“I’m certainly a student of 70s and 80s sitcoms,” admits Neil Hannon, a singer-songwriter who specialises in creating droll character studies for The Divine Comedy, his veteran pop/indie act that were divinely revived by 2016’s unexpectedly successful Foreverland (it reached No 7, their highest chart placing).
The softly spoken 48-year old’s excellent, experimental follow-up is a double album, Office Politics, which is littered with potential sitcom characters from “a bad guy climbing the greasy pole” on “Queuejumper” (“I jump the queue cos I’m better than you”), a middle-aged man who “doesn’t understand how the modern world works” on “I’m a Stranger Here” and the exquisite, Alan Bennett-esque “Norman and Norma” about a couple who marry in Cromer in April 1983 and end up joining a Norman/Anglo-Saxon re-enactment society in their retirement years because they’re both at a “bit of a loss”.
‘I don’t have the common touch, as everything I do is for me. I never take the general public into account at all’
He wrote the latter track, which has a whiff of Abba about it (“I keep saying I’m an Abba fan and it never appears in print, so I’m saying it again, I’m an Abba fan”) and is reminiscent of the bittersweet Richard Briers 80s sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles, at his home in Kildare after he discovered a note that just said “Norman and Norma” on it.
“In what weird, hallucinogenic drug trip did I write that down – and who are Norman and Norma?” he wonders, before giggling (he’s a giggler). “I remember getting out of bed at one in the morning, putting me socks on and singing, ‘Oh Norman, it’s never ever felt like this before.’ I thought, ‘That’s a good chorus,’ so I went down in my dressing gown to write the rest of the song.”
Yet it wasn’t easy to finish, because the first verse only covered the couple’s honeymoon and it was the kind of song where you need to know the “entire story” – from Norman and Norma’s early days to parenthood (they have three children: Nadia, Nora and Niamh) and retirement.
“I just wanted them not to go quietly and I was thinking of the Norman history association,” says Hannon, who rather resembles a venerable historian in his neat, all-brown ensemble.
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“I love history and seeing those people in the re-enactment societies, and wondering: who are they? Why do they do this? Do they get paid or do they do it for the mead? I thought that’s what Norman and Norma would end up doing at the weekends and they would love it and really get stuck in,” the Northern Irishman giggles.
The son of a lord bishop (Brian Hannon) with esteemed forebears (one ancestor was the Pasha of the White Nile), Hannon is one of the music industry’s most endearing (and enduring) eccentrics, or one-offs. He has survived and flourished for nearly 30 years and even managed to deliver two (very funny) albums about cricket (the poignant “The Umpire” and the particularly silly “Meeting Mr Miandad” are stand-outs) with his act The Duckworth Lewis Method, alongside Thomas Walsh of Pugwash.
“I don’t have the common touch, as everything I do is for me,” he confesses. “I never take the general public into account at all, which is half the reason I’m still here. If people like my stuff, they really like my stuff… [which] is sort of idiosyncratic or idiotic. It does mean that I’ll never be a world-beating person, because I just don’t please enough people.”
‘I’ll never be a world-beating person, because I just don’t please enough people’
For a brief period, during the height of mid-90s Britpop and the album Casanova (1996), Hannon did enjoy considerable fame with big hits such as the addictive “National Express”, saucy “Something for the Weekend” and poignant “The Frog Princess”, but after a slightly less successful time during the Noughties on a major label, Hannon appeared to find his absurdist voice (the humour is in the spirit of Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and Monty Python) with Duckworth Lewis, which channelled his heroes ELO and 10cc.
It seemed to free him up lyrically, allowing his wild imagination free rein.
“Part of the reason for making this a double album is to keep some of the weirdness,” he says. “Quite often with structured, 12-song albums, you end up weeding out the stuff that is not quite honed and in recent years I’ve been trying to keep more of the oddball stuff, because I think it’s equally useful.”
The 16-song Office Politics, which is a (sort of) concept album with an overarching theme about the depersonalised nature of work and modern life, is Hannon’s most ambitious and refreshingly offbeat record yet, with song titles such as “The Synthesiser Service Centre Super Summer Sale” and “Philip and Steve’s Furniture Removal Company”.
The latter is a particularly bold (and bonkers) track that imagines US composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich trying to produce a theme tune for a sitcom. (Hannon himself created the theme tune for The IT Crowd and wrote the fabulous “My Lovely Horse” for Father Ted; “I want to shower you with sugar lumps”). It’s a song that Hannon “absolutely adores” – though he’s “not even sure if it’s a song”.
Other stand-out esoteric songs on Office Politics are the poignant “Psychological Evaluation” in which a “tired” middle-aged man answers banal questions delivered by an automated (or vocoder) voice, and “Opportunity Knox”, in which his “grabby” protagonist murders “an international businessman” from one of his other songs, “Come Home Billy Bird” (from 2004’s Absent Friends).
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Hannon enjoys the idea of “recycling” his material. Could Office Politics make a musical? “People say this about every album I bring out,” says Hannon, gently dismissing the idea. “I always think that if I was going to write a musical, I would start differently. You could make a dramatic piece for the theatre but not a musical and I’m not sure it would be enjoyable,” he giggles, adding, “A producer would have to have a lot of faith.”
Hannon, who is never less than stimulating company, appears content. He is settled in a rural farmhouse with fellow singer-songwriter Cathy Davey, his partner of the past decade (who sings on the new album), and is working with the likes of Squeeze’s Chris Difford (who sings on “Absolutely Obsolete”).
However, there are quite a few topics that still vex him, including Brexit and immigration (“It’s just every man for himself – we are us and everyone else can go to hell. It’s so lacking in overview; every tribe has been migrants at one stage”), “mental” Morrissey (he used to be one of the “funniest writers” but seems to “have turned in on himself as time went on”) and contemporary singer-songwriters (“a load of old moaners, with not a lot to say”).
“Contemporary pop music is in a bit of a state,” he adds. “There is an awful lot of music that seems completely surplus to requirements. There’s the caveat that we said that about 80s pop music as well, and some of that was really good. It was very tribal at the time – ‘Well, the girls like Wham! so we can’t possibly’ – but I really like some Wham! and Duran Duran as well…”
‘Morrissey used to be one of the funniest writers but seems to have turned in on himself as time went on’
However, he saves his fiercest anger for computer games. “I read devastatingly sad statistics about computer games,” he grumbles. “There’s literally 100 times more money being made from games than music, and computer games don’t do anything for you – they don’t tell you anything about life.
“I play some games because I’m sitting on the loo and I’m bored,” he admits, “but it doesn’t cause you any wonderful emotional response, it doesn’t make you dance, what the f**k does it do? It just gives you something to kill, which is not a pleasant thing to do, so just stop everybody and start buying music again.” Starting with the weird and wonderful Office Politics…
‘Office Politics’ is out on 7 June. The Divine Comedy tour the UK in October, starting at Belfast’s Ulster Hall on 7 October
