I quite like ”Ignorance Is Bliss” and it’s a good opening song. The guitar riff is really basic but nifty at the same time. Had it been played on a twelve-string Rickenbacker I could (almost) imagine this as a song by The Byrds. The vocals are buried in the mix and I’ve never really paid attention to the words so I have absolutely no idea what Neil is singing about. The production here (and throughout the entire EP) is also really basic. It does sound samey after a while, and I wished they had experimented a bit with more interesting arrangements and a wider variety of instruments. I give it 3/5.
While I wait for you lot to take a listen and post your scores, here’s some much more detailed background info courtesy of ashortsite.com: Fanfare For The Comic Muse is The Divine Comedy’s very first album, and the only one to have been recorded while TDC was still a real band, a rock band. Heavily influenced by REM (in particular their album Eponymous), Neil Hannon formed a band on the ashes from his former project, October, with his bandmate Lawrence Hoy and two new musicians John McCullagh and Kevin Traynor. After recording a first demo, at Active Studio in Banbridge, the band would adopt the name The Divine Comedy, and Lawrence would depart from the band. The demo was sent to several labels, including Rough Trade, who may have forwarded it to a new label specialized in Irish bands, Keith Cullen’s Setanta. Even though Keith didn’t like the recording at first; yet his girlfriend did and she insisted on him to give the band a try. And so history was made: The Divine Comedy got signed to the label in January 1990 and the 3-piece recorded Fanfare in Easter. The album was recorded at Homestead Studios, a place also used by other by other Irish newcomers such as Therapy?; and produced by John O'Neill, guitarist from The Undertones / That Petrol Emotion, who was quite active on the Derry scene and would release a single with his band Rare on Setanta Records later in the year. The choice of such a producer was so probably driven by Keith Cullen, while Neil knew exactly what he wanted do to (i.e. sound like REM): “It wasn’t a particularly happy experience, none of my suggestions were taken on. Neil knew exactly what he wanted, he produced that album himself” recalls John [1]. While the album has not a proper concept or thematic, the songs deal with various themes which remain regular in Neil’s career: love (‘The Rise And Fall’, ‘Secret Garden’ even though in a more adolescent perspective), nature and ecology (‘Tailspin’, ‘Logic Version Emotion’). The album title is a cross-reference between ‘Fanfare For The Common Men’ and ‘Victory For The Comic Muse’. The later is a quote from A Room With A View, a film he watched as a teenager, and would influence him for years, as the reference would be used again for the album Victory For The Comic Muse. The albums Liberation and Promenade would also use samples from the movie. And it is interesting to note that the demo version (still unreleased) of ‘Secret Garden’ originally featured the line “a worn out copy of A Room With A View” as a reference to the novel by EM Forster. Little is known regarding the cover art. No credit is given, and reverse image research doesn’t give any clue. According to LastFM [2] it is an adaptation of a drawing of Raphael Sanzio by painter Ernst Wieltschnig, although no reference to the latter can be found. This may lead to think it was actually designed on purpose for the album. It is true to say the album received little interest from the UK press, and did not sold many copies, however it still may not have been such a fiasco as Neil tends to sum up. To put thing in perspective, it was still the very beginning of the Setanta label (the second LP released by the label, which had mainly released 12” EP before) and so not much distribution, and they (the band and the label) have yet to develop their network. The band played in a handful of clubs in London; but mainly did shows or festivals in Ireland where they received more positive reviews [3]. However, it will acquire with time the reputation of a disowned and controversial album. After the band split-up, Neil Hannon will reinvent The Divine Comedy, and Liberation would be considered as the proper first album. Despite this Fanfare… has been reissued twice: Setanta reprintedsome copies after The Divine Comedy became successful (a bootlegwould also get in stores the next year); and more recently within the Juveneilia compilation.
Wow, the descriptions of the album aren't kidding about it sounding like REM! Particularly like "Reckoning" and "Fables". I like this a lot on first listen, and would say some of this jangling wouldn't have gone amiss on some of their later guitar-based recordings. 4/5
Just you wait for the song that’s basically a rip-off of “It’s the end of the world...” (although I only JUST realised that this morning!)
That’s something which came to my mind on relistening this morning- and maybe the clue to that comes in the quote above from the album’s producer who basically says that Neil knew exactly what he wanted and effectively produced it himself.
For an opener for your first album, you could do worse. Pretty catchy, and I love me some jangle pop. I’ve no idea what the lyrics are about, but they sound fine, at least. 3.5/5
I've got a certain fondness for this song. Many years ago, members of the TDC website forum put together a DIY covers album. I tried to stitch together a version of Bath which turned out to be unlistenable, so I did a quick acoustic rendition of this instead, and that's what made the cut. At the time, I only had access to a copy of fanfare I'd slowly downloaded from napster over a dial up internet connection. It's only this week, after delving into the Juveneilia discs of the box set, that I've discovered by download of this track was missing a final verse! Anyway, as debut openers go, it's not bad at all. Not brilliant, but respectable enough.
Yep, shades of R.E.M here, once the drums came in I was thinking of Dont Go Back To Rockville. Vocally it got a wee bit Smiths like to my ears. Perfectly competent, but a bit generic indie pop (probably not the only time on this album). 2/5.
In anticipation of this thread I put Fanfare on for the first time this morning and was mildly surprised. Neil has disowned it for years, and whilst it sits outside the recognised DC sound, it’s not a bad little album for a young upcoming band in the early 90s. This track opens the album up with an energetic burst of R.E.M. guitar jangle and is a catchy opener. Very different to anything I have heard from a Neil previously but certainly not something to disown. The sound of a young band mirroring the music of the time. 3/5
It's a nice opener from what I would call Proto-Divine Comedy. Neil's voice is pleasant, but not as self-assured as with later releases. (and that's a comment that spans the album) Not very chord heavy but a nicely put together song. I'm going to be terrible and be a little more granular. 2.5/5.0
Welcome to the forum! I love the idea that you signed up purely to take part in this, even if you didn’t... Please stick around and let us know what you think of all of it - plus feel free to share your cover, could be quite interesting!
Yeah, I agree with you - I personally didn’t enjoy it at all when I first heard it, but listening to it recently as part of the whole journey captured by the boxset, it doesn’t sound anywhere near as “unlike” TDC as I remembered. I guess now I’m older and wiser, I can hear past the basic instrumentation and production, and recognise Neil’s composition and arrangement style.
I DID sign up just for this, though I've been lurking for a while. I'm not sure where the CD with my cover is - it's probably in the loft - but I haven't heard it for about 20 years, and I can't imagine it will have aged ever so well!
Alright then; it’s probably my turn to offer an opinion! I first heard this album in 1998, when, having played “Fin de Siècle” to death after its release , I decided that I had to have the last back catalogue album I didn’t already own. Oddly enough, the world of internet music shopping, despite being in its infancy, came up trumps; as it become apparent that one website (might even have been the early days of Amazon?) suddenly had some brand new copies of the CD for a sensible price. The effort I went to to get it, did not unfortunately prevent me from hating it and dismissing it out of hand - and as I just said; it’s only now that I feel I’m giving it a fair shake. Anyway, “Ignorance is Bliss” is a decent opener. It’s one of the tracks I feel is less “TDC”-ish, even now I’m more open minded to the album - but still, a pretty good, upbeat, jangly opening. And since posting it this morning, I’ve been walking around humming it all day, so that’s a decent sign! Like the close harmony vocal arrangement; something there is a lot of on this album and indeed in Neil’s catalogue to come. Having said that - if my least favourite song on “Promenade” or “Casanova” will end up getting a 3/5, I’m not sure I should even award that much to the “pretty good” tracks from this album. So it’s a harsh-sounding 2.5/5 from me.
I don't know how much I can say about this song specifically that I won't say about the whole album, but here it goes. It's not bad, but it's not very distinctive. Trying to remember it in context of what I was into at the time, I would say that it's not too dissimilar to the bands I was listening to about 4 or 5 years before this record came out so maybe a bit behind the times. I traveled a lot back then and every decent sized city in America had half a dozen "REM" bands that sounded pretty much like this. Maybe this style of band was just hitting the UK, but I'd had more than my fill by 1990. The one good thing is that Neil is not doing a Stipe impression, but the vocals are mixed so low that they're not given an opportunity to help distinguish the music. Every band starts by sounding like their influences and lots never grow past those influences. This song is by no means a bad song and it's possible that even this DC lineup could have grown to be more distinctive over time. Overall it's not a bad first effort, but I'm glad that Neil ended up where he did. 2.75/5 (Slight derail: I love all things Undertones related and I only came to find about O'Neill producing the album with the release of this box set. I wonder how different the album might have been if he'd been allowed more influence, though I prefer artists having more control than producers.)
Vocals being buried in the mix was a trademark of the shoegaze genre and here they remind me especially of Ride's vocals, who had already released their first two EPs before Neil recorded this. Also, we know he was a fan of Ride as he even released a cover of their song "Vapour Trail" nine years later. So basically this sounds like a cross between R.E.M. and Ride. I like it but both bands had a lot of songs which are better, and Neil's band would soon have to. So I'll give it 3/5. I came across some excellent essays on The Divine Comedy from the blog "The Flan in the High Castle". This quote analysing "Ignorance Is Bliss" from the essay on the debut album (Protected Blog › Log in ) will give you some food for thought regarding the lyrics: We open with “Ignorance Is Bliss”, a tinny little pop song whose title may well be the first ever literary reference in a Hannon song (though it’s possible that he was just echoing the common phrase rather than consciously quoting the Thomas Gray poem in which it originated). Taken on its own, this track resembles the story of a love affair, a tangled relationship where one person stifles the other: “I rely upon your charity to survive / I deny myself to prove that I’m alive / I plead guilty if sweet innocence is this / I support the motion, ignorance is bliss”. However, if we consider the ecological concerns of the later tracks, a corresponding meaning emerges. It’s easy to read “Kill me with your kiss / Bliss, whoops, apocalypse / Ignorance must be bliss” as part of some torrid break-up story, but the rest of the album suggests a more literal interpretation of “apocalypse”. Yes, this is something loftier: a song about the complex, sometimes dangerously antagonistic relationship between mankind and Earth; a song about flirting with the end of the world, and the unease we feel when we accept responsibility for our actions. In its middle verse, it’s remarkably unambiguous about this: “I deny myself to keep this world alive / You walk out and off the edge of the abyss / I oppose the motion, ignorance is bliss”. It’s an ascetic environmentalist singing to a climate change denier. However, it’s also wilfully inconsistent about which perspective it’s coming from, with Hannon claiming to “support”, “oppose”, and “propose” the same motion at various points. There’s no really coherent way to interpret this, but perhaps that’s fitting – Gray’s nostalgic reflection on a simpler time in his life is so commonly misunderstood to mean “ignorance is superior to knowledge” that it’s often difficult to know whether someone quoting it is saying what they mean or something quite different. On another level, this engagement with the idea that gaining knowledge may be uncomfortable – or at least not straightforwardly desirable – ties in with the album cover’s depiction of a fallen angel. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is notoriously bitter, but that’s revolution for you. One night in 2010, Hannon performs at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. Standing alone onstage with an acoustic guitar, he asks the audience for requests. After a few moments of turning down the usual tedious calls for “My Lovely Horse“, he reflects, “I’ve written too many songs, haven’t I? Is there any way of, sort of starting, you know, from here, working backwards, writing less and less songs? Sort of… Martin Amis-style…” As if in answer, some strange soul shouts, “Play ‘Ignorance Is Bliss’!” Sounding slightly perplexed, Hannon obliges, performing an abbreviated version of the partly-forgotten song. The first half he spends parodying his younger self’s strained vocals: “I rely upon your something to survive … I’m an angst-ridden seventeen-year-old.” He then shifts into a richer, more mature register, giving us a glimpse at how Fanfare could have sounded had it been recorded at a time when Hannon really knew what he was doing. “I love this bit,” he interjects before the final line, “Ignorance must be bliss.” Some cheer, some laugh, and Hannon offers us his final verdict: “What a way to wrap up a chorus. Okay, that’s that… but you gotta start somewhere!”
I had also come across that blog earlier today, though it seems to be offline , so thanks for posting some bits from it! That’s a great story about him actually doing “Ignorance is Bliss” , I wonder if there’s a recording of it out there...?
Alright, you have about 10 hours to score “Ignorance is Bliss” if you didn’t already, scores will be tallied tomorrow morning when I wake up and then we’ll move on to the next song.
Good thread! Not sure how much I can add except for memories and the odd photo of stuff in my collection; starting with these:
This is an interesting point, I lived through this era in the U.K., and it’s my impression that “this style of band” completely passed us by, certainly in the mainstream. I never heard any REM until “Shiny Happy People”, and Toad the Wet Sprocket is a name that I’ve heard but I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard a single note of the music. I think that’s why this album was so alien to me, coming from the lushly orchestrated majesty of “Casanova” and “Fin”.
There must be something wrong with me, but this song sounds great to me too. I obviously have to get the album. (By getting the box set? ulp). 4/5
Weirdo Nah, seriously; it’s actually worth having. The boxset is a marvel from start to finish , so well worth the investment. But you can probably get a second-hand CD copy of “Fanfare” on its own for a lot less these days.
Hey, we’re more than happy to have you along, even if you’re just reading! Nothing to stop you listening and voting - that’s the most important contribution to this type of thread. Great pics, by the way... those are the same two records I have from this period - Europop is eluding me at the moment.
