I haven't heard either the Elvis DaCosta thing or the Ash duet, although have heard of them,so will be interested to hear them whenever we get there. I'm sure I read some press article years ago that said the version of Oh Yeah was plain creepy/borderline dodgy (the song is about going out with a school girl after all...!). I'll wait to hear it, but guess that while Tim Wheeler has/had a 'young' voice, Neil has always sounded sort of old (and had also made an album entirely about sex...! )
Casanova After Promenade, Neil's second masterpiece. Both on the sheer quantity of stunning songs (notably "Songs of Love", "Through a Long and Sleepless Night", "The Frog Princess", "Charge", "Something for the Weekend" and "The Dogs and Horses") the arrangements and performances, and the cohesion, and the brilliant "triple ending" of the last three songs. If you're wondering why I don't quite the same about the subsequent efforts, stick around to find out. We've discussed a lot the problematic lyrics, but maybe we should point out that one of the influences cited by Neil was Serge Gainsbourg, and between him and other similar writers, provocation was part of the point. Whether you meant everything you said or not, you wanted to get people's attention. This also comes through with the influence of prose writers, who have more freedom to write in the first person without people assuming that the narrator = the author. I'm not saying I think transgressive lyrics are necessarily great per se, but they were very much in the air at the time- see also Pulp, Suede, My Life Story. So that should be borne in mind perhaps, as well as the youth of the author.
The Birds of Paradise Farm It seems to be the way (and I haven't given this too much thought, so I may be wrong), that from the 1980s onwards, whenever there's a classic breakthrough album, there's at least one classic b-side associated with said album. Here is Casanova's. 4/5 St Francis preached to the birds, but I don't know about Leonardo. He certainly drew them in his sketchbooks.
Let me just say that we thoroughly encourage opinions on this thread! But I think I have the opposite opinion re: cohesiveness and quality so it'll be interesting to see where we differ as the thread progresses...
Blimey, I think you might be the first person on this forum to ever mention MLS... the other band I used to go and see whenever possible during my uni years! I still think all 3 of their "proper" albums stand up really well. (the new one from last year was somewhat "meh" to me.)
FYI and for my own reference - the Ash duet happened on the 20th of Feb, 1997 - so about a week after "A Short Album" came out. The Elvis DaCosta single seems to have been released in June 1998, so just before the release of "Fin De Siecle".
After Extra Time? (High scoring match! Good win for the Birds, who surely must be at a disadvantage leg-wise.)
I imagined that at some point we were going to compare and constrast the two bands, as they were so often compared and contrasted at the time. The surface similarities are obvious. But a zealous MLS fan at the time told me that the two fandoms were mutually exclusive- if you liked one, you couldn't like the other. Because to the hardcore fans, the similarity was purely superficial. (I myself liked both bands, but not obsessively in either case. I considered myself neutral. I hadn't heard Promenade yet). I imagine that hardline Shillingfordians thought that their man was being sincere, whereas the other guy was being "ironic". And Hannonites probably felt the same, but the other way around. I mentioned them in the context of "edgy lyrics" because one of their songs popped up in my shuffle yesterday and the line "all the king's w****s and all the king's hit men"struck me and reminded me of what Jake's lyrical persona was like.
The Flan in the High Castle examines what's unique about the first B-side/bonus track of the Casanova era: “Birds of Paradise Farm”, a fanciful song of escape and escapism. This song has a rather unique musical sound, with a playful but relentlessly repetitious jangle-guitar riff played over an unusually piercing, amelodic string backing, but what’s really striking is the way Hannon couches it in a very uncharacteristic level of autobiographical detail. The lines are very short, giving the song a conversational feel. “My parents knew / These people who / For all their faults / Were very nice / They owned a farm / Whose old-world charm / Earned it the name / Of Paradise”. Here we have our first hint of the song’s personal nature: Hannon often alludes to fathers and patriarchal deities, but he rarely specifies his own actual parents. The song is already rooted in the strangely subjective, and the hosts’ unspecified “faults” give us our first hint of the unusual conflict to come. Next, Hannon emphasises the autobiographical dimension by tossing in a quick upper-middle-class signifier: “We came to stay / One holiday / We played croquet / And burned our arms”. Finally, the song reaches its object: “But I was charmed / And lost for words / When first I heard / The birds of Paradise Farm”. The shift to the chorus coincides with the narrator’s discovery: “Singing gay songs / All the day long / Making love to the dinner gong / Wondering when / Their human friends / Would come to feed them”. Delighted by the birds’ song, he rushes off to find them, which brings us to the song’s devastating shock twist: “I looked in the trees / And in the air / I searched the eaves / Of disused barns / Till finally / To my despair / I found / The caged birds / In Paradise Farm”. Well, not that shocking: the song never specifies what sort of birds they are, but the title obviously suggests birds-of-paradise (Paradisaeidae), which you’d hardly expect to find larking about outdoors in a Divine Comedy song. (The parallel-universe Earth in which all Divine Comedy songs take place has only two populated countries: Anglo-Ireland and France.) In the chorus’s second iteration, the birds are still singing happily, but now they’re “Wondering why / Their tiny lives / Should be spent behind iron bars”. There’s something quite effective about this: Hannon doesn’t allow the narrator to project his own distress onto the caged creatures, but he does allow him to project curiosity – an idle wondering at their predicament. He attributes to them the sadness of accepting unfortunate circumstances, which is a subtle and relatable thing, and rather more touching than grand woe-is-me tragedy. Reflecting this same commitment to sad acceptance, the narrator has the beginnings of an idea, but he instantly puts it out of his mind, even as the passion rises in his voice: “Now, Leonardo da Vinci / Saint Francis of Assisi / But Neil Hannon of the See House, Fivemiletown / Well, it doesn’t quite sound right, somehow”. (We then get a lovely Hammond-organ solo that sounds like it was originally composed to accompany Father Ted Crilly running frantically down a road – which, considering that the song was released around the time of the second series, it very possibly was.) Pop music is a form predicated on audience identification. The narrator of a pop song is supposed to be a blank slate. Generally, they’re meant to say things like “I love you” and “I miss you”, not “I knew him, Horatio – a fellow of infinite jest” or “Gregor Samsa woke to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin”. Audiences can, of course, appreciate and connect to stories dealing with very specific or complex characters, but such stories generally work better in literary, dramatic, or televisual forms. A pop song is a visceral thing: it’s intended to function regardless of how much attention the listener is paying to it, and it’s written with the knowledge that most people who enjoy it will never remember anything but the hook or (at best) the chorus. A pop song wants you to sing along to it; to dance; to forget yourself. One way this is facilitated is through the use of simple, direct, emphatic, uncomplicated emotion for the listener to channel. Pop songs are cartoons – very short ones, at that, almost by definition. Complicated protagonists and engaging dramatic situations clash with the structure. You can’t do Proust in a four-panel Peanuts strip. The Divine Comedy are, for all their oddness, still a pop group. Names are an uneasy fit for this idiom, and when they do appear, they’re usually just signifiers for an object of desire – something on which the listener can project their own feelings. As such, it’s a bit shocking when Hannon mentions his own name in the lyrics – something he’s literally never done before. In an instant, the pop blankness is compromised. Biographical details poison pop songs, turning them into something else. We can imagine that we’re the one who’s becoming more like Alfie; the Frog Princess is everyone’s ex, the story ours to step into and inhabit. “Birds of Paradise Farm” lacks this one-size-fits-all quality. Romantic love is the basic currency of pop music, but the songs exclusive to the “Casanova Companion” records are about considerably stranger things. Perhaps that’s why they’re not on Casanova. However, “Birds of Paradise Farm”, with its animal-freeing hippie fervour, actually does have an antecedent in the Divine Comedy discography – indeed, it’s the first record released under the Divine Comedy name: Fanfare for the Comic Muse. By pop-music standards, this little album is decidedly abstract: there’s precious little romance, with all seven songs articulating the young Hannon’s environmentalist messages via an indie-jangle-pop REM pastiche. “Birds of Paradise Farm” doesn’t sound much like Fanfare – it’s more confident, more refined, and less ambitious – but there’s a distinct thematic lineage here, and it offers an intriguing glimpse into the sort of music Hannon might have produced if he’d applied his mature grasp of the craft to the themes that mattered to him as an adolescent. The narrator wants to free the birds, to befriend them like some legendary hero from long ago, but he’s stifled by propriety – by the basic mundane reality of who he is. The third time the chorus comes round, the birds are “Wondering when / Their human friend / Would come to free them”: now the narrator is projecting complicity onto the birds, seeing himself as a conspirator, supplanting the birds’ owners as the centre of their world. That the song is specifically set in a farmhouse is apt: the birds aren’t caged inside a normal house, but inside a place that was already designed to imprison animals, already the site of civilisation’s intersection with nature. The song closes on an ambiguous note: “When the last day came / I took my time / They called my name / And revved the car / When nature calls / You must reply / They laughed, waving goodbye / To Paradise Farm”. We know that Neil is tarrying. The question is: is he staying behind to covertly release the birds from Paradise Farm, or is he just taking one last look at them – bidding his caged friends a repressed, impotent farewell? Is it Neil’s parents who, thinking he’s using the bathroom, laugh that “nature calls” – a rather elegant songwriting joke paralleling his desire to free the birds with an actual biological compulsion – or is it the birds themselves who laugh as they answer the non-euphemistic call of nature and fly out the window? This ambiguity, and the possibility that it cloaks a disappointingly realistic answer, raises another question: is “Birds of Paradise Farm” a true story? Hannon’s mentions of his own name, address, and family do suggest so, and while the happy bird-freeing ending we anticipate would have placed the song firmly in fantasy territory, the ambivalent conclusion we actually get is decidedly more like one of the strange, unsatisfying, firmly non-narrative moments that constitute our actual lives. In Hannon’s ur-text, A Room with a View, Lucy Honeychurch’s only emotional outlet is the piano; he found the film revelatory “because it was all about living life as art, rather than just living life to get through another day.” Perhaps the narrator of “Birds of Paradise Farm” freed those birds the only way he knew how, the only way he could manage: by writing them into a song.
There’s a touch of “The Summerhouse” about this line... I wonder if they were somehow related at one time.
What I love most about this song (apart from the unusual lyrics) is that the music is a lovely blend of early 90s Pulp (especially the beginning, which wouldn't be out of place on Intro or His 'N' Hers) and 60s-inspired Saint Etienne. That Jarvis Cocker hilariously namechecked himself in a song ("I Spy") the previous year can't be a coincidence either.
Birds of Paradise Farm I'll admit that some of my early exploration of Divine Comedy was done via early MP3 trading sites like Limewire. Birds was one of the earlier tracks I found and I had no idea that it was a b-side. I loved it pretty much right away and later came to find that the quality of b-sides from DC was generally pretty high. I can only guess this song never saw release on an album because it just didn't fit in anywhere. 5/5 Casanova I have no idea if my individual songs scores would average out to be the same, but when thinking of how I feel about the album overall, I would give it a 4.5/5. Despite some ill considered lyrics there is tons to love about this album. To me it is maybe second strongest as an album, right after Promenade. Did I give Promenade a 5/5? I hope so. Regarding My Life Story: I read about both bands in passing before I heard either. I didn't end up hearing any MLS until well after I'd heard Divine Comedy and I was not impressed. My Life Story sounds like what I thought Divine Comedy would sound like before I heard them and was pleasantly surprised. To me, MLS just sounds like strings added to generic, crappy, third rate, brit-pop songs. Admittedly, I have not gone deep.
Well, livingforever has already given his opinion, and I would like to add my own endorsement of particularly their second album, and to a lesser extent their first, and to a great number of their early b-sides which are often better than the album tracks - a sure sign of a band that took their art very seriously. (The third album sounded like a whole other band, one I didn't like at all). But it's hard to give you a youtube link of a song to start with because even to me they were an acquired taste- particularly the vocals, and some of the more outrageous lyrics - and I can't think of one song that would be sure to convince you straight away. With me, I saw them play live and casually heard their records for ages before it really sunk in how much craft had gone into some of their songs and arrangements.
Who knows? Maybe the songs I heard were all off the third album. As I said, I did not go deep. I'm always happy to be wrong, so if you think of one that might convince me feel free to share.
I completely agree with you. Since Liberation is still my favourite of the four albums so far, it's no wonder that this song gets a higher score than most of Casanova: 4.5/5. I was tempted to give it a 5, but I'm not keen on the melody and mannered vocal style of the middle eight. From Leonardo da Vinci unleashed: the animal rights activist within the artist : What I most vividly remember is a picture in the Ladybird book of Leonardo releasing a bird he had just bought at market from its cage, while amazed bystanders look on. This illustrates a claim in Giorgio Vasari's life of Leonardo, first published in 1550. Vasari says the genius so loved animals that he bought caged birds – sold in Italy at that time as food, as well as pets – simply to let them go.It sounds like a wild bit of hagiography. It obviously associates Leonardo with the image of Saint Francis of Assisi, who preached a sermon to the birds [...].
Birds of Paradise Farm A great little B-side with a wonderful melody that just rolls and bounces along. A very cheesy sounding middle eight instrumental break that somehow still manages to fit with the surrounding instrumentation. I agree that it would have sounded out of place on the Casanova album, but that doesn't matter as I don't care about the cohesiveness of albums. 4.2
Argh, I see that I managed to contradict myself in two sequential posts! That's what comes from not having English as my mother tongue. "Cohesiveness" was the wrong word to use in my original post on the album Casanova. Perhaps "consistency" would have been better. Because yes, consistency is important, but cohesiveness doesn't matter much to me.
With that misunderstanding explained, I should perhaps also mention that I don't really listen to music through albums. I might have mentioned this before, but an album to me is mainly a collection of songs. After having bought an album, I generally listen to it twice, find out which songs I like, and add them to my digital collection of songs. Which means that after that, I only listen to the songs that I enjoyed. I'm sure that that's anathema to some of you guys, and there's certainly some truth in what people say that some songs require further listening to really get you. But I'm fairly happy with my own music experience. And it should be said that at those times when I don't have a TBLT (to be listened to) pile of newly bought albums, I generally pick out some of my old CDs and have a re-listen. So it does happen that I find new favourites later on. This whole thing just to explain why to me the cohesiveness of albums is less important, it's the quality of the individual songs that matter.
That is interesting! And probably explains why you rate “Promenade” and “Casanova” much lower as albums than I do. To me, both are perfectly sequenced experiences with a beginning, middle and end. A sort of “novel/film in album form”. And in fact sometimes the transition from one song to another is part of what I like about the songs - so yeah; I don’t understand wanting to just pull out a few songs from each to stick into a playlist, but that doesn’t mean I think you shouldn’t do it!
Thank you! That explains that part then (could've done my own research, but hey...) Casanova as a whole for me probably ties with Liberation as my second favourite / most listened to album. I didn't score those two, but would've given Promenade 4.8 (that burp knocks off a decimal point, and Neptune's Daughter knocks off another for being a bit too poncey...!), and Liberation 4.4 as its so charming but does feel a bit all over the place sonically. But this is about Casanova - 4.4/5 from me overall. I don't have a problem with the supposed problematic parts as I understand it to be in part a character piece, and in part critical of that kind of man/that part of Neil's own masculinity which he perhaps chased after but was at the same time deeply uncomfortable with. Aside from this, it was the mid-90s and Neil was 25 years old. No revisionism needed! Musically it sounds gorgeous and varied, but the sound holds together as one although there's no strong storyline as in Promenade. Its one that you can put on in the background but there's also more to get from it on a closer listen, although perhaps not as much as some TDC records. I think I'm scoring it highly on the sound of it really, rather than lyrical content!
Birds Of Paradise Farm is the first non-album track to feel genuinely worthwhile; happily, the first of many. It'd be interesting to know from a timing point of view, at hat point the decision was made. As others have said, it wouldn't really fit on Casanova: too obviously biographical (true or not, I don't know), not the right theme, stylistically different sound. Maybe it was always intended to be a b-side? Maybe it was left over from previous writing sessions? Maybe it had the potential to be an album track but things took a different turn. I think it probably is one of the better TDC b-side. Light, breezy, near-disposable, but saved by telling an interesting story. The hammond solo is a musical highlight, and the split-octave vocals are a nice touch. Some nice guitar in the background too. It sounds like a real 'band' track, so it's ironic that Neil recorded it pretty much on his own - I didn't realise that was the case until today. It doesn't move me ever so much, I don't think, but I certainly enjoy it. 3.5/5
