As the strident opening flourish of Sweden boomed around the Music Centre on Saturday night it was apparent that Neil Hannon, a.k.a. The Divine Comedy, has finally dropped the restrictive rock 'n' roll pretence and donned the more comfortably-tailored ensemble of the pop composer. His return to purism has been steady and just a teensyweensy bit sneaky: last year's low-key release, A Short Album About Love, marked Hannon's move from clever rockin' cat to complete classical gas-man, and the new album, Fin De Siecle, revels in its own orchestral glory, gleefully dancing a bolero on Britpop's grave. Hannon may have flirted with rock 'n' roll in the past, and it served him well; now he's in flagrante delicto with his true muse, and loving every musical moment of it.
The besuited Hannon hit the stage to the backing of a full band which included his cowriter and arranger, Joby Talbot, and settled into the dyspeptic humour of Generation Sex and the self-destructive sarcasm of Thrillseeker, stopping off to visit some old landmarks from his 1993 album, Promenade.
Tease that he is, Hannon kept us waiting for tracks from his best-selling 1996 album, Casanova; the taped voice of Michael Caine signalled the intro to Becoming More Like Alfie, and the band rocked with the period precision of The Italian Job.
The show climaxed with the millennial trilogy of The Certainty Of Chance, Life On Earth and Here Comes The Flood, then encored with the seedy Something For The Weekend and the new dawn chorus of Sunrise.
