This was the last Dublin gig for this line-up of The Divine Comedy, and with a now long-haired Neil Hannon and six others on stage, the band occasionally came across like a prog-rock behemoth, with their monster lights and boisterous music, which seemed tired and drained of subtlety. It should have been a joyful last hurrah, but for the most part it failed to live up to expectations.
Your Daddy's Car, from the first of the band's six albums, Liberation, is a song about teenage boredom, but in this performance it was merely boring. Lost Property, from the current album, Regeneration, was more interesting. This is where a seven-piece band works brilliantly - a sound Hannon may not easily recreate in whatever stripped-down direction he's heading for.
National Express, always a crowd-pleaser, was better, and it gets bonus points for the well-worked Bono/U2 spoof at the end.
An encore of The Power Of Love, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Christmas classic, was great, but elsewhere the sound was too often overblown to the point of sounding like Pink Floyd at their bombastic worst.
One of the great things about The Divine Comedy is the nuances in the music, but most of the show's interpretations lacked any nuance whatsoever.
Who knows whether this big-band phase of The Divine Comedy is ending for financial reasons or because Hannon needs to plough new furrows? But whatever Hannon does next is bound to be interesting - and probably great. The gig at the Olympia, however, was neither.
