This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Neil Hannon could be a character from one of his own songs as he walks into the Royal Festival Hall, looking elegantly dishevelled in a grey tweed jacket, pulling a suitcase behind him and direly in need of a coffee. Since 1989, Hannon has been the sole constant member of The Divine Comedy, surviving both failure and (sometimes even more perilously) success. At 55, he might be at the peak of his powers.
We’re meeting here because The Divine Comedy are currently in rehearsals for a show at the RFH this July. It will mark a crowning achievement on a spectacular twelve months for the band, starting with the early previews for their 2026 album Rainy Sunday Afternoon. When it was released in September, it reached number four on the UK album chart — The Divine Comedy’s highest placement for a studio album in a 37-year career. Sold-out tours of the UK and Europe followed.
More importantly, Rainy Sunday Afternoon is also one of Hannon’s best albums: wise, witty, emotionally acute and melodically irresistible. “I’m very, very happy with it,” he says. “I think finally I’m kind of giving up on any semblance of being popular or contemporary sounding. It’s too late.” Now he’s older, he says he has a “take me or leave me” attitude. “The vast majority leave me,” he adds, self-effacingly, although this isn’t entirely true. As a live act, The Divine Comedy’s popularity has steadily boomed over the last 15 years.
That’s a reflection of the fact that, with its current line-up, the band has simply improved with age. “I really love the way we sound,” says Hannon. That includes the way his own voice has changed. “There’s less elasticity in my voice than there used to be — I can’t hit the crazy high notes — but I’m a better singer.” He’s right: Hannon’s controlled, emotional delivery on “The Last Time I Saw the Old Man” from Rainy Sunday Afternoon (about his own father’s death) is one of the greatest performances of his career, as moving live as it is on record.
Of course, some things are harder than they used to be: travelling is more of an ordeal than when Hannon was in his twenties. “In the old days, I loved everything about touring — the camaraderie and the drinking. As the years have progressed, it’s gone the other way. I love my friends in the band, but after about three days, you think, ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t do this anymore.’ Once I’m on stage it’s a relief.”
There’s more of a physical toll for showmanship, too. Hannon, who has the demeanour of an English lecturer offstage (despite never going to university), becomes a man possessed when he’s in front of an audience. “The rolling around in the aisle, that’s fine. It’s trying to get up again that’s the hard bit,” he laughs. And there are some lyrical subjects that have started to feel uncomfortable, specifically sex: “It begins to look like you’re a dirty old man. There’s plenty of the nineties stuff that I find difficult to sing live.”
The Divine Comedy’s chart breakthrough in 1996 came as part of the second wave of Britpop, at the height of lad culture. In 1994, the launch of Loaded magazine and the release of Blur’s Parklife and Oasis’s Definitely Maybe had marked a return of a brash, funny kind of masculinity after the drippiness of the so-called new man. But soon, this was curdling into something more cynical and misogynistic.
Ironic sexism looked a lot like the real thing. When Blur scored their first number one with “Country House” in 1995, it was accompanied by a Benny Hill-esque video full of scampering Page 3 girls. Female Britpop stars like Miki Berenyi of Lush and Louise Wener of Sleeper have recalled how the press pushed them into being sex objects first, artists second, whilst male musicians openly collected teenage groupies.
Hannon never really fit the lad mould. The Divine Comedy had started out as an uninspiring indie outfit: their 1990 debut album, Fanfare for the Comic Muse, featured jangly guitars, muddy vocals, and far too much of a debt to early REM and Felt. The album failed to chart and was subsequently deleted. You can now listen to it on YouTube, although Hannon doesn’t think it’s due for a critical reappraisal. “Well, you’ve heard it now, and you realise why I wouldn’t push people in its direction,” he says.
For the next album, Liberation, he kept the band name but drastically changed the sound, layering harpsichords and strings under lyrics that reference Seamus Heaney (“Death of a Supernaturalist”), F. Scott Fitzgerald (“Bernice Bobs her Hair”) and Wordsworth (“Lucy”). Most importantly, it unveils the full loveliness of Hannon’s baritone, with its choirboy purity befitting the son of a clergyman (Hannon’s father, Brian Hannon, served as bishop of Clogher).
That was followed by chamber pop masterpiece Promenade, which blends classical instrumentation with perfectly structured songs, and highbrow themes with delightful silliness, often in the same song. “Don’t Look Down” is a witty declaration of atheism that ends with a God-like voice delivering the warning of the title. Like its predecessor, Promenade is ragingly literary — especially on “The Booklovers”, on which Hannon namechecks 300 years of novelists over a string arrangement.
I tell him that, when I was 14, I decided to read every writer in the song. He looks amused: “I’m sorry to make you do that, because I certainly didn’t. I’ve read maybe a quarter of them.” (That quarter does include the erotica author Anaïs Nin, who he says he read with “great gusto” in his twenties.) “The whole thing is the biggest act of pseudo-intellectualism,” he laughs fondly; he says his biggest regret about the song now is not including Dodie Smith, of I Capture the Castle and 101 Dalmatians.
Gorgeous as it is, Promenade still didn’t give the Divine Comedy commercial success. But as the nineties ticked past their midpoint, Hannon says, “I saw the way the wind was blowing.” Britpop had taken its cues from the bands of the sixties (the Beatles, the Kinks), and now other influences from the era were also coming to the fore: John Barry soundtracks, big orchestral arrangements and easy listening — all things that Hannon loved.
“I thought, I can do that. There was a knowingness, but it’s just a jumping-off point to do something interesting.” The result was the 1996 album Casanova, and lead single “Something for the Weekend” — a galloping story of lust and betrayal built around a reference to Stella Gibbons’s novel Cold Comfort Farm. It became the band’s breakthrough. “There were five years where it was nuts,” he says. “Not Blur or Oasis type nuts, but nuts for me.” He threw himself into the role of pop star, with all the absurdity that entailed.
“I’ve done certain things that have rather crossed a line, certainly for my mother. Every year Cosmo would do the male nudity edition, and I posed in a tribute to Lovesexy by Prince, draped in a lily or an orchid, not wearing any clothes. My areas were covered.” A neighbour informed Hannon’s mother, to her horror. “I was very apologetic. But that was part of the fun, pretending to be a sex symbol when I had no right to.” (Despite extensive googling, I have sadly found no trace of this photoshoot online.)
Casanova established Hannon’s persona: foppish, horny and self-satirising. His songs of that era were often deft send-ups of masculinity. “Becoming More Like Alfie” anatomises the nineties drive towards laddishness, with a protagonist who finds himself giving up love and instead embracing “the kind of life I had reserved / For other guys less smart than I”.
Of course, Hannon wasn’t the only artist toying with these ideas. Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker was also delving into the darkness of male sexuality, and the results, especially with Pulp’s 1998 album This is Hardcore, can sound shockingly brutal in retrospect. “There’s plenty of Jarvis’s stuff which is certainly risky,” says Hannon. “I love Pulp, but there is a context problem after a while.”
That’s especially so when recent cultural shifts seem to have closed down the space for talking honestly about desire. “Sometimes these days you get the feeling that you’re meant to think that sex and the problems that go along with it don’t exist any more, and it’s not suitable for making entertainment. But it’s not about being pervy. You’re just trying to investigate the fact that there are pervs in the world, and unfortunately they’re all men.”
“Michael Jackson made some of the greatest pop records ever, and he was definitely not a good lad. But I have always had the ability to compartmentalise art from the people who made art. I can perfectly happily watch Woody Allen films, and God knows there’s so many amazing painters and novelists and classical composers through the centuries who were despicable people. That’s the wonderful thing about art — it rises above the frail and flawed humans that make it.”
But long before cancel culture was a thing, Hannon was ready to move away from smut. After Casanova, A Short Album About Love offers a deliriously romantic antidote to Alfie-style cynicism. Then came Fin de Siècle, which honed Hannon’s character-sketch comedy to perfection and introduced a magnificently eclectic range of influences, from Kraftwerk to Brecht. Or, as Hannon puts it: “It’s mental. Possibly one of the strangest records ever made.”
It was also remarkably prescient — sometimes deliberately (“Generation Sex” is a perfect three-minute skewering of the tabloid culture that would dominate the next decades), and sometimes accidentally. “When I was apocalyptically listing all of the possibilities for the end of the human race on ‘Here Comes the Flood’, it was a joke,” he says. “I didn’t mean it. I thought, everybody’s so worried it’s gonna be exactly the same afterwards. I was so wrong about that.”
‘I stopped really caring about pop music after 2000. Arcade Fire were the last band I was totally on board with’
After six albums with the independent label Setanta, Hannon moved to Parlophone for 2001’s Regeneration. At the time, he was tired of his own persona, and suspected other people might be feeling the same. “At the end of the nineties, I was getting big vibes from the industry of ‘we’re bored, we want the fresh new thing’. I thought the only way to counter that is to be the fresh new thing.” Working with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Regeneration stripped away the orchestration for a rockier sound.
But it underperformed commercially. “It’s not a bad record. It’s just like, what the hell was that about?” The Divine Comedy made two more albums with Parlophone, featuring two of the greatest songs in Hannon’s discography (“Our Mutual Friend” on Absent Friends, and “A Lady of a Certain Age” on Victory for the Comic Muse), but chart success continued to drift away. By the end of the noughties, Hannon was labelless.
It was a precarious moment for the whole industry. Streaming was replacing record sales, and social media was taking over from music radio and TV. So Hannon did something radical: with his manager Natalie de Pace, he set up Divine Comedy Records. “At the time I was like, ‘Oh my God, is this like self-publishing your novel?’ But I went with it, because there really weren’t that many good options to sign to anybody else.”
In fact, it was a huge success. “I probably should have done it earlier. Apart from anything else, there’s the absolute 100 per cent control over what you do, and how you sell it.” Since then, every one of The Divine Comedy’s self-released albums (Bang Goes the Knighthood, Foreverland, Office Politics and Rainy Sunday Afternoon) has outperformed the last: a triumphant second act.
Today, Hannon gives the impression of being comfortably detached from the music industry. “I stopped really caring about pop music after 2000. Arcade Fire were the last band where I was totally on board.” He lives in County Kildare with his wife, the singer Cathy Davey (he has an adult daughter from his previous marriage). Hannon and Davey run the My Lovely Horse Animal Sanctuary, named after the faux-Eurovision song Hannon wrote for an episode of the sitcom Father Ted.
Hannon later collaborated with Ted’s co-writer Graham Linehan on a musical based on the show. This was ultimately cancelled, Linehan claims, because of his vocal opposition to trans activism. Hannon has subsequently avoided discussing Linehan, though he has said that very few songs had been written for the project by the time it was axed. One of these was repurposed for the 2023 movie Wonka, and Hannon says he’s keen to do more soundtrack work in future.
He deems his experiments in other genres less successful. In 2012, he wrote an opera based on the works of Tolstoy: “I was sitting there on the opening night and the closing night thinking, I’m not sure this is the area that you’re destined to work in.” Despite his manifest bookishness, his attempts at novel-writing have been abortive: “I’ve started about five books, and I’ve always realised by page three that I can’t write a book. Thank God for pop lyrics, because it’s a form I can work with.”
It’s a modest self-assessment from someone who, by any standards, could fairly claim to be amongst the greatest living songwriters — not just in Britain and Ireland, but in the world. But in midlife, Hannon has nothing left to prove. “I’ve reared the child, I’ve had some hits, I’ve been on Top of the Pops. What the fuck do I do now? The wonderful answer is, more of the same.”
