Timewatching: The Divine Comedy Album-by-album thread

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by LivingForever, Nov 5, 2020.

  1. Hazey John II

    Hazey John II The lyrics are fine, there's no problem there

    I was assuming this would come in at 3ish - such an aberrant and abrasive song, a enormous leap from The Summerhouse or Bernice Bobs Her Hair, but a leap into a black hole. But then I listened on headphones and it blew my head off. It's the same braveness I like in Timewatching or that Wuthering Heights cover - where did he find the guts to do this? Is there anything with a more extreme vocal performance than this?

    Well, yes, of course there is more extreme music than this, but in terms of how far out there Neil puts himself in the context of a carefully composed, fully thought through bit of theatrical songwriting, I can't think of many precedents. I Spy by Pulp? Moribund the Burgermeister by Peter Gabriel? Maybe Condition of the Heart by Prince? What else?

    I think Kate Bush is a key influence here - Get Out Of My House, Breathing, Waking The Witch - all of them have this kind of controlled ugliness, this performative extremity. And I suspect she's an influence on the subject matter as well - particularly Running Up That Hill, where Bush laments how she and her lover will never fully understand each other because they cannot swap places, cannot 'feel how it feels'. The desire to connect with or inhabit other people is a core concern for Bush: The Man With The Child In His Eyes, Hammer Horror, Houdini, Reaching Out, Deeper Understanding, right up to Snowflake or Misty.

    What about Neil? (@LivingForever, sorry for another long quote! But I do think it's relevant to the discussion above - I agree with @Zardok we should treat a pipe as a pipe wherever possible, but there is definitely more going on here, by Neil's own admission...)

    Fiona Smith, professional psychologist: The thing that struck me about 'Casanova' is that it deals with earthy, physical relationships and then the other extreme, the untouchable ideal and that both are unfulfilled.
    Neil: I couldn't have said it better myself.

    F: There's also the theme of looking in at someone else's life and feeling jealous of their attention and confidence.
    N: Yes. Although it goes further than just being jealous of other people but being jealous of women. About being able to put on a frilly dress and romp through fields. Of being a complete fairy.

    F: So the headline to this will be 'Neil Hannon in Transvestite Shocker'?
    N: I don't know (long pause). It's something to do with removing all aggression, those male aspects that I find every day in myself. Being led by that thing that dangles inbetween your legs. Everywhere you look there's just brilliantly engineered images to make you... just gorgeous women everywhere and I really hate the way they're able to twist me. I'm annoyed by the fact that they get me every time.

    F: But you do have control. I wonder whether you actually believe what you've just said. Is it that by gratuitous shagging you're not really opening yourself up to people? It's very one dimensional.
    N: Yes, it is, isn't it?

    F: Maybe what you're jealous of is the capacity to open up to people. To drop the boundaries.
    N: Yes, but I thought I'd eradicated that from my personality.

    Psychosexual Evaluation, Select June 1996

    So this might well broadly support the Flan's notion that Casanova is an album about gender dysphoria (though I don't really like using that term to describe it), but I don't agree it's about transition as well. I still think it's not really that Neil wants to be a woman, but that he has huge problems with being a man. There's no insight into what it's like to be a woman anywhere on the album - even A Woman Of The World, ostensibly a sympathetic song about a woman, is about a fantasy movie image, not a real person, and most of it is about how Neil feels about her - still the man's point of view.

    But almost every song obsessively builds up and tears down various different male archetypes, and wrestles with the fact of male sexual desire, painfully aware of the facades that men construct which can prevent them from truly opening up. And the apeotheosis of this is "Then again, you can try just to live your own life in the way that you find most amusing, I DON'T REALLY CARE" - an explicit rejection of everybody else, with an obvious and painful confession that he does, in fact, care very much.

    Although the stray jokes that Through A Long And Sleepless Night was constructed from are visible ('But I've no horse', 'what a cool death' etc - all of which I love just as stray jokes), it's really quite well formed in its rising paranoia - I particularly like the sexual urges rising up not once ('whips would only make it worse') but twice ('In hospital... in case you're there') from the self-loathing in verse two. Similarly, the central joke of always being the bridegroom and never the bride, which I previously took as a bit of mordant contempt (putting a joke like that at such a fevered pitch), might well be the fulcrum of the album, on the reading above. (But although the song clearly distils Neil's agonising rage at always being the bridegroom, it still doesn't have any sense of what being the bride would be like - the only women here have thunder thighs, or hospital uniforms.)

    I still find the whole thing quite a painful listen, though, and a difficult one to accept as a conclusion, because we end up with not much more than the recognition of self-hatred. Still, it's a stunning song, and I didn't really realise how great it was until now. So thank you all once again for this thread! 5/5

    Stray notes:
    I know Neil has said Joby helped with tidying up his arrangements, but Joby only gets an arrangement credit on Theme From Casanova and The Dogs and The Horses. The rest of the album's arrangements - including this - appear to be all Neil, which is a spectacular achievement.

    The early version is definitely very early, at least in the writing, so it might well be that the demo is Timewatch EP era (Google Translated):
    The text of "Through a Long & Sleepless Night" is really weird. How was he born?
    N: It’s a melody that has been around for 4 or 5 years. I still have a lot of people running around in my head that I'm not sure what to do with. Apparently, this one was waiting for this album. That said, I couldn't find a line for it, when all the other tracks on the album had theirs. So, I reopened my notebook from last year and put together all the little bits and pieces I had never used.

    https://www.ashortsite.com/books/articles.php?keyword=mofo1996_05

    LONGEST NOTE LEAGUE TABLE (have we missed any of these yet?)
    1. Through A Long And Sleepless Night: 5:45 - 6:06, 21 seconds
     
  2. LivingForever

    LivingForever Forum Arachibutyrophobic Thread Starter

    Thanks for this, I had skim-read that psychology interview and missed the bit about putting on frilly dresses! I think your reading is correct, it’s about wanting to feel less aggressively masculine whilst wrestling with all the feelings that bring his masculinity very much to the fore. That’s a reading I can get on board with (unlike the Flan’s one.)

    So happy we were able to change your mind about this song - it honestly is a masterpiece to me, and I have no idea how someone goes about creating something like this (and I suspect he doesn’t really either...)

    There’s nothing quite like this on any TDC album from hereon in, and that makes me a little sad - I love a pretty tune as much as the next guy, but I do miss this kind of dark violent intensity in the music. (Even the apocalyptic Broadway musical of “Here Comes the Flood” is positively polite compared to this...)

    Longest note league table... hmm, Your Daddy’s Car? “Can you feeeeeeeeel?...”
     
  3. ericthegardener

    ericthegardener Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dallas, TX
    Neil has continued to write plenty of great tunes that I love up to the present day, but it has been too long since we've had one with that crazy intensity. Most people lose that as they get older, so it's totally to be expected, but I'm with you, I really miss it!

    I'd disagree though that there's nothing like that from hereon in, though. Pretty sure we'll see something like that on the next album. At least to my ears.
     
  4. GK

    GK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pittsburgh PA
    Great book...
     
  5. A Tea-Loving Dave

    A Tea-Loving Dave Forum Resident

    Location:
    Northumberland, UK
    Fallen somewhat behind, so for much of the following I shall try to be succinct so as to avoid spamming the thread up with long screeds of purple prose :p he says now, but we'll see where my replies to posts actually take me! Scores first, then random remarks in another post.

    I don't particularly *dislike* this one, but neither is it one of the tracks that I feel all that drawn to listen and re-listen to. If I was explicitly listening to Casanova, I'd listen to it and enjoy it, but I reckon if I had my Divine Comedy music collection on shuffle and this one came up I quite possibly would skip it. Neil's vocals are pretty strong here and the instrumentation is also spot on, however - so it says a lot that we are already getting into territory where a "meh" song nonetheless gets a higher score than much of what has come before - 3.5/5 methinks.

    This one is certainly a lesser song, both musically and in terms of vocal strength, than the preceding track - but it has one strong point the other lacks, to wit a lot more of the surreal strangeness which I like to pop up in my musical tastes from time to time. My first live concert ever was a secret invite-only gig in 2005 for the members of the long-since extinct official messageboard for the Scissor Sisters, an online community (and band!) which had an extremely formative effect on who I am today - most notably, it's where I met my girlfriend, who I have now been with for almost 14 years - and this track rather reminds me of some of the early demo tracks by said band. As such I have a bit of a soft spot for this one, and give it a strong 3.5/5

    This is another one which gets a boost above the score it would otherwise earn on sheer merit, due to pure sentimentality and personal bias :p I first heard this track during the Divine Comedy performance at the Essex site of V Festival in 2006, which I later discovered was part of the overall Victory tour. I attended the festival with a handful of friends I had made on the aforementioned Scissor Sisters forum, a few weeks before I started university and at a point in time when I had (to be honest) heard relatively little of the Divine Comedy back catalogue.... pretty much just Something For The Weekend, Songs of Love, National Express, Billy Bird and Absent Friends, plus perhaps an isolated track or two I didn't know were by the Divine Comedy. But there wasn't much else that interested me during that point in proceedings, and I liked the tracks I knew, so I decided to watch the performance. I heard some of the tracks I recognised, a good few that I didn't but which I would discover properly when I bought Victory soon afterwards, and a handful which I would not hear again until I started collecting the back catalogue of Divine Comedy in earnest over the coming months. But looking back, of all the tracks that I didn't immediately know at the time, this is actually the one I remember most clearly. So it brings back some happy memories, and marks the start of a journey which would ultimately lead me to writing these words at this very moment in time. Compared to that, it's somewhat hard to get bogged down into issues of mere "quality" or how it compares to other tracks when taken in isolation!

    It is what it is, which is a track which although definitely not one of the strongest ones on the album is one that means a lot to me. 4.5/5

    There is probably very little indeed I could say about this song which has not been said before, either within this thread or a million times elsewhere on the internet. It's one of the best songs in the entire DC back catalogue in terms of lyrics, music, vocal performance and the sheer emotion it evokes, although the connection with Father Ted - a programme I now have very mixed feelings about, between my love of the series itself, and my antipathy towards Graham Linehan for reasons it's best we not get into here but which will probably be obvious - does make me a little uncomfortable these days.

    But nonetheless, it will surprise no one to hear that I give this one a resounding 5/5.

    I don't have quite as much to say about this one - I like a fair amount of the music, Neil's voice is good, some of the lyrics are a bit ropey, but it's a really enjoyable one to hear live. 4/5 methinks.

    I quite like this one - it bops along rather nicely, the instrumentals and lyrics are both pretty good, and although it's not the best pastiche Neil has ever done it's fun to listen to. I think the track ends with a bit of a damp squib, however.

    4/5 for this one.


    This is a weird one. But then, I've already said that sometimes I like weird, with different kinds of weird hitting different spots in my psyche. I think this particular spot must be the one formed by my parents playing Foxtrot by Genesis to me when I was a small child, and the exposure I therefore had to the many different shifts in lyrical and musical style contained within "Supper's Ready" on that album. Let's call it the Willow Farm spot in my unconscious mind, shall we? :p

    Which is all to say, I like this one and will be giving it a nice solid 4/5
     
  6. A Tea-Loving Dave

    A Tea-Loving Dave Forum Resident

    Location:
    Northumberland, UK
    And now some random remarks.....

    It's increasingly occurring to me that this is probably the reason why the same applies to my DC listening tastes, even though I have never really consciously pondered the topic before!

    Very much akin to how I remember the V Festival performance, which I believe took place about a fortnight after this video was recorded.

    Have the scores peaked this early? :o :p

    Whilst, as noted above, I have only ever "known" the very, very different Neil when it comes to my own live experiences.... although I have seen and heard the earlier two flavours of Neil (shall we call him Suit Dick and Regen Dick perhaps?) many times through the dubious wonders of Youtube, plus the occasional gig bootleg.

    I reckon you might be correct - though whether it was this version, or something closer to the final version, I am definitely glad this track wasn't what ended up being used.... it would have just been *too* cheesy.

    It's a bit like the often-noted fact that one of the blessings bestowed upon anyone up to and including the older end of the Millennial scale is that (by and large) we got to have our youthful awkwardness and indiscretions happening in a rather less permanently-preserved fashion than those at the younger end of the Millennial scale and the subsequent "Generation Z" have :p I mean, looking back at my teenage self and how utterly clueless I was (in my case, much more due to extreme social awkwardness, undiagnosed Aspergers and lack of any social skills when I did try to interact with others, and not really due to any interest in romance per se) I have to count my blessings that much of the online footprint I left at the time has been washed away by the tides of time, or else buried under the massive sediment left by those younger than myself subsequently!

    I reckon that might well be a spot-on summary of what Neil was trying to "say" with this album, even if he might not have consciously known it or had the mental vocabulary *to* consciously know it. It's certainly something I sometimes feel about myself - as I noted above I am on the autistic spectrum and so (even before I had an official diagnosis) I was never quite certain whether it was normal to sometimes not feel all that invested in being masculine, or even actively dislike my own masculinity, or whether this was something which came with the autism :p in more recent years, with research into how autism can overlap with gender fluidity and an increased disinterest in fitting stereotypical "roles" becoming more mainstream knowledge, and therefore giving me access to mental vocabulary I didn't already possess, I have come to the conclusion that it is a bit of both! These days I am comfortable to, basically, be someone that doesn't feel like he fits into the stereotypical "masculine" mould but doesn't care that he doesn't fit into the mould either, and is happy to be his own unique version of whatever "masculine" means.
     
  7. LivingForever

    LivingForever Forum Arachibutyrophobic Thread Starter

    Great posts, @A Tea-Loving Dave !

    Please feel free to carry on catching-up as and when you can :)
     
  8. Vagabone

    Vagabone Forum Resident

    Location:
    UK
    I had not known before that "Long and Sleepless Night" was made up of leftover notebook detritus, but it makes perfect sense now I do know it. I bet many more songs are constructed this way than the average listener guesses. It backs up my own position that one shouldn't try too hard to wrestle the lyrics into a coherent narrative if the lyrics seem to fight against it. Also that they don't necessarily mean too much. I can imagine him thinking of the phrase "never the bridegroom, always the bride", and thinking, "That's good! Write that down". I found it funny at the time, though I can't remember why now. It has that air of transgression, that touch of "Running Up That Hill", as Hazey John II notes. In short, I think it's a joke, but jokes often reveal more about us than we intend.
     
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  9. LivingForever

    LivingForever Forum Arachibutyrophobic Thread Starter

    We’ll have a later start today as I’m currently accompanying my wife to an antenatal appointment and she’s already glaring at me for typing on my phone... :D
     
  10. The Booklover

    The Booklover Forum Resident

    Location:
    Germany
    That's one way to look at it because I generally don't agree with the assumption that there is a single right answer. Since Roland Barthes' The Death Of The Author, the prevailing method of finding the one and only true meaning of a text through decoding the author's intention has been questioned in literary criticism. Although the autobiographical reading is still very common, there's been an understanding that once a text is published it's in the hands of the readers to construct its meaning, potentially allowing for several meanings instead of a single undisputable one (the supposed author's intention). Of course, that doesn't mean that everything goes, a reasonable interpretation needs to be supported by what can be found in the text itself. As The Flan wrote:
    So while Neil's statements in interviews may support one reading of the lyrics, it doesn't preclude other readings such as the Flan's.

    Yes, unlike Neil Tennant or Brett Anderson, whenever Hannon goes into falsetto mode, it's unfortunate that it always sounds insincere in varying degrees (like he's taking the piss out of the character that's singing). That said, in the studio version of this song it's a minor case. The band version, however, it totally ruined for me by the falsetto parts.
     
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  11. The Booklover

    The Booklover Forum Resident

    Location:
    Germany
    Yes, that makes sense. I'm also reminded of Pulp's "I Spy" because of the menace in Neil's vocal delivery although the anger is not directed at others but at himself.
     
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  12. LivingForever

    LivingForever Forum Arachibutyrophobic Thread Starter

    Do you have a score for "Long and Sleepless" that you want me to include? I don't think you've posted one yet! :)
     
  13. LivingForever

    LivingForever Forum Arachibutyrophobic Thread Starter

    "Through a Long and Sleepless Night" once again split opinion (at least you can't say it's just a bland filler song!) and scored 64.35 from 15 votes, for a preliminary score of:

    4.29
     
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  14. The Turning Year

    The Turning Year Lowering average scores since 2021

    Location:
    London, UK
    Hello fellow Divine Comedy followers!
    I stumbled across this thread last night and so have joined for the purposes of following and contributing.
    I'm late to the party but hope I'm fashionably late and that no one minds.

    I won't bore anyone with my thoughts on previously discussed songs or albums, other than to say that Promenade is the only album I have listened to regularly over the years. (I tend to revisit the other albums every few years when I suddenly remember they exist!)

    With that I mind, Tonight We Fly us my absolute standout TDC song which I think rises above all the others (haha... cringe) by Neil and also by the majority of other artists. Actually, I can't think of a song I like more by anyone, or which more perfectly combines music, lyrics and arrangement to really create something transcendent.

    My opinion of most other TDC songs has fluctuated wildly over the years but this one does it for me every single listen.

    The last line gets me too, for not being didactic but rather acknowledging the possibility or not of heaven and the mystery at the heart of life. (I am in turns atheist, agnostic, humanist but am married to a liberal Catholic, which has given me a more open perspective to religion than I had before!).

    I'd have to score Tonight We, Fly one 5/5, and as nothing else quite touches the hem of its dress for me, I think my scores will have to be either fractional (0.25 increments) or just lower than everyone else's!

    Now, having already broken my promise and bored people, I'll move on to the discussion of the current/yesterday's song - in another post...!

    I haven't read all the comments and discussion and frankly too busy with work and childcare to properly catch up, but look forward to keeping up from now on!

    Best wishes,
    The Turning Year
     
  15. LivingForever

    LivingForever Forum Arachibutyrophobic Thread Starter

    Today's song is:

    Theme From "Casanova"

    The "end credits" of this widescreen epic of an album, and its only instrumental (if you can call it that, with its opening voiceover.)

    The voiceover, narrated by Joby Talbot, is a perfect parody of the end credits of a BBC Radio 4 drama programme - and as someone who grew up in a household where Radio 4 was on constantly, I can't even begin tell you how accurate it sounded to me in 1996, and how hilarious I still find it to this day.

    1996 Press Release Neil said: "From the ridiculous to the sublime. This is probably the purest expression of Divine Comedy schizophrenia to date, and I didn't have to say a word on it."

    2020 Twitter Party Neil says:
    Here's the song, then:

     
  16. LivingForever

    LivingForever Forum Arachibutyrophobic Thread Starter

    As befits a track that has, to the best of our knowledge, never been played live, there are very few alternate versions, however there is a demo on the new boxset:

     
  17. LivingForever

    LivingForever Forum Arachibutyrophobic Thread Starter

    I'm also going to put this here - whilst it's not claimed that this instrumental doodle from the new "Casanova" bonus disc has anything to do with "Theme from Casanova", there's something about its bouncy feel that reminds me of the last minute or so of "Theme".

    Here's "Electro Wurly Groove"

     
  18. The Turning Year

    The Turning Year Lowering average scores since 2021

    Location:
    London, UK
    Through a Long and Sleepless Night: 4.5

    I love Neil's more unusual experimental work, so I absolutely adore the unadulterated craziness of this one. Such drama and build up, plus a side to Neil that, as others have said, doesn't come out very often on records.

    As a woman its harder for me to comment on the male psychology aspect of the song or album, but what you say here is how I've read it for a long time.

    Agreed. Perhaps the ending of one particular song on ASAAL comes close to this raw, unhinged feeling...? Can't think of anything else though (Grinchworm aside - I love that!).

    Love this league table!
    Can you feeeeeeeeeel is definitely up there, but we all know the winner - although it should probably be disqualified for being unapologetically deliberate?!)
    Is there a long note in The Summerhouse too?


    I understand this, but I've actually always really liked Neil's falsetto, although I agree that it often sounds insincere or is actually just a blatant pisstake.

    I like it on this song - it adds to the unhinged feeling! I do particularly enjoy the contrast in the final chorus which is not sung in falsetto.

    I like that, where its not an obvious or seeming pisstake (Charge/Frog Princess outro) he generally uses it sparingly and to great effect on some songs (e.g. Sunrise, Note to Self [I think - 'there is nothing, as frightening, as being, alone...']).

    I do think that, on Casanova, Neil's vocal performance is so highly stylised that it could all be read as insincere at a first listen!

    (I wasn't going to write this, but what the hell - logic aside, Neil's falsetto does something funny to my insides, completely against my will, much as I cringe to think of that...!)
     
  19. The Turning Year

    The Turning Year Lowering average scores since 2021

    Location:
    London, UK
    While I'm here...!
    I'm not sure I rate Theme... very highly in musical terms as its a bit pedestrian to me, but its very gentle, and sits beautifully in its place after Through a Long and Sleepless Night and the rest of the album like a nice cup of chamomile tea after drinking too much coffee. (Similar effect to Songs of Love throwing a bucket of lukewarm water over the overly arduous 15 year old than us Charge...!).
    It takes brings us back to reality with Joby's Radio 3 style narration, and is a lovely link to the sweet, un-Casanova like final track on the album.

    Score:
    As a standalone track I would score it 2.25, but in its place on the album (and I'm firmly an album person), I give it 3.00.

    Good day to all, I look forward to returning later to see other people's views!

    The Turning Year
     
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  20. The Booklover

    The Booklover Forum Resident

    Location:
    Germany
    I hadn't forgotten but had to have a couple more listens. I'm settling for 4/5.

    Yes, it puts earlier songs into a different context, which is why Neil complained about people jumping to conclusions based on one line of a song. The problem, though, is that most people respond to a song on its own - especially when it concerns a single played on the radio without any album context. Without a single release and media exposure, Promenade could be considered in its entirety far more easily.

    The quiet part starting with "Bored of normality?" actually sounds a bit like early Genesis (apart from the breathing/groaning) and lots of intros to Iron Maiden epics (Steve Harris having been heavily influenced by Foxtrot as well).
     
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  21. Linky53

    Linky53 Forum Resident

    Location:
    North Yorkshire UK
    Theme from Casanova

    The perfect antidote to the intensity of Sleepless Night. First time I listened to this i got one of those 'what the heck...' momments with the mocking Radio 4 intro, but I think its a masterstroke in shifting the mood. Perfect to lead into the gentle strumming laid back beat overlaid by the beautiful horn arrangement. After a couple of minutes we get the lifting high string and the song kicks into another gear with the full arrangement. A long gentle descending outro and then the barking dogs and horses set us up again for the next song. A beautiful melody and arrangement and whilst it may be a bit Roger Whittaker I love it.

    4.7/5
     
  22. Vagabone

    Vagabone Forum Resident

    Location:
    UK
    I thought the intro was imitating Radio 3 rather than Radio 4: speaking of the album as if it were a classical concert, which would be more likely to "under-run" and need a schedule-filling extra piece than a spoken drama.

    Anyway, a very beautiful piece. 4/5
     
  23. LivingForever

    LivingForever Forum Arachibutyrophobic Thread Starter

    That’s very interesting - I’d always thought of it as the credits to a drama piece, but now you come to mention it that actually does make more sense...

    Edit: “Performed by the composer...” - you’re absolutely right.
     
    Last edited: Jan 12, 2021
  24. vzok

    vzok Forum Resident

    Location:
    UK
    Theme 4
     
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  25. Radiophonic_

    Radiophonic_ Electrosonic

    Location:
    Royal Oak MI
    “Theme from Casanova”: I quite like the palate-cleansing nature of the track, and it’s certainly another ear worm for me; I was whistling or humming it at various points the last couple days. Lovely stuff. 4.25/5
     
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