of his singles demonstrated, though, Hannon is a master of the classic pop song. The forthcoming National Express sounded immediately brilliant, with a timeless Christmassy feel. He will, of course, not be releasing it until January.
But the real surprises were in the darker, richer sound-scapes of his show-casings from the recent Fin De Siecle album. From quasi-orchestral bombast to soaring, cinematic Sixties Euro-pop, this is clearly a man who is drawing inspiration from (or subconsciously reinventing) the whimsical fringe of progressive rock. I could swear one new song had cheekily revamped the riff from Jethro Tull's 1977 pastoral romp Hunting Girl, and another from Led Zeppelin's Kashmir.
Elsewhere, there might well have been a sheen of Caravan, The Moody Blues, Hatfield & The North . . . There was even a gong and a marimba on stage, and they weren't there for show. Neil Hannon is possibly steeped in a grander tradition than we all imagined, but either way this was a triumph of a gig from an artist unusual, at least, in the late 1990s.
