Yes, Neil Hannon’s life is changing. He has just broken up The Divine Comedy as a full band, with plans to go solo again and officially retain the name only. Plus, he has a new two month-old baby to contend with.

“ I’m in a pleasant state of complete ignorance about the future at the moment. Which is a nice way to be, because usually it’s planned out about three years ahead of you. I don’t know when I’m going to the studio. I don’t know what it’ll sound like, or who I’ll use. Hooray! It’s going to be a great interview isn’t it, I’ll be able to tell you a lot,” Hannon jokes to me over a tuna sandwich at L.A.’s famous Canter’s Deli.

Hannon now has something in common with Spritualized’s Jason Pierce, as Hannon clarifies, “he’s done the same as me, kind of jettisoned his band.” In order to understand how Hannon has gotten here, to this state of uncertainty, we must first delve into the secret history of his brilliant band (or alias): The Divine Comedy.

If you’re reading this article in the United States, then there’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of The Divine Comedy, nor of Hannon, the band’s mastermind and only true member. If you have, then you hopefully already know what a lyrical genius Hannon is. If you haven’t been exposed to Hannon, then be warned, you are about to discover one of the greatest songwriters of our generation. Over the past ten years, Hannon has slowly been developing a devoted following in the British Isles, garnering top twenty singles and gold albums. The Divine Comedy originally formed with a completely different line up than the one Hannon has just laid off, in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in 1989 and was an R.E.M.-influenced guitar trio. They released a few EPs and toured with My Bloody Valentine and Suede, before breaking up in 1992. Hannon continued to record under the name Divine Comedy, releasing his debut album, Liberation, in 1993. Gone was the indie rocking guitar sound; instead Hannon now embraced more eclectic heroes like ‘60s icon Scott walker and film composer Michael Nyman (The Piano). Like Walker, Hannon presented himself as a wry, well read (hence the song Booklovers, in which he basically lists his favorite authors), intelligent troubadour backed by a small orchestra.

I ask Hannon if he’d ever be interested in working with Walker, in having him produce one of his albums, as Walker has recently produced the latest Pulp album. A look of fear crosses Hannon’s face, before replying, “I don’t know how Pulp managed to do it. I thought, how can you work with your absolute hero? I’d be too shy to say boo to him, you know. And anyway, I’m sure he thinks I’m just a bit of a rip-off,” Hannon laughs. This is but the first taste of how surprisingly humble Hannon actually is.

The Divine Comedy’s first two albums received generous praise, but it wasn’t until the third album, 1996’s Casanova, that Hannon began to attract a mainstream following. Benefiting from the success of intelligent bands like Pulp and Blur, who made British indie rock cool and acceptable again, Casanova’s first single, the highly amusing pop ditty “Something For the Weekend,” received extensive airplay and entered the UK singles charts at number 14. It was at this point that I first discovered the wonder of The Divine Comedy.

Two more top thirty hits followed: “Becoming More Like Alfie” (in which Hannon fears becoming a playboy in the vein of Michael Caine’s famous 1960s character) and the even more humorous “The Frog Princess.” “Songs of Love” became the theme song to the popular (and funny) British sitcom Father Ted, and The Divine Comedy had officially made a name for themselves in the UK.

Casanova was also The Divine Comedy’s most fully realized and ambitious album to date, in that it was more musically adventurous and varied than Hannon’s first two efforts. Around this time Hannon was also in the process of putting together a band that, by 1998, would eventually be a permanent seven-man line up. To finish up the groundbreaking year of 1996 for the band, The Divine Comedy played a show-stopping concert with a full orchestra at London’s Sheapard’s Bush Empire. At the same time, they used the orchestra to record their next release, A Short Album About Love, which was exactly that.

A Short Album About Love contains one of Hannon’s finest songs, “If….,” which must rank as one of the most beautifully twisted love songs ever written. Conceived in a list-type structure, Hannon begins by singing lovely things like: “ If you were attacked, I would kill for you If your name was Jack, I'd change mine to Jill for you” Slowly, however, the narrator’s obsessive personality comes out: “ If you were a horse I'd clean the crap out of your stable And never once complain” Still, the listener thinks that Hannon is just devoted to the one he loves, until the whole song crescendos with the disturbing lines: “ If you were a dog I'd feed you scraps from off the table Though my wife complains If you were my dog I am sure you'd like it better then You'd be my loyal four-legged friend You'd never have to think again And we could be together 'til the end”

I jokingly ask Hannon if his new wife, a wife he had yet to meet when he wrote “If….,” was a horse, would he clean the crap out of her stable? Hannon laughs before replying, “well of course I would. In many ways, that’s what pregnancy is like (laughs). I won’t go into it now. So I think I’ve already fulfilled that. It’s like, you know, I love my dog and when she throws up I clean it up. I’d expect her to do the same for me, except that she’d probably just eat it.”

The Divine Comedy followed up A Short Album About Love with Fin de Siecle. Released in 1998, Fin de Siecle then became Hannon’s most ambitious work. On the epic album he intelligently tackles everything from the death of Princess Diana on “Generation Sex” (“Lovers watch their backs/As hacks in macs take snaps/Through telephoto lenses/Chase Mercedes Benzes through the night/A mourning nation weeps and wails/But keeps the sales of evil tabloids healthy/The poor protect the wealthy in this world”), to the non-existence of the afterlife on “Life On Earth” (“Build your coffin of balsa wood/Spend all that you earn/When you go you are gone for good/Never to return”), to the Northern Ireland peace process on the album’s hopeful closing track, “Sunrise.”

“ Who cares where national borders lie/Who cares whose laws you're governed by/ Who cares what name you call a town/ Who'll care when you're six feet beneath the ground,“ Hannon pleads on “Sunrise,” before concluding that there is now a sunrise over the night of thirty years of war, there’s now hope for peace in Northern Ireland. Hannon admits that maybe he jumped the gun when I ask him if he’s still quite so optimistic about the Northern Ireland peace process.

“ I knew that was too early to write that song,” Hannon admits. “I did qualify my optimism in the song, when in saying ‘from the corner of my eye I can see it,’ and in asking the question, ‘can you see the sunrise as well?’ So it’s up to everybody to see it, or it won’t happen. And um, see I could never be Bono, because I get all embarrassed talking about images like that, but he’d just go off on it.” Still Hannon continues, saying that he thinks the peace process is unstoppable as long as they work out a way to dramatically lower the unemployment rate. “It goes for most types of violence, the cause is boredom,” he points out.

Hannon could be accused as being pretentious, but simple fact is that he tackles issues largely ignored by mainstream songwriters, or even most good independent bands. When most bands do try to tackle real issues, it just comes off as heavy-handed. Who else has so eloquently pointed out the hypocrisy surrounding the death of Princess Diana and the public’s reaction to it, in song? Instead we were stuck with Elton John trudging out “Candle In the Wind” again, a song he’d originally written as a tribute to Marilyn Monroe, not Diana.

This not to discount the light hearted side of Neil Hannon. Hannon is also a great pop songwriter, with tracks like “Pop Singer’s Fear of the Pollen Count” and “National Express” (in which he humorously describes exactly what it’s like to ride on Britain’s national coach service).

A best-of entitled A Secret History of The Divine Comedy followed Fin De Siecle in 1999, and featured The Divine Comedy’s strangest departure to date, their techno cover of Noel Coward’s “I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party.” Originally released on a Noel Coward AIDS charity tribute album, the reasoning was that a party in the 1990’s would sound a lot more like The Chemical Brothers than the classy music that probably accompanied a Noel Coward soirée in the 1930s. “Certainly in those days I was interested in doing anything people would not expect,” Hannon explains, “It was probably the zenith of that. Funnily enough, that’s my parents favorite song of ours. It just makes them laugh. I wonder why?”

Still, some fans were less than amused by The Divine Comedy’s five-minute change of direction. “It’s hilarious. They played it on the Breakfast Show, exclusive on Radio 1, you know, ‘this is the new single from The Divine Comedy.’ And they got people to phone in with what they thought of it. And there were people saying, ‘I can’t believe it, they’ve just ripped off Born Slippy by Underworld!’ Duh, yeah that’s exactly what we did. A lot of people aren’t able to make that leap. I mean, we use a lot of musical references and I think a lot of people don’t see that you can actually do lots of different types of music and use the fact that you can use different types of genres to color your songs. I just tend to confuse people, which is probably why Regeneration doesn’t do that to a large extent, because I was fed up with confusing people. Oh, I don’t know, I might start confusing them again.”

Regeneration is the band’s major label debut, after leaving indie Sentana for Parlophone. As the title might suggest, it wasn’t just the label that changed, so did The Divine Comedy’s sound and make up. Previously only Hannon appeared on the band’s album covers and in publicity shots, but now the whole seven-piece band was being photographed. Also, Radiohead and Travis producer Nigel Godrich was enlisted to shake up the band’s sound. Gone, for example, are the epic strings that have dominated much of The Divine Comedy’s previous work; Regeneration is a much more stripped down affair. Although, this wasn’t as much down to Godrich as you might think it was.

“ He was not opposed to strings. In fact, I was the one who said I don’t want any strings on this album. And he, with the help of some of the guys, eventually persuaded me that it was okay to have them on a few things. No, Nigel was all about trying to steer clear of corniness, kitsch. You would have thought, ‘What’s left after when you take that away from us?” Hannon jokes. Hannon thinks that his next album might be somewhere between the classic Divine Comedy sound and that of Regeneration. The sound of Regeneration may have left some long term fans wanting more, but there’s no denying that Hannon still has a lot to say with his lyrics; he’s just not dressing them up in fancy costumes anymore. The album opens with “Timestretched,” in which Hannon bemoans how time so easily gets away with us. “There’s not enough days in the week and weeks go by quicker than drunks knock back liquor,” he sings. Later, he once again tackles religion on “Eye of the Needle,” drawing on a youth spent being dragged to church and noticing that most of the congregation weren’t exactly practicing what they were being preached, and what they were preaching to others (“The cars in the churchyard were shiny and German, distinctly at odds with the theme of the sermon”).

It’s clear from Hannon’s lyrics that he doesn’t believe in God or the afterlife. “I can’t spend my whole life working towards that, and then it doesn’t happen. I’ll be really pissed off,” he says. And yet, I’m still curious if the birth of his young daughter, Willow, has altered such views in any way.

“ You see, you can realize the beauty of life without needing a god to make it all logical. I find it much more magical and wonderful the fact that life has just kind of happened and developed in the way that it has. And, you know, that we are sitting here talking about music. The very fact that humans created music is astonishing. If you have a god, then that automatically sort of means that it’s all up to him, that it has nothing to do with us. Well frankly, we work bloody hard to do all this stuff,” Hannon exclaims, before adding in a quieter tone, “but, obviously, my dad has a different idea.”

The first thing you notice about Neil Hannon when meeting him these days is how long his hair has gotten. Previously, Hannon presented himself as a clean-cut fellow, one who always wore a suit in photos and at concerts. Today he is decked out in jeans and a t-shirt for some band that reads, ‘Twisted Punk Metal Bastard Rockers,’ and has near shoulder length hair. How unrefined.

Hannon admits he’s been too busy with his new baby to get his hair cut. “I don’t know if it will suddenly hit that wonderful sweet spot and it will look just great, but the longer it gets, the worse it gets. I’m waiting until it will just be Jon Bon Jovi or something like that,” he laughs. Ironically, we’ve arranged a photo shoot with him at a barber shop next door to Largo, where Hannon and two now-former members of his band will be performing that night. The barbershop is run by a quirky pair. Martha is a delightful old lady who has no qualms telling local bald Jewish men on the street that they need to come into the store and get their hair cut now, right now. Her partner is a slightly flamboyant fifty-something gay man, who expounds to us the pleasures of seeing a community theater production of Grease. Whenever a customer comes into the store, they fight over him like vultures with clippers. Hannon remains quiet but kind when the old lady tries to get him to let her cut his hair. Neither one has heard of The Divine Comedy.

The other thing you soon notice about Neil Hannon is how humble he is. Even though he’s a brilliant songwriter, acknowledged by many, although not quite enough, as one of the best songwriters around, he doesn’t seem quite so sure of his talent. “I don’t know. I’m probably not very good at displaying actual emotions in songs. I have to have some way of covering it all up, and making it somehow clever,” he confesses. Which is a not-so-nice way of saying that Hannon has the ability to turn a banal love song into something much more special, simply because of his eloquent gift of gab.

When I ask him which album he’s most proud of, there’s a long pause before he says, “I really wanted to choose one there, I tried really hard, but at the end of the day I just don’t feel like I’ve done the one that I would choose. Sorry.”

There’s a song on Regeneration called “Love What You Do,” in which Hannon expounds that in order to enjoy life you have to enjoy your career. I ask Hannon what he’d want to do if he couldn’t be a musician, to which I get another humble response. “Well, I’d want to be an artist, but I’d fail obviously, because I’m not good enough. After that I’d be a novelist, but I’d really fail at that, because I’m shit at that. All of those things are cool, but what I really would end up doing is probably working in a craft shop in Ilkskillen in Northern Ireland,” Hannon laughs, “being the local loser. I’m so glad I can do what I do, you know.”

And Hannon plans to continue to do what he does. The future isn’t exactly certain. He has plans to open as a solo acoustic act for Ben Folds’ spring solo US tour. After that he’ll need to spend some catch-up time getting to know his new daughter before heading back into the studio. Hannon thinks he has his work cut out for him, as he doesn’t want The Divine Comedy to be forgotten as a footnote in musical history -- or at least he wants some of his songs to stand the test of time.

“ Basically, I would like to write maybe two or three songs that remain in the public consciousness. Whether they remember who did them or not, I don’t care. But just like, you know, a couple of tunes that people sing at parties.” Do you feel like you’ve done any of those songs yet? “ Almost, not quite.” Like “Something For the Weekend?” “ No, you see, I don’t think that would. It needs to be a bit more universal, a bit more playable on the acoustic guitar. I think ‘Songs of Love’ came close. We should’ve maybe released that as a single, I don’t know. That would be nice, something like ‘Moon River’ is what I’m talking about. Oh well, back to the drawing board.”

Q & A Side Bar

Below are more quotes from our 2002 interview with Neil Hannon:

Mark Redfern (M): I heard you’re a huge fan of R.E.M.?

Neil Hannon (N): I certainly used to be. I’m a huge fan of a lot of their stuff. I heard a phrase recently, ‘jumping the shark.’ It’s popular on the East Coast, I don’t know, it’s something to do with Fonzi jumping a shark with a motorcycle or something.

M: Yeah, there’s a website called jumptheshark.com, which pinpoints the exact moment various TV series’ went down hill. The idea is that Happy Days went downhill after the episode where Fonzie had to jump a shark with a motorcycle.

N: I’m sure you could do that with bands too. It would be very presumptuous of me to say when that was with R.E.M., but I think it happened, somewhere along the line. It’s not that they’ll never make another good record, it’s just that once a band’s made a bad record, it’s hard to ever look at them in the same light. Like Paul McCartney, can you ever see him in the same light, after all the amount of crap he’s put out? It’s like Elton John, everybody’s been going, ‘Ah, well, his new album’s really quite good.’ But you can’t bring yourself to even listen to it, because why should we? He’s done too much.

M: Do you worry about that happening to you?

N: Well, I suppose, yeah. I don’t think enough people are interested for that to happen to me.

M: I mean, not in this country, but in England you have quite a following.

N: I’m no superstar, though.

M: Do you wish you were a bigger superstar?

N: I used to be a lot more anxious about it, but I’m becoming very happy just to play my songs to whomever will listen and, you know, leave it at that. I can’t be arsed to do the hard sell anymore. I’m not going to go out there with a sandwich board reading, ‘Buy my record.

M: But you’re touring with Ben Folds and the like?

N: Yeah, I mean, considering I’ve got a two month-old baby at home and I’m doing a seven-week tour of the States, I think I’m willing.

M: Even though you think they’ve ‘jumped the shark,’ what was it like opening for R.E.M. a few years back in Dublin?

N: It was an awesome experience. I don’t mean to underplay the fact that I think they are one of the greatest bands that ever existed. It was especially weird for me, because I’d seen them in Dublin in 1989, Green tour. And it was like about two days before a bunch of my A-levels, which are the final sort of leaving school exams. I went to see them and I thought, ‘What on earth could be better than this,’ and I just flunked all my A-levels because I didn’t care anymore. I was thinking, ‘One day I’ll be up there.’ And ten years later I was on this Dublin stage supporting them. It was kind of weird.

M: Do you feel like you write better depressed?

N: No, I’m not really in any state when I write, but I don’t think I could write when I was depressed, ‘cause when I’m depressed I just play Civilization or something. Civilization is just a ridiculously addictive game and it plays on all my worst control freak tendencies. No, I do write best when I’m in a good mood, I think. Or I certainly write most when I’m in a good mood. When I’m depressed the last thing I want to do is make music. I don’t even want to listen to it.

M: Have you written any lullabies for your new daughter Willow?

N: No. I wish I had done, it might put her to sleep. I find myself singing to her to try and get her to sleep, but your mind goes blank. What am I going to sing? Then you get into a tract -- one night I did every single Motown song I could remember. By the end of the night you’re going, ‘Reach out, reach out, shhhhhh,’ you know.

M: Do you have any guilty pleasure bands, bands you like even though you know better?

N: I have loads, it’s one of my worst habits. The guys always sort of take a piss at me because one of my favorite bands, sorry acts, was Whigfield. Do you remember ‘Saturday Night?’ It was a huge techno hit in the early ‘90s. ‘Saturday night dance, I like the way you move, pretty baby.’ And I loved Aqua as well. It’s like, the sillier, the more Euro and the more plastic the better. ‘There’s just something so potent about cheap music,’ a great man once said. There’s probably worse things than that.

M: They’re pretty bad. My guilty pleasure has to be Hall & Oates.

N: Right, yeah. I find myself liking a lot of really sickly seventies music. And I’m sure it’s cool now, but I love the odd Steely Dan track.

M: Groan. I don’t go for Steely Dan, but Hall & Oates, I can go for that, yes can do.

N: (Laughs) Leave me alone, I’m a family man.

M: Any current musical artists that are really doing it for you right now?

N: The Hives, yeah they’re cool. We went to see them at the Astoria and they were very rocking. They were funny. They’re kind of a bit like Aqua in many ways -- one trick ponies -- but they do it particularly well. I do like The Strokes as well; I don’t know if it’s allowed to say that anymore. Oh, I don’t know. I spend most of my time listening to John Cage and Steve Reich. How pretentious is that?!

M: Do you believe in your own lyrics? For example, does “Note To Self” sum up your world view?

N: It does, because each verse basically contradicts itself. You know like, ‘The writer writes for himself, not for you, but a song is not a song until it’s listened to.’ It’s kind of directly contradicting, which does sum me up, because I generally listen to one person expounding on a theory, I go, ‘Oh yes, that’s absolutely right.’ And then if somebody else says the opposite, I’ll probably agree with them as well. I can’t make up my mind. Although, I suppose the verse in the middle, ‘Beauty is not the same thing as youth,’ I believe that. (laughs)

M: If you could be one literary character, who would you be and why?

N: I always liked… I can’t even remember the name of the character now, which rather defeats the object, but the main character in Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh. (Note: the main character’s name is Paul Pennyfeather.) I think that book is the model for so many other stories. Like, there’s a film called Oh Lucky Man, which is similar in a way that this guy just kind of falls from one bizarre situation into another by complete accident and coincidence and all this. I love stories where the author has absolutely no concern for reality, you know. Because in many ways reality is much more like those books, in that strange things do happen. Coincidences do occur, which would seem beyond the realms of fiction. But I think we get more sort of truth out of uh, if you need something to happen in a plot, just do it, you know. To hell with, ‘Well that’s outrageous. You can’t do that.’ So I like that.

M: Do you have any strange hobbies?

N: Probably. What do I do? What do I do at home? I don’t have this hobby yet, but I have a strange compunction to buy those little houses. You know the little replica houses? When you go to a town in France you can get a little street house, with a little windmill in it from Holland. I’d just like to have a house big enough so that I could have a whole room, a city of these tiny little houses. That’s a bit weird. (laughs) I wonder if they’re all to the same scale. That would drive me nuts, you see, if they weren’t, it has to be all the same. I’m sure you can tell a lot about my mind by all this. That I like the world miniaturized to make it all within my grasp. And my sense of neatness, that it all has to be to the same scale. Sorry, I’m doing your job for you.