The charmed life of Neil Hannon

For once the location fits the subject. The Library Bar of the Central Hotel is all hushed mutterings and plush bookshelves and velvety drapes and soft candlelight. It could be gentrified Dublin a century ago, with Yeats and AE and assorted Hellfire Clubbers lurking in shadowy corners resurrecting The Dead. It hardly needs to be stated that Neil Hannon looks quite at home here, loosening his tie and sipping a drink at the end of a day’s promo chores for the sixth full-length Divine Comedy album, the rather splendid Absent Friends.

As you join us, we’re discussing the fanfare for the uncommon man of the title tune, which boasts amongst its charms an audacious arrangement suggesting everything from Scott Walker to Busby Berkeley to Oklahoma.
“Every time the strings go ‘diddle-liddle’ my wife goes ‘Dynasty!’ and I have to hit her,” Hannon laughs, before quickly adding, “Don’t write that I hit my wife in the magazine!”
Damn it, I always wanted to begin an interview by asking the subject if he’d stopped beating his wife yet. But Neil Hannon doesn’t look like that sort of bloke, and he’s certainly not in that frame of mind. “Refreshed and anxious to proselytise”, the singer is somewhat relieved by the uniformly positive notices the new album has been receiving, an antidote to the polite but muted response to Regeneration a couple of years ago.
Shortly after that last album’s release, Hannon elected to disband the touring line-up and strike out anew, a decision not taken lightly, but one that seems to have panned out for the singer. Absent Friends is his Barry Lyndon: a gorgeously photographed and costumed portrait of human foibles and failings.
“It’s funny because visually it seems to have a resonance with how I kind of want the music to feel as well,” Hannon says, ever so slightly tipsy from his second G&T. “I always try and replicate that night-before-Christmas kind of vibe. It’s dark, it’s freezing, and yet there are little lovely lights everywhere. There’s that Camus quote on the inside of Scott 4 that says everybody’s artistic life is spent trying to replicate the first time his heart opened, and it’s totally true. Just basically the first time that something really completely chimed with you, I think that’s what you’re constantly harking back to and trying to get to happen.”
Which is a nice way of saying we’re all perpetual teenagers.
“I suppose so. But if it happens when you’re 60, then…”
Then you’ve had a pretty crummy life. And Hannon has had nothing of the sort, a fact to which he testifies on the new album’s closing tune ‘Charmed Life’, a prayer for his daughter Willow. Such songs are hard to carry off without sounding either softheaded or smug, but it’s a credit to Hannon’s skill as a singer and lyricist that he manages to do so.
“It’s a fine balancing act,” he concedes. “You don’t want to appear self-satisfied and also you want to avoid the huge gushing sentimentality of, ‘I’m a father!’ To be honest, I started writing it before Willow was born, which is kinda crazy, but I had the kind of rough idea and I finished it afterwards. I suppose it’s almost like this completely abstract phenomenon, new life, I had no idea how it would turn out. Still not sure. And you can’t promise her wealth or riches or fame or success, but just kind of hope that she’s lucky like her dad, y’know?”
When I suggest that the process of writing that song might have been a sort of meditative preparation for becoming a father, a means of staging the necessary death of the ladies’ man, Hannon says this:
“It’s not that you suppress a certain part of your character, ’cos you can’t ever suppress your libido, you can’t forget that you’re an animal who wants to shag everything that moves, but you can kind of channel it better.”
And how does he channel it?
“I kinda channel it through, sort of, if I see a beautiful woman, I go, ‘My god, she’s beautiful!”
Uh, okay. Does he mean he’s developed more of an aesthetic appreciation of the female form?
“Exactly. There’s something weird about the old, y’know, when I was in my twenties: ‘She’s beautiful – I want to shag her!’ It’s like a kind of possession thing; you have to kind of rule everything. You just change that. That’s how I managed it anyway. People have asked me how it had affected the writing, and yes, everything that happens to you affects the writing if you’re a proper writer. It would be really weird to have all this happen to you and then go and write songs about getting drunk.”
Nevertheless, he’s in the right town for intemperance. Hannon and his wife Orla have been resident in Dublin for some time now. Presumably they moved here the better to bring up a family?
“I suppose that was the prime objective,” he says. “Y’know, I think London had beaten us into submission, me and Orla. I’d been there for ten years. It was fine, I never imagined myself staying there forever, ’cos I don’t feel the need to be in that hub, and anyway most of that hub kind of thing is self-imagination on London’s part. We moved to Muswell Hill, which is a bit leafier, a bit nicer, and we could see ourselves just gradually drifting off into suburbia, and that was a scary thought. So much better really to move to another capital city, but just a slightly more chilled out one, a bit of culture going on.”
Does Neil think his audience will have a hard time adjusting to the idea of him as a reformed jack-the-lad?
“Well I think they had their hard time on Regeneration and there seems to be a collective sigh of relief with this one: ‘It’s got strings and he’s wearing suits – what more could we want!’ That’s an easy way in, but that’s okay, I don’t mind easy ways in as long as they get in and they listen to it. That’s why I’m not afraid of releasing ‘Come Home Billy Bird’ first. It’s catchy and it’s got drums, but it’s a way in. I kinda wanted to deconstruct the whole thing, ’cos so often you’ve got a band and then you stick some strings on the top to prettify it, and it’s too easy. I just wanted to use bits of the band as colour on the palette, put things in when they were necessary and not just out of habit.”
Did he ever wake up at any point over the last couple of years and go, “Shit, I’ve sacked the band! I’m on my own!”
“Not really, because I had to be sure before I did it. And it took a few months to build up the courage, not just to face them, but to face myself, and the realisation that this had to happen. Worse thing I’ve ever had to do, ’cos you feel like a heel. You feel horrible and treacherous. But I knew that it wasn’t just for me, that I couldn’t… I felt that they all needed to kind of go their separate ways as well. And they have.”

Maybe it’s something to do with parenthood teaching a person that they’re no longer the centre of the universe, but as a songwriter, Hannon now appears better equipped to inhabit other people’s perspectives. At several junctures on Absent Friends he writes in the third person, and to good effect.
“My manager Natalie actually said, ‘Why can’t you write about other people?’” Hannon says, “and I have in the past found it very hard… it’s not about ego funnily enough, it’s more about not feeling that you’re worthy: ‘How can I write about other people’s lives when I haven’t lived it?’ So its almost like you have to allow yourself to feel that you know enough, that you’ve attained a certain degree of wisdom over the years, that you know how people think and feel.”
Certainly, much of the dramatic tension in the music stems from Hannon’s layering of larger than life string arrangements over descriptions of humdrum situations – be it Billy Bird the commercial traveller trying to catch a flight home to see his son’s football match, or the student flat vignette of ‘Mutual Friends’.
“I enjoy heightening the mundane in a way,” he maintains, “because people’s lives are 98% humdrum: doing the washing up and making sure you’ve got enough clean socks for tomorrow and, ‘Oh shit we haven’t got any milk.’ And I don’t want to ignore all that because it’s a huge part of life, I think if you put those little details in songs then people have somewhere to place what you’re doing. Without that it all seems very vague.
“Y’know, I hear a lot of singer-songwriters, and I’m not going to diss anybody ’cos I’ve grown well out of that, it always rebounds on me, but I always feel slightly abstracted from it, because it doesn’t seem to be grounded in any kind of reality that I understand. It’s more like Magritte pictures; you’ve got your businessmen in your average suburban house, except there’s a train coming out of the fireplace or something like that. In ‘Mutual Friends’ it’s just a guy who happens to have had a bit of a bad night, but it’s a complete tragedy in musical terms. And because of that, it actually moves me in a way that most of my songs never do.”
Gainsbourg was really good at that on songs like ‘The Ticket Puncher’ and ‘Non Affair’. His strings are…
“Very romantic and melodramatic. Just kinda little tragedies. But the big tragedies don’t interest me!”
Except for perhaps on a piece of music like ‘Wreck Of The Beautiful’, an eerie neo-classical maritime ballad in the Walker-sings-Brel mode, the first song of its type Neil has ever attempted.
“It’s funny that,” he says, “I kinda always meant to and I never got around to it. At face value it is about a ship, but it is just an allegory for an old friend of mine, who shall remain nameless. I thought, ‘How best to write a song about this person without them suing me?’ And that was the result. Kind of like the ‘Wreck Of The Ancient Mariner’ or something.”
This writer took it at face value as a straightforward ode to a big old boat.
“Well I’m very pleased that you did, because that’s all it needs to be, and in a way that’s a truer kind of emotion than the underlying reason for it. Because I would feel just as sorry for the ship, that’s the kind of guy I am – I feel sorry for dogs and inanimate objects! I remember there was a painting, a print of Turner, ‘The Fighting Temeraire’, which is one of the last sailing ships of the British Navy, and it was a picture of it being brought in to be broken up, and it always moved me.”
So for Neil Hannon, Absent Friends has opened up no end of musical and thematic possibilities, and he seems to be revelling in these new freedoms – and conversely, the discipline demanded by them.
“I kind of sat down to write this with a view to stopping so much experimentation, to be honest,” he admits. “I’d experimented all my life, but on this one, I wanted to write a record that was kind of at peace with itself, and wasn’t trying to go somewhere. I just wanted to arrive at a destination, some sort of conclusion as to what I wanted to do musically, and this is what I want to do. I think I’m just getting better at it to be honest. I want to make music that makes my soul happy.”

Absent Friends is out now on EMI