Neil Hannon is getting away from the rough rock 'n' roll ideal and goingback to being his arty self. The Enniskillen man tells Kevin Courtney which way his muse is moving him.
Skittish, moi? Neil Hannon, leader and sole remaining member of The Divine Comedy, is quick to refute suggestions that he may be a musical dilettante, flitting like a hyperactive butterfly from one idea to the next, and changing his mind more often than a chameleon changes its skin colour. A year or so after he dumped the cravat and the Noel Coward persona to embrace the rock 'n' roll ideal, he's performed yet another volte-face, deciding to go back to his arch, arty roots and revive The Divine Comedy's peculiar mix of haute couture and pop craftiness.
If David Bowie announced that he was reanimating his Ziggy Stardust character, it would probably raise a plucked eyebrow or two, but Hannon has always had a whiff of the aesthete about him, so it's hardly earth-shattering news that he's opted to, essentially, start being himself again.
Earlier this year, Parlophone announced that The Divine Comedy would no longer exist as a band, but would revert to its original form as a clever conceit inside the head of Neil Hannon. The label would be retaining Hannon as a solo artist, but he will continue to trade under The Divine Comedy monicker when he plays a concert at St Nicholas's Church on Saturday, July 27th as part of this year's Galway Arts Festival. He will be backed by two members of his original band, but this time it's Hannon who will be firmly in charge, directing things with the sure, steady hand of a conductor, and exercising full creative control over every aspect of the music.
So, what prompted Hannon to set up as a sole pop practitioner? "It was just a sorry recognition that maybe, like Roy Keane, I'm just not a good team player," smiles Hannon ruefully. We're sitting in the Morrison Hotel on a dull - and somewhat depressing - summer's afternoon. Public opinion may have leant slightly against the errant Corkman, but you get the impression that Hannon's sympathies lie with the former Republic of Ireland captain. After all, the boy from Enniskillen has also had to stand firm and make some difficult choices, and damn the torpedoes.
"It was a bit of a horrible, sick feeling that grew inside me, thinking, y'know, what I actually want to do, the music that I want to make, or that I keep hearing in my head, is not really designed for this outfit. Because we'd always had so much fun and it was such a tight unit, it was the hardest decision of my life. But sometimes you have to stand up for your principles and just do it. Thankfully, the band were pretty decent about the whole thing, but I have to say that it's like when you break up with a long-term girlfriend-stroke-boyfriend. You have to say that it's for everybody's good, 'cos if I'd continued in that form with that group, I'd have become more and more jaded and more creatively stilted, and that wouldn't be good for anybody."
What a difference a year makes. In early 2001, I sat with Hannon and his band in Temple Bar prior to the release of The Divine Comedy's last album, Regeneration, and faced a united musical front. Gone were Hannon's trademark tweed suit and schoolboy haircut, and in their place was lank, long hair, sweatshirt and trainers. Shorn of his studied outer shell, Hannon looked for all the world like a Kurt Cobain for classical music fans.
He spoke like someone who had been pulled back from the abyss of terminal pretentiousness, and seemed grateful for the chance to be simply a band member and not a tin-pot musical dictator with a skinny tie and a snobbish attitude to rock. Somewhere along the line, he had stopped and asked his band members: "Does my art look big in this?" And they answered in the affirmative, prompting Hannon to jettison his weighty muse, climb down from his pop podium and muck in with the rest of the lads.
TODAY, Hannon still looks lank and unkempt, but also somewhat relieved that his little experiment in musical democracy has ended in noble failure. Despite its cohesive musical voice, Regeneration failed to equal the success of previous albums, Casanova, Fin De Siècle and 10 Songs About Love, and hasn't yielded chart hits of the same crafty calibre as National Express, Generation Sex and Something For The Weekend.
"I do think the whole atmosphere has changed, and 'indie' music, for want of a better term, was a victim of its own success in the 1990s.
"Because Oasis and Blur and everybody did so well, it meant that an awful lot of bands, as soon as they picked up guitars, they were signed to major labels, and that's the worst possible thing that could happen to a new band. It goes in cycles like that, but in a way it's a sort of regenerative process, and now you'll find there's a new underground, and great things will come out of that."
In Britpop's heyday during the mid-1990s, the UK Top 20 would be routinely filled with Blur, Oasis, Suede, Supergrass and Skunk Anansie. Pulp's Common People would be at number one, and The Divine Comedy's theme tune to Father Ted would be wafting out of our TV sets every Friday evening. Today, the charts have been taken over by American white boys in skateboard punk outfits, TV-manufactured pop idols and - of course - Britney Spears.
How does Hannon see himself fitting into this new musical scheme of things? "Depends where people put me," is the pointed reply. "What I intend to do, is probably just listen to my more aesthetic side. Like the name, there's always been a huge dichotomy in what I do between the popular and the populism." He pauses to wince at his choice of words. "The dichotomy between! D'you listen to meself! Jesus!" He then decides to press on through the verbal maze: "I've always enjoyed popular music hugely, and popular culture. But then, it's like a battle between the sacred and profane, because I have massive musical urges that don't fit into the current idea about what pop music is. So I'm going to follow those urges. I've just decided I have no need or desire to do anything for anybody else, but that's kind of what I did in my early twenties as well. I never made music for anybody apart from myself, and - amazingly - everybody liked it."
Neil Hannon was born in Derry in 1970, the son of the Bishop of Clogher, and grew up in Enniskillen. He and some mates formed a band, moved to London, and got signed to Setanta Records, releasing their debut album, Fanfare For The Common Muse. Hannon, however, had ideas of his own, so he parted company with the band, kept The Divine Comedy name, and released Liberation in 1993, followed by Promenade a year later. Both albums displayed Hannon's talent for taking grandiose literary and musical ideas, and creating catchy, easy-to-fathom pop songs. This ability was to reach fruition on 1996's Casanova, which sold 100,000 copies in the UK and Ireland. On that album, Hannon was backed by an ensemble which included keyboard player and arranger Joby Talbot, and this became the permanent Divine Comedy line-up.
Hannon and co became a highbrow hit machine, reaching the Top 20 with The Frog Princess, Something For The Weekend and Everybody Knows (Except You), recording A Short Album About Love at the Shepherd's Bush Empire with the Brunei Ensemble, collaborating with composer Michael Nyman, and recording I've Been To A Marvellous Party for a Noel Coward tribute album. By the time he released Fin De Siècle in 1998, however, there were grumblings that maybe Hannon had bitten off more culture than the rest of us could chew.
'I'M old enough now to be able to have a bit of perspective on what I've done over the past 15 years or so, and try and home in on what I think I do best,and try and distil the essence of my music. Cos I think it's about time that I got it right. I'm not ashamed of not getting it right, because it's great fun getting it wrong. There are right bits in all of the records. When I'm listening to each of them, I'm going: 'Blimey, cringe, cringe.' Then I go: 'Ooh, that bit! That's perfect! I couldn't have done it any better if I'd tried.' So I wanna gather together all those perfect bits, but something that I've learnt over the years, not least from Nigel Godrich [Radiohead producer who helmed Regeneration], is balance. Knowing when to stop and trying not to tip over the edge into incredible kitsch or incredible grandiose nonsense."
Hannon is currently on tour with a stripped-down Divine Comedy line-up, featuring band members Ivor Talbot and Rob Farrer.
After the Galway Arts Festival date, they'll be going on tour with American piano man Ben Folds. A new Divine Comedy album is planned for early next year.
"I think what I like most, and what I do best, is pop music. But when I say pop music, people start thinking of instrumentation and sounds, and that's not really what I mean.
"What real pop music is, it's taking a quite simple idea and putting it in a straightforward, understandable way, that gets an immediate emotional response. But you can do that using the most complicated methods.
"I think that's the key with a lot of the best music, art, literature. The great classics that we think of from the 19th century, they were the popular culture of that century. Dickens's works, they were almost just cartoons."
The Divine Comedy performs in St Nicholas's Church, Galway, on Saturday, July 27th, and at the Ambassador, Dublin, on September 26th and then tours England. See also Neil Hannon's website at www.thedivinecomedy.com