The Divine Comedy Live at Vicar St., Dublin

Imagine you’re decked out in your finery for an evening of pastoral and littoral songs of sex and death by a suave European boulevardier, when you’re accosted by an Irish band with a drum machine doing Kraut rock and borscht bop like they invented it. To the unending delight of the crowd, the choice of Neosupervital to support The Divine Comedy was a good one, as they clearly share the desire that art should draw attention to its artfulness. And how many guest acts finish a set where someone else’s notoriously picky audience are chanting their name, website and myspace address?
No stranger to a bit of Kraftwerk himself, Neil Hannon and his coterie of elegant musicians slink onstage to conduct for us an evening of rapturous delight, opening with ‘To Die A Virgin’ which sets the tone. Unsurprisingly, the petit mort is ubiquitious; from the prelapsarian ‘Secret Garden’ to the prescient jeremiad ‘Generation Sex’.
The new album also carries a cover of The Associates’ sticky carpet number ‘Party Fears Two’. A fitting addition to Hannon’s canon, it’s another sleazy number comparable to ‘Weekend’ or ‘In And Out In Paris And London’ as it’s performed in so duplicitously stylish a way as to eclipse the grimy misdeeds it celebrates.
There were also moments of sweetness and light, the roseate ‘Mother Dear’ for instance clearly stirred emotions as much as the refulgent ‘Charmed Life’, and those circumambient fluffy, warm feelings served as noble sacrifice to the show’s dynamics when they were ruthlessly dashed by the fantastically ignominious ‘Charge’.
We move along to Promenade classic ‘Tonight We Fly’ with Bowie fellatio-style guitar-playing action, and then quick a word from Alfie. The audience, now sweaty, giddy – and apparently drunk on possibilities – behold this beautiful porcelain man before them. A performer perpetually surprised by applause and whose composure it still disturbs after more than a decade of critical regard, with neither shirt ruffled nor hair misplaced, he coyly thanks them for “jumping up and down at the right bits”.