Ooh - I think they may have done a handful of solo dates at the same time - I have an mp3 recording of them covering Bowie's Absolute Beginners which was apparently recorded at the Rotown Cafe, Rotterdam on 25th June 97. It's an audience recording, so the quality isn't great, but I can ping it over to @LivingForever later on for his growing YouTube obscurities list...
Yes, that seems strange. But as you say, this time Neil's performance is less creepy and more in line with the original song, which is also emphasised by his introductory words, "This is the band that I would have wanted to be in when I was 18."
Thanks for that. There were no setlists for the German support dates on setlist.fm. Maybe it's time I finally registered with ahortsite. Although the shows were in support of ASAAL, the previous three albums are covered as well. Also, apart from "The Frog Princess", I still enjoy all the songs played. Yes, that fits as they played support for Radiohead in Utrecht just the day before.
A last word on “Marvellous Party”, Neil says in the “Fin” liner notes that the programming was done by a guy called Steve Hilton, whom he describes as a “clever young boffin” before going on to say he now works on Hollywood soundtracks... Perhaps it’s at Steve’s door we should lay any complaints about the dancey bits, though surely Neil told him what he wanted.
“I’ve Been to a Marvellous Party” turned out to be musical marmite, scoring 41 points from 12 votes, for a preliminary score of: 3.42 “Fin” opening post coming at some point today... if it turns out to be this evening then we’ll not launch into the first track until tomorrow
Agree. Awkward but not creepy this time! (And a beer break is better than a fag break!) It does make you wonder why do it again though..?!
It's been really interesting to read everyone's diverse opinions and thoughts on I've Been to a Marvellous Party! Knowing absolutely nothing about rave music I had never even thought about whether that aspect of it was any good, so that pov was particularly interesting from @Hazey John II and @BRBD. And now that I've read the odd/bizarre/downright nasty lyrics, I'm less excited about hearing Grizzly Knife Attack again, although I will give it a few more listens. Perhaps its for the best that it remains a badly-recorded obscurity unless the words are drastically reworked...!
I like how we are all so surprised/shocked that the lyrics to a song called “Grizzly Knife Attack” aren’t very nice
Haha, a very good observation! I was surprised there were lyrics full stop, and also thought perhaps it was a metaphorical grizzly / grisly knife attack... Who knows! I've realised through taking part in this discussion that I don't very much like what I'll now forever think of as Neil's 'dark weirdo' period, and am glad to be moving on to the broader scope of 'Fin'. (Although I'm pretty sure that had I discovered TDC at this point I would have had a poster of Neil on my wall, embarrassing as that is to admit . I've grown up a bit since then, thankfully!). I also have a (boring!) story coming up of how I got into TDC, but that's for next week I think
Okay, I’m going to do my ‘how I got into The Divine Comedy’ post because now is probably the best time, especially if we’re on general introductions today before starting the songs tomorrow. It’s not actually that interesting a story, so feel free to skip over it – I’ll never know. My introduction to the band came in 1998 soon after Fin de Siecle was released. My musical journey in life up until that point is as follows… As a child, I was always interested in music, and I was an avid listener to radio 1 up until the age of about 10. I also spent suprising amounts of time as a child rummaging through shop bargain bins for cheap 7” vinyl. I didn’t buy anything good (and none of my purchases from this time of my life are still in my possession now), but I learned some habits that definitely came back to me as a teenager. When I was about ten, I kind of tuned out of the pop scene. I’m not sure what caused this in retrospect, but I turned my attention instead to the music my parents owned. A lot of this was of no interest to me, but it did spark a love of David Bowie (now much stronger than it was then), a love of Queen (then much stronger than it is now) and a love of the The Beach Boys (which still exists in some form). During my early teenage years, I learned the drums, then the guitar, and I spent a lot of time playing in various churches as my family moved around. Because of this, my musical interests became largely directed towards the rather niche contemporary Christian / worship genres (which, to be fair, were undergoing a bit of a renaissance at this time). I wasn’t deliberately cutting myself off from other music, but my interests kept me fully engaged until about 1996. At that point, I was recruited by a band at school. I don’t think I was really cool enough to be in a band, but drummers were in short supply, and it turned out I could play the drum part of Green Day’s ‘Basket Case’, and that was enough. The band was terrible, it really was, but it did force me into exposure some of the indie rock of the time, and I developed a brief intense love of the first two Oasis albums especially (losing interest just before Be Here Now was released, so I was arguably ahead of the curve there for the first time ever). In 1997, somehow, I was given cassette tapes of two albums which changed everything – Urban Hymns and OK Computer. I played both of them to death during that winter, and it was these two albums that made me realise there was a whole world of music out there that I just had to find. I started turning back to radio, specifically the Mark & Lard afternoon show and the Evening Session on Radio 1, and to XFM which – it turned out – I could just about pick up on my bedroom stereo if the arial was in just the right place. Exactly how The Divine Comedy were thrown into the mix, I’m not sure. I definitely remember someone giving me a cassette copy of Fin De Siecle (possibly backed with A Short Album), so it was obviously after the album had been released. Why this happened, though, I’m not sure – the girl who gave it to me wasn’t a particularly close friend (and it certainly wasn’t a flirtatious move, or anything like that), but there must have been some kind of reason. I certainly remember liking Generation Sex when it was released as a single, but I’m not sure I bought it at the time of release. I definitely remember watching the band on Jools Holland (in December, according to the bbc website) because I remember noticing that Neil had the same guitar as me. (Incidentally, Massive Attack and Elliot Smith were both on the same show, so it was a good one!) Once in possession of this illicit cassette, things moved very quickly – by the time National Express was released as a single, I’d have counted myself a proper excited fan, and by the time ‘A Secret History’ was released later that year, I’d hoovered up every album and CD single released up to that point. My peak fandom, I guess, came slightly later (round about the Regeneration era) but there are specific reasons for that, and I’ll come back to it when we get there. So, because of all this, Fin means a lot to me, even if I wouldn’t necessarily count it as my favourite TDC album now. Looking forward to getting stuck in…
Great story, thanks for that! I'm always interested in how people came to enjoy bands I also love, as the stories are always so different in the details, but yet strangely familiar in a way, too.
I'm keeping my origin story for a little while longer, because we're gonna need boring posts further on.
Alright then, as always we will start the new album by taking a look at what Neil has to say about it in general in his new 2020 liner notes. Here's 2020 Neil on "Fin De Siècle": Buckle up, everybody, Fin de Siècle is a wild ride. Every time I listen to it (about once every decade) I come away feeling as if I've been on a particularly extravagant rollercoaster; dizzy, elated and a trifle nauseous. If Casanova was the musical personification of attention seeking, then Fin de Siècle is the musical personification of supreme self-confidence. We threw everything at it: orchestras, metal riffs, choirs, electronic programming, anvils, Waterloo Station! Why? Um... because we could. [...] I recall listening to it in the late 2000s and texting Joby afterwards saying it was 'a huge white elephant of a record'. I've modified my opinion a bit since then. Now I think it's a melodramatic, fascinating, outrageous, multi-coloured elephant! Wildly overblown in some areas, genuinely affecting in others, I could only have made Fin de Siècle back in my twenties, so I'm supremely thankful that I did - striking while the anvil was hot, so to speak! [...] Fin de Siècle is French for 'end of century'. It refers in a more specific sense to the pessimistic vibe around the end of the nineteenth century. 'Oh dear, we're so terribly decadent, this can't end well.' Its aesthetic was captured brilliantly by people like Klimt, Munch, Wilde and Beardsley. Everything was gorgeously decorative, psychologically warped, and utterly doomed... Secession-era Vienna was its creative epicentre, hence the Viennese photo shoot. It was the anxiety surrounding the approaching millennium rather than the artistic movement that gave the title its relevance. To some extent I was mocking those who were so fearful of it. Being more or less a rational adult, I knew that an arbitrary selection of numbers on a calendar couldn't alter the destiny of humankind. Looking back, that may not have been quite what they meant...[...] I wrote and demoed this album in the spare room of the little Clapham flat I'd moved into with Orla. Living together was all very new and fun. The flat was situated above a Blockbuster video outlet, and I gorged happily on all the TV and films I'd missed during my busy years. Before '97 I'd never seen an episode of Friends or The Simpsons. I got myself a PlayStation too. My favourite game was one with little pirate galleons called Overboard. Being a slightly obsessive, completist type, I had to get to the end of the game before I could start writing again. But the last few levels were really hard! It probably put the record back by a month or so. I think my brain needed a little time away from writing though. I don't think I'd had a break since 1999. The relationship between The Divine Comedy and our record label Setanta continued to slowly disintegrate through this period. Trying to get recording sessions booked or an agreement on touring budgets became fractious and heated.[...] One morning while making the record in September Sound studios, a fax came through from Keith in reference to some deal we thought we'd made with him. NOBODY AGREED NUTHIN - it proclaimed in a thick black scrawl. I think we both knew our time together was coming to an end. A notable addition to the band, and to the sound of this album, was Leicester's own Rob Farrer, percussionist to the stars. As well as hitting resonant objects repetitively, he was also great fun to have around. Between Bryan, Joby, Pinkie and Rob, there were few, if any, serious moments. For the album of National Express, Fin de Siècle actually contains many of our more 'out there' moments. Here Comes the Flood, Eric the Gardener, Sweden. Even Thrillseeker (with its pretty spot-on Kirk Hammett impression) is a tad unconventional. When other artists experiments, they usually go all loose and free-form. My experiments, however, tend to become worryingly intricate, like those webs made by spiders on cocaine. I hasten to add I've never needed drugs to bring forth these psychotic musical episodes. To make bizarre, over-complicated music is my default setting. And now here's a quote from Neil in 1998 which I found on ashortsite, by way of extra background! 1998 Neil says about the album: It was 1977 and Jubilee fever had gripped Mr. Lindsey's heart. "Now children, we're going to get a big box, put lots of stuff in it and bury it", proclaimed the excited headmaster. The 'time-capsule' was dutifully filled with Swap-Shop T-shirts, Grease soundtracks and assorted 70' tat, pisced in a hole and covered with wet Derry earth. I was seven and the idea of coming back when I was thirty meant nothing to me. The fact that by then it would be the year 2000 made my heart sink with the impossible vastness of time. Of course I would never be thirty - I couldn't even imagine being ten. I am now twenty-seven and time suddenly seems impossibly short. I'm already planning my return to Londonderry in 2000. I long to see exactly what rubbish we thought future generations would find so fascinating. I can almost hear the gasps of astonishment as the first mouldy coupy of 'Speed and Power' is brought to the surface. I have tried with 'Fin De Siècle' to learn the lessons of history. If you take the best bits from the past and aim resolutely for the future you might just end up with something that lives in the present. After all, no one wants a bunch of retro-crap... do they?"
There are a stack of interviews with Neil from 1998/1999 about this album (it seems 'every rag and glossy mag' wanted to talk to him around this time!) with some more interesting quotes about the album and its various songs, which I will bring out in due course, but for now let's progress onto the facts and figures of the album: Fin de Siècle (album) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Fin de Siècle Studio album by the Divine Comedy Released 31 August 1998 Recorded 1998 Genre Orchestral pop Length 46:41 Label Setanta Producer Jon Jacobs Neil Hannon Fin de Siècle is the sixth album by the Divine Comedy. Released on the 31st of August 1998 by Setanta Records, the album's ten tracks were recorded in 1998. The album peaked at number nine in the UK Albums Chart.[1] Track listing[edit] All songs written by Neil Hannon, except for "Eric the Gardener" and "The Certainty of Chance", written by Neil Hannon and Joby Talbot. All songs arranged and conducted by Joby Talbot. No. Title Length 1. "Generation Sex" 3:31 2. "Thrillseeker" 3:33 3. "Commuter Love" 4:42 4. "Sweden" 3:25 5. "Eric the Gardener" 8:26 6. "National Express" 5:05 7. "Life on Earth" 4:23 8. "The Certainty of Chance" 6:06 9. "Here Comes the Flood" 4:09 10. "Sunrise" 3:17 Personnel The Band Vocals & Guitar Neil Hannon Guitar Ivor Talbot Bass Guitar Bryan Mills Piano & Harpsicord Joby Talbot Organ & Accordion Stuart ‘Pinkie’ Bates Drums Miggy Barradas Percussion Rob Farrer Special Guests Katie Puckrik Narration on ‘Generation Sex’ Hilary Summers Vocals on ‘Sweden’ and ‘Commuter Love’ Dexter Fletcher Narration on ‘Here Comes The Flood’ Steve Hilton Programming on ‘Eric The Gardener’ The Brunel Ensemble Artistic Director Chris Austin Violin 1 Christopher George, Maya Bickel, Kate Birchall, Benjamin Harte, Bérénice Lavigne, Mary Martin, Benjamin Nabarro, Roy Theaker Violin 2 Charles Mutter, Aroussiak Baltaian, Eos Counsell, Anna Giddey, Kelly McCusker, Emma Mitchell, Timothy Myall, Matthew Ward Viola Yannick Dondelinger, David Aspin, Joanna Lacey, Jong On Lau, John Murphy, Robert Riley Cello Betsy Taylor, Emmeline Brewer, Christopher Fish, Louise Hopkins, Robbie Jacobs Double Bass Peter Devlin, Philip Dawson, Ian Watson Flute/Alto Flute/Piccolo Rebecca Larsen Oboe/Cor Anglais Max Spiers Clarinet/Bass Clarinet Stuart King Soprano Saxophone Simon Haram Soprano Saxophone/Tenor Saxophone/Baritone Saxophone/Flute Charlotte Glasson Alto Saxophone Chris Caldwell Tenor Saxophone Kelvin Christiane Bassoon Rebecca Menday Horn Matthew Gunner, Tansy Davies, Jonathan Hassan, Jonathan Morcombe Trumpet Daniel Newell, Mark Law, Simon Jones, Robert Samuel Piccolo Trumpet Simon Roberts Harp Lucy Wakeford Administrator Deborah Keyser Crouch End Festival Chorus Chorus Master David Temple Sopranos Rachael Conner, Denise Haddon, Gisela Soinne, Nina Weiss, Julia White, Jenny Weston, Pamela Constantinou, Pat Whitehead, Liz Knight, Sue McCrone, Allison Mason, Naomi Fulop, Felicity Ford Altos Alison Brister, Tina Burnett-Pope, Jo Chapman, Veronica Gray, Rhael Jenkis, Elise Godlen, Jane Heliwell, Pauline Hoyle, Catherine Best, Maggie Huntingford, Claire Turner Tenors Michael Coates, John Best, Steve McAdam, Ken Wilson, Nick Turner, Philip Robinson, Christopher Higgs, Barry Valey-Tipton Basses Roger Cleave, Geoff Kemball-Cook, Robert Doodall, Paul Haddon, Martin Hudson, Bruce Boyd, Vincent Laxler, Paul Mason, Lenny Fagin, Stephen Greenway, Ian Lawrence, John Gibbons, Matthew Turner Arranged and Conduced by Joby Talbot Produced by Jon Jacobs Co-produced by Neil Hannon Engineered and mixed by Jon Jacobs Additional Engineering and Programming by Andy Scade Assisted by Mitsuo Tate, Adam Brown and Mak Togashi Recorded at September Sound, Olympic & The Dairy Mixed at Westpoint Sleeve concept by Neil Hannon & Kevin Westenberg Design by Rob Crane Neil Thanks Órla (everybody knows…), all at Alan James PR, Chris Austin, Jeremi Barton, Jane Beese, Bluebeat Tours, Dave Brock, Capital Repro, C-Bird, Neil Cox of Lancing Chapel, Chubby & Sara, Sara Drake, Vicky & Terry Elyard, Geoff Emerick, David & Hilary Farrer, Em & Tom Farrer, Finn (R.I.P.), Gary & Sue, Toni Jenkis, Dean Kennedy and all our crew (Funky Mark, Ger, Nipper, Snake, Steve, Warren, Andy). Jeff Lynne, Lionel-Army-Man, Maya Gabrielle, Becca, John Megan & Max Harrison, Polly Corbett, Mark Krais, Breid McLoone, Marcus Magnity, Metropolis Music, Miguel Barradas (Big Mig), Sarah at Mutronics, Charlie Myatt, Michael Nyman, Natalie De Pace, Paul & Linda, John Peat & all at the RBS Elgin Avenue, Pilot, John D. Price, RADAR, Ian Ramage & all at BMG Music, Paul Rushbrook at FX Rentals, David Sefton, all at Setanta (past and present), Claire Shahbazian, everyone from Skintown, Giles Stanley at Muirhead Management, Sian Somers, Georgina Starr, Adrian Eleanor & Joby Talbot, Yoshi Terashima, Tossy, Keith Tonge at PMC, David Tyler, Waterloo Station, John Whittaker, all at Vital & all Hannons everywhere… In memory of Vicky Elyard, Helen McComack & Dermot Morgan ℗ & © 1998 Setanta Records
Okay then, feel free to talk about “Fin” as a whole, the entire period, your thoughts and experiences from this time, and we will kick off with “Generation Sex” in the morning.
This introductory post to Fin de Siècle starts off the last round of analyses by The Flan in the High Castle: Fin de Siècle was released in 1998, a year after the stripped-down, quasi-live Short Album About Love, but it doesn’t follow it stylistically. No: this is a proper Divine Comedy album, with the brand of maximalist orchestral-pop excess that the hat-trick of Liberation, Promenade, and Casanova have led us to expect. Fin de Siècle features more than a hundred musicians, combining the orchestral talents of the Brunel Ensemble and the choral efforts of the Crouch End Festival Chorus. With only ten tracks, the album might seem quite lean – something offset by several lengthy, expansive instrumental sections, for which we can thank the growing influence of arranger Joby Talbot. As its baroque title suggests, Fin de Siècle is not just an attempt to repeat the success of Neil Hannon’s preceding albums: anchored by some of his most straightforwardly commercial pop singles ever, it also drifts into some of his strangest territory to date, with experimental forays into opera, the spoken word, and Broadway musical. The rotations of the Gregorian calendar, arbitrary though they are, have a way of amplifying the eternal human neuroses, dragging them into the light. As the meter approaches rollover, people flail to project some semblance of narrative logic onto the scrolling blankness of time, sometimes crystallising the essence of an era. In the last years of the nineteenth century, a mood swept France, in particular the intellectual circles of Paris, and spread across Europe. The prevailing feeling was one of ennui and pessimism, characterised by the sense that civilisation was approaching some manner of radical change. Interrelated artistic movements sprang up in response: the Aesthetes, who esteemed sensory pleasure and consumption above all else; the Decadents, who were fascinated by decay and deterioration, and turned to excess and parody. The mood came to be known as the spirit of fin de siècle. The album’s title refers to this milieu; since it literally means “End of Century”, however, it also refers, playfully, to the time the album was released. It’s a good name: in calling back to the end of the nineteenth century and forward to the conclusion of the twentieth, it finds a way to unite Hannon’s contradictory interests in the antiquarian and the apocalyptic. The wordplay, however, suggests that perhaps the album isn’t about the end of either century, but about the commonalities between the ends of both – that it’s an album about history as a cyclical, eternal thing. The year 1999 is self-evidently a more portentous, more dramatic 1899 – it makes sense to expect that it should see the resurfacing of 1899’s metaphysical ills. As the new millennium loomed closer, the apocalypse weighed more heavily on people’s minds. Doomsday cults such as the Stelle Group and Aum Shinrikyo sprang up, predicting imminent nuclear holocaust and world-rending natural disasters. The end of the world is a theme that has always lurked in Hannon’s work. It manifests in various forms, from Fanfare’s “Tailspin” to Short Album’s “In Pursuit of Happiness”, often for only a single song; and it seems that the mood of millenarian anxiety also, to some degree, affected Hannon. Certainly it looms over Promenade – a ponderous, album-length countdown to a world-rending New Year. As Allison Felus points out, “All [Hannon’s] best songs have always been steeped in death,” and “Fin de Siècle… is about the death of a whole century.” More than that: it’s the ultimate culmination of this theme – an entire album about the apocalypse, or more precisely, about the anxiety of living in a decadent modernity where the end feels nigh. Fin de Siècle is about the apocalypse, but it’s also about the cyclicity of history – two themes which directly contradict each other, casting a pall of irony over the entire album. In the liner notes, Hannon introduces Fin de Siècle by way of an anecdote from his primary-school days. “It was 1977 and Jubilee fever had gripped Mr Lindsay’s heart…” The headmaster had Hannon and his classmates contribute items to a time capsule: “Swap-Shop T-shirts, Grease soundtracks and assorted ’70s tat, placed in a hole and covered with wet Derry earth.” Hannon recalls his early imaginings of one day digging up the capsule as an experience of vertiginous childhood sublime: “The fact that by then it would be the year 2000 made my heart sink with the impossible vastness of time. Of course I would never be thirty – I couldn’t even imagine being ten.” Everyone has a handful of childhood memories like this, I think – moments when our fledgling minds first brushed up against the scale of reality, like plankton against the leviathan; our consciousnesses recoiling, but changed, never to be quite the same. Clearly, Fin de Siècle itself is intended as a sort of time capsule. The album attempts, on one hand, to encapsulate its fleeting cultural moment, hence its smorgasbord of cultural commentary on 1998; but it’s also trying to serve as a memento of one man’s personal obsessions and fixations, a snapshot of a mind, a life. Hannon explains: “I have tried with Fin de Siècle to learn the lessons of history. If you take the best bits from the past and aim resolutely for the future you might just end up with something that lives in the present. After all, no one wants a bunch of retro-crap… do they?” To an extent, this album is Hannon summing up his twentieth-century work as the new millennium approaches; but like that work, it’s still branching out, extending tendrils into untapped genres, even entire musical traditions. He had experimented several times mixing music with the spoken word, most prominently with “Theme from Casanova”, but Fin de Siècle takes this to another level: three of the album’s ten tracks feature substantial spoken sections. Fin de Siècle is a Frankenstein angler fish, its body stitched together from opera, Broadway, spoken-word performances, and sprawling instrumentals, with its singles a glowing Britpop lure. The front cover is a black-and-white photograph of Hannon in profile, before a Viennese monument to the modernist architect Otto Wagner. Hannon wears, as usual, a suit and tie; and the sunglasses, removed for the intimate side-step that was Short Album, have returned. The monument, in fact a tall pillar, is shot so tightly that it fills the photo: all we can see of it is the text that’s engraved on the chosen side (at around waist height – Hannon must be kneeling). ERNUERE [sic] VON DER GEMEINDE WIEN IM JAHRE 1959, it tells us. “RENEWED BY THE MUNICIPALITY OF VIENNA IN THE YEAR 1959”: a contextless shard of art history. Hannon faces to the right, like Caesar on a denarius, like the angel of history facing the future, like Bowie on the cover of Low. The band and album names are superimposed in tiny sans-serif white. Hannon looks diminished in a way we’ve not seen before: whereas the Louvre pyramid on Promenade seemed an expression of Hannon’s sharp cool, the Wagner monument here buries him under a weight of history and culture, the weight of the twentieth century. The artwork created for Fin de Siècle, and used to promote the associated tour, consists mainly of a series of photos taken around Vienna. Like the cover, they’re mostly black-and-white; Hannon is in black tie, sometimes with sunglasses, sometimes without. In one of the more memorable images, he’s squashed into the corner of the frame by the looming edifice of the Karl Marx-Hof tenement complex; the opposite page is a mirrored version of the same picture, with the signage carefully edited to create the illusion that it’s a separate photo. In another, a pensive Hannon stands with his back to us, before the Heroes’ Monument of the Red Army. The only splash of colour is on the memoriam page, where we see a road lined with trees, stretching off into the distance, tinted a dreamy green: Fin de Siècle is dedicated, in part, to Dermot Morgan. There’s no real effort here to move beyond the contemplative greyscale languor of the Casanova and Short Album photoshoots. Perhaps that’s appropriate, as this album doesn’t represent a radical break – it’s not until the new millennium that Hannon will try something as dramatic as Liberation. And even if Hannon’s moody posing and the photographer’s eye are familiar, the environs are intriguing: Fin de Siècle is, visually speaking, a brutalist album. We see Hannon wander an uninhabited world of concrete structure and sculpture, a colourless cityscape of imposing and unapologetic blocks. The foregrounding of Otto Wagner directs our attention to modernism itself. The early twentieth century was a time of profound change throughout Western culture – in art, in literature, in physics. Although these developments spanned diverse spheres of thought, they were connected by an underlying logic – an eagerness to Make It New, to experiment in form and content and technique, to shatter existing assumptions and singular perspectives. Brutalist architecture, challenging conventional understandings of aesthetics and human behaviour, was a part of this. When discussing the themes of Fin de Siecle, it is worth keeping in mind that the Greek root apokalupsis does not refer to destruction: it means “to uncover”. One question the album seems to be asking: will the dawn of the twenty-first century involve a shattering of ossified thought, a revolution of understanding, in the same way that the dawn of the twentieth did? Will the new century have its Picasso, its Joyce, its Einstein?
I must have bought this at the local record chain that stocked a lot of UK imports, but I don't remember if I read about the release in advance or just stumbled on it in the store. I do recall not being happy it was in this thin cardboard package, as they were prone to being easily damaged. I still have my original, albeit somewhat the worse for wear. I only bought one or two of the CD singles due to lack of funds, but a friend who was also a Nyman fan bought the ones I didn't as he wanted to hear the Nyman covers. We were both left underwhelmed by those tracks, but as an album it was more of a grower over time than an immediate favorite, or at least that's how I remember it. Now, I'd probably rank it in the top three albums of his. I like that the subject matter is offbeat, with only one love song as such, and even then it isn't a straightforward one. The 2020 remaster changes to "Generation Sex" and "The Certainty of Chance" we can discuss when we get there, but one is much appreciated, the other not, by me anyway. Having thrown so much at this album, I suppose a course correction was needed by Neil afterwards, but I'm glad this is the record we got out of it.
Since @Radiophonic_ brought up the different versions of “Generation Sex” and “Certainty of Chance”, here’s a little interview from Uncut magazine in October 1998. The samples on the original promo CD I found in London in July ‘98, and on the 2020 reissue are from the movie “La Dolce Vita”, which as Neil explains, he had to remove for copyright reasons. The Article is entitled “Neil Hannon on his Favourite Tourbus Video, La Dolce Vita”: When I was desperately looking for samples to put on my new album, I bought Fellini’s La Dolce Vita - then I found out that The Fellini Foundation have a blanket ban on all sampling. But while scouring the video for cool bits, I actually watched the movie and it’s fantastic. It’s where the world ‘paparazzi’ comes from, and it’s a wonderful chart of the moral decline of this photographer, played by Marcello Mastroianni. The music, by Nino Rota, is fantastic as well. That’s my current favourite, but I haven’t tried it on the tour bus yet because after ten minutes of black and white everybody else would be like, “Shall we try the new Mike Meyers film?” Actually, my concentration span was considerably longer in the old days. When you’re on your parents’ attic from dawn til dusk writing songs, light relief is going downstairs and watching a four-hour German film from the Forties. But since my life has become very busy, I’ve just been going to Blockbusters and getting the latest disaster movie.
I remember Marvellous Party getting its first play on radio one. They had been building it up for the debut play of it, which seems strange to think of now. I was sat there ready, with my tape record button ready to record. And record it I did. And then ended up doing lots of dual tape recordings so that I ended up with one whole side (or both, I forget!) of the tape filled up with that song. Which is possibly a nightmare to a fair few people. But I loved listening to it at the time, which I did repeatedly, especially the properly filled out and euphoric ending. Hard to say how good it really is, but it was a fun release. Maybe I'd give it a 3.7? I don't think I've listened to Fin as an album all the way through for quite a while. Looking forward to doing so again.
Fin de Siècle was my first 'new' DC album - bought all the singles in all versions, and I have very clear memories of listening to it a lot in autumn 1998. Although I don't listen to it anything like as much as Promenade or Casanova now, I still have a soft spot for it, and not just from nostalgia. Reading Neil's comment "like webs made by spiders on cocaine" when the box set came out was a lightbulb moment - of course, it's Neil's cocaine album! Be Here Now's got nothing on this. The sense of still being on the up - this one will be bigger than Casanova, let's give it all we've got - is intoxicating, especially since it's such an incredibly strange album, no quarter given. Even the parts I don't like as much I still admire for their ambition or bravado. Something I'd like to think about as we go along: was the turn to Regeneration inevitable? Was there really nowhere else to go from here? Certainly pop music was changing a lot at this time, and more orchestral albums in this vein might not have been similarly successful. But artistically, while this is recognisably a Divine Comedy album, it's another very distinct tweak of the style - no song here would fit comfortably on Casanova - while also being arguably the most varied DC album to date. It doesn't immediately feel like the well had run dry. But maybe some seeds of exhaustion will become clear as we go through.
Well; it’s very interesting you ask that, as one of the many contemporary interview quotes I pulled out last night about this album was this one from Les Inrockuptibles in September 1998, where it seems Neil was already thinking the same as you... “With Fin De Siècle, I probably found the sound I had been chasing for a long time. For me, it brings together all the best aspects of my previous albums. It's also difficult to say which route we’re going to take after this. I wouldn't want to be too definitive, but I feel like it's the end of an era - and not just because it's my last record for my first label, Setanta. It's a little scary to think that you're going to have to consider something completely new. We will probably have to put the orchestra in a safe: I'm not sure we can go any further in that direction. The group and the orchestra have never been so united as on Fin De Siècle.” Interesting, too, that he is already talking about moving away from Setanta barely a month after the album coming out...
Generation Sex gets a 4 from me and maybe I'm being a bit generous. It's a good, confident song but it's almst as if the sound gets in the way of the clever lyric. A bit too brash, perhaps? Yes, it might be said it was fashionable for doom and gloom to be on some people's mind as 2000 approached but frankly it was a huge ball and apart from the laughable nonsense about the millennium bug and rubbish like champagne shortages which never materialised (all gimmicks to make a frightened public soend money on things they didn't need, hmm...) much of it was posing. And few pose better than our Neil.
I don't recall what he says in the Regeneration remaster liner notes, but maybe he also felt that the orchestral pop style had hit a commercial dead end if not an artistic one. He already has talked about how he was earlier squarely aiming for commercial success, so saying to himself "I want to have a hit album and sounding like, say, Bends-era Radiohead would be good" wouldn't be hugely out of character. Plus, a new style for a new label and a new millennium makes sense. Change everything, see how it goes. That he then immediately came back to what he had succeeded with before when Regeneration didn't work out like he hoped must have been pretty chastening for him. Also, if he felt that he couldn't go much further artistically in the orchestral style, what does he consider the albums after Regeneration? Treading water for a buck in some ways? Or did he decide that there was in fact more he could do in his chosen style? He could wildly diversify his sound if he really wanted, while keeping the same palette of instruments. After all, Scott Walker made Tilt with guitars and orchestral instruments. Does Neil have something similar artistic leap in him, or is he happy ploughing his particular furrow for another 10-20 years or whatever? Office Politics is in some ways a welcome change in sound for him, so I'll be curious where he goes next.
