Part Ulster, part Weimar Republic, diminutive Northern Irish song stylist Neil Hannon used his breakthrough Divine Comedy album to create a fantasy world of a decadent debonair cabaret on viagra, which he eruditely pulls off by only occasionally letting his tongue be found anywhere near his cheek. From swirling orchestral manouevres in the dark to savage witpop, via Fin de Siècle tear-jerkers that would have done credit to his lachrymose heroes Scott Walker and Burt Bacharach. It makes a pretty strong case for Hannon being one of the greatest singer-songwriters of the past quarter-century.
Following Fabulous Fourths reassessments and overviews of Kate Bush, Pet Shop Boys, Echo & The Bunnymen and Blondie, our newest contributor Catherine Walters finds that sordid suavity and esoteric Euro-jadedness have seldom sounded this ridiculous, or this good.
This is Casanova.
If I were to say to you The Divine Comedy what would be the first thing to come to mind? Some of you might answer Dante, others would say “cat!”, well, possibly only my brother whose recently deceased cat was named after the venerable author. On a happier note, others might say that group with that really good ‘Britpop’ album, Casanova.
Casanova was The Divine Comedy’s fabulous fourth album following Fanfare For The Comic Muse (released July 1990 but subsequently disowned by its author Neil Hannon, and according to his official website it’s “currently not available for download” although you can play a brief clip of the first song), Liberation (released August 1993), and Promenade (released March 1994).
None of these albums really captured the public’s imagination but Casanova, released in April 1996, was to change everything, reaching 48 in the UK album chart and spawning three singles Something For The Weekend (14), Becoming More Like Alfie (27) and The Frog Princess (15).
The breakthrough came when Chris Evans, then host of the BBC Radio 1 breakfast show, championed Something For The Weekend and played it regularly. Something For The Weekend crashed in to its peak of fourteenth place at the end of June that year. The album from which it came initially charted at number 71 in the second week of May but 10 weeks later re-entered the charts at its highest position of 48 staying in the top 100 for nine weeks (and clocking up a further seven weeks between November and April 1997).
But could it really be considered a Britpop album? The mid-’90s musical phenomenon was characterised by its lighthearted, bouncy guitar music and laddish lyrics, seen as a reaction to American grunge rock. The peak years were 1995–1996, placing Casanova, released in early ’96, squarely within that timeframe.
Britpop’s lyrical themes were often small day-to-day trivialities and whilst the camp chamber pop vignettes of Casanova could be seen on the surface to deal with the everyday minutiae of life, with its frothy, witty ditties laden with bawdy innuendo and catchy couplets Casanova has an overarching theme of sex and death and it feels reductive to limit it to one genre. More Britfop than Britpop?
And there’s certainly nothing laddish about its writer, especially when he’s playing the part of unscrupulous upper crust playboy who lies, cheats and steals to get into anybody’s knickers. It was all incredibly perverse but also very, very funny. Can you imagine Neil in a cagoule and bucket hat? Case in point: the videos for all three singles from the album feature the foppish Irish munchkin in his trademark suited and booted attire.
Having said that, in one of the tracks, Through A Long & Sleepless Night, you are invited to imagine him in alternative dress as he takes on the perfumed persona of a drag queen, lamenting that he will always be the bridegroom but never the bride. Rolling Stone’s review hilariously misinterpreted the lines “I’d rather die than be deprived/Of Wonderbras and thunder thighs” as being “plain-spoken lust”, as opposed to from the mouth of a downbeat drag queen. I’m still not quite sure how they managed that one.
And, because this is me (and Steve Pafford is a confirmed professional Pethead) I couldn’t possibly let this opportunity go without mentioning something else released in the September of that year, also featuring a song sung from the point of view of a female impersonator, called Electricity. Whilst Casanova was feted as a so-called Britpop album, the Pet Shop Boys declared outright that sixth studio set Bilingual was their anathema statement, with Neil Tennant musing that its Latin-fused rhythms were “a reaction against Britpop. We like being part of Europe”.
Of course, maybe we should take the theme of the album literally from the BBC-style spoken introduction to the otherwise instrumental Theme From Casanova: “The Divine Comedy’s Casanova — a collection of songs for bass baritone and ensemble, inspired by the writings of the eighteenth century Venetian gambler, eroticist and spy; and performed for us there by the composer, Neil Hannon.”
Hmm, doesn’t sound very Cool Britannia to me. Whilst Britpop celebrated being a geezer tanked up with Cigarettes And Alcohol, Casanova focuses on the sleazier end of the spectrum of love and lust. So bearing in mind the dual themes of legendary lotharios and mortality we literally start proceedings with tittering females and a lecherous paramour before launching into a tune concerning deceit, gaslighting and the use of a phrase traditionally associated with barbers and condoms, before a violent crime is committed.
As depicted, the woodshed alludes to the quote from Stella Gibbons’ 1930s comic novel Cold Comfort Farm, “I saw something nasty in the woodshed”. Gibbons never revealed what the ‘nasty’ was but the trauma of its sighting was used to excuse Great Aunt Ada’s unpleasant behaviour, threatening an attack of the vapours if anyone defied her or tried to escape the farm. Here the ‘something’ in the woodshed is used as the bait to persuade our hapless, but gaslighting and clearly also not at all innocent, male protagonist to take a look, even with the promise of a good time if he would just go and investigate. Of course, when he does he meets with his misfortune and wakes up with, presumably a headache, and nothing more.
Hannon takes wicked delight in playing the louche lecherous aristocrat here, and I get the impression that the featured characters on this album are all as bad as each other. In fact next, with Becoming More Like Alfie, we meet yet another flippant sleazeball who seems to feel the concept of consent is flexible (“Everybody knows that no means yes/Just like glasses come free on the NHS”). And, via the narrator’s persistence with “slap and tickle” he seems to pop up again in the slightly Smiths-esque In & Out of Paris & London, which emphasises the nudge-nudge wink-wink carry-on sex capers with wry abandon, subverting the Hokey-Kokey to deliciously smutty effect.
Even the beautiful and, to my ears, what could be seen as a pure love song in Songs Of Love isn‘t as straightforward as it appears. If you delve into the lyrics they talk of roaming the streets looking for prey whilst searching for a mate, so not quite so romantic when you look at it in that light, is it?
Starting out as the instrumental theme tune for telly comedy Father Ted, Songs Of Love did the job that A Woman Of The World was supposed to do, had TV bosses not rejected its brasher melody. With Hannon, the son of a bishop, offering up his best Frank Sinatra impression amid a 1930s Vegas showgirls routine, it’s not at all surprising why AWOTW would be rejected as the keynote track for this bucolic drama concerning the lives of priests on an island in Ireland.
Songs Of Love feels more pastoral, like a gentle love letter to Neil’s emerald homeland. You can imagine lambs frolicking through fields, maybe even picture My Lovely Horse (another Hannon composition featured in Father Ted’s A Song For Europe episode).
The shady libertine continues to be in evidence in the resolutely un-PC Frog Princess, candidly admitting “I don’t love anybody/That stuff is just a waste of time” but still chancing his arm with “Your place or mine?”. But by A Woman Of The World we see the beginnings of an about turn, maybe he loves her, maybe he hates her, maybe he needs her? Of course, he does revert to type considering the happenstance of killing her whilst in the throes of passion though of course the possibility is always there that she might get in there first.
But that is to discuss the insidious nature of intimacy I mentioned, however, is it also really an album about death? In my opinion, yes. Of the 11 stories the lyrics of seven contain allusions to or are explicitly about mortality, whilst one of the four that don’t is mainly wordless (the aforementioned Theme).
Two of the tunes deal wholly with death: The Dogs & The Horses, the album’s closing chapter, and the jaunty Charge, song five, be a blasé treatise on trench warfare which finds Hannon channelling famous lovemen from Jim Morrison to Barry White and Prince. Midway through the latter, the composer seems to be having great fun charging into the valley of death and shooting left, right and centre, so gung-ho in fact that he’s stark bullock naked. One can almost picture him smoking a cigar with a bandana and camo paint.
The last word in dissonant denouements, The Dogs & The Horses, conversely, is a beautiful baroque slice of Scott Walker-esque melodrama featuring a deathbed vision of beloved pets coming to say one last goodbye and escort you up to the pearly gates. This is, of course, in stark contrast to our protagonist in Middle Class Heroes who is “never to heaven go”.
Maybe again here we are seeing the growth in character progressing throughout the record. We start with the unpleasant side of life but build up to a rousing finale where all is forgiven and we see our rakish hero in a slightly more sympathetic light. We realise he is an animal lover indeed, who has repented of his previous lust and life and can now enjoy an afterlife in heaven and not the hell contemplated in Through A Long & Sleepless Night, here we really feel the shift from loathsome letch to snarling old codger. Hannon never once glosses over the grubby and self-serving aspects of male desire and the album is all the better for it.
And so we leave on a note of positivity that people can change, that repentance brings deathbed redemption and that anyone can end up loved. Or, we could just listen to Neil Hannon and live our lives via the philosophy of track number nine.
“Then again you could try just to live your own life/In the way that you find most amusing.
I DON’T REALLY CAAAAAAAAAARE!!”
Catherine Walters
