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Almost three decades after The Divine Comedy’s third album Casanova conferred unlikely pop stardom upon him, Neil Hannon is visited by a memory that brings a smile to his face. It concerns the faint sense of irritation he used to feel when people used to try and stick a genre on him. Baroque pop – he used to bristle against that one. And now? “Baroque pop? What does that mean? Does it indicate string arrangements? Ornately detailed melodies? Well, I love all that stuff!” In this, he is far from alone of course. In 2022, three years after The Divine Comedy’s twelfth album Office Politics saw them land their first ever top five position for a studio album, they repeated the feat with the career-spanning anthology Charmed Life. Last year, saw his motion picture soundtrack to Wonka oust Barbie from the top of the Official Compilations Chart, in the process introducing the creator of modern standards such as Something For The Weekend, National Express and Our Mutual Friend to a whole new audience.

As it happens, those new converts really couldn’t have come along at a better time. With Rainy Sunday Afternoon, Neil has created a sonic montage of all the things that make you search for The Divine Comedy on your preferred music portal. You may have suspected as much if you heard the first song to serve notice of the album’s arrival. Neil was moved to write Achilles after reading Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s 1915 poem Achilles In The Trench, which portended the fate which awaited its author on a French battlefield two years later. Neil had been sitting on the song for ten years, trying to figure out how he could best honour a lyric which encapsulates “the growing dread of the young classics scholar as he waits to board a troop ship for Gallipoli.” When Neil alighted upon the bittersweet canter of the version that opens the record, the song seemed to set out the sonic terrain on which, over time, the remainder of the album would be assembled. 

There’s no getting away from the fact that Rainy Sunday Afternoon features some of Neil’s most personal songs to date. These range from the rueful reminiscences of a lockdown quarrel detailed in the title track – in which a wound-licking retreat to the bedroom culminates in contrition – to the loss of Neil’s father Bishop Brian Hannon, whose Alzheimers diagnosis back in 2008 had already inspired a classical piece entitled To Our Fathers In Distress (premiered in 2014 at the Royal Festival Hall). Fast-forward to 2023 and Neil found himself humming a tune whilst out walking his dogs – a tune which would gradually morph into The Last Time I Saw the Old Man. At times like this, he says, “the prospect of revisiting painful memories isn’t altogether pleasant, but you know you have to go there.” For a while, the song lay half-finished until Neil found himself at his father’s old piano in the house where he grew up. The result is a masterclass of elegant devastation, which reveals itself over strings that seem to keep their distance – respectful of the farewell being played out – and Tom Rees-Roberts’ flugelhorn stretching out languorously between the verses.

When the arc of a lifetime reaches its apex, the view ahead is as clear as the view behind you. Rainy Sunday Afternoon is a record that casts its gaze in both directions, sometimes both in the space of one song. Taking its inspiration from the title of Carson McCullers’ novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter “feels like the perfect metaphor for our journey through life, irrespective of the outcome. And even though I’ve found my panacea in relationship terms, I can remember what it was like when that felt a very long way off.” 

It’s a song that finds a corollary of sorts in another of the album’s indisputable highlights. When it comes to love songs, of course, Neil has form. In 1997, he filled an album with them (A Short Album About Love), but I Want You gets to the emotional and philosophical heart of the matter by transmitting from the exosphere of true adoration. This is a love that – should they make themselves vulnerable to it – has the power to redeem “messianic autocrats or tycoons who spend billions to ride rockets into space.” And whatever’s left to say that words can’t convey comes with the musical transposition that ushers in the emotional reveal of the words “I want you”. Even if he makes it to that line without his bottom lip starting to go, you might not.

Something similar could be said about All the Pretty Lights, a paean to formative Christmas journeys from Northern Ireland to London. It evokes the synaesthetic riot of the big city seen through the saucer eyes of a small child with a wonderment that calls to mind Paul Williams or the later work of Paddy McAloon. “Everybody grows up/Things can’t stay the same,” sings Neil, “What I’d give just to relive a single hour again.” Written for his daughter Willow (who also offers backing vocals) as she left home, a comparable longing also colours Invisible Thread, albeit one eclipsed by the shared excitement at the possibilities that sit at the intersection of childhood and adulthood. “I’m sewn into your collar/You’re stitched into my heart,” he sings – and, coming as it does at the very end of the album, the ensuing silence feels all too real.

Unlikely as it may seem on the face of it, The Man Who Turned Into a Chair was seeded from an aside issued by Neil’s wife Cathy Davey, remarking that if he carried on sat in the same chair watching the cricket, he risked “turning into a fucking chair”. No sooner had her aside germinated into a lyric than matters took their own feverish course, resulting in a waltz-time parable that bears all the hallmarks of a Hannon classic – especially when a Greek chorus of female voices intercepts the narrative to impassively observe the terrible fate that has befallen the song’s protagonist. 

Here and on Down the Rabbit Hole – an allegorical tale set in a parallel world where “we are always right [and]/We’ve gone too deep to turn back now” – one is compelled to wonder whether the experience of working on Wonka has permeated Neil’s own storytelling. There’s certainly something deliciously Dahl-ish about the fate of the latter song’s protagonist who “slowly slipped away/We lost a little more of him each day/First his feet, then his legs/Then his heart, then his head/Until just one hand survived/To wave his friends and family bye bye.”

“I think that, to an extent, I was already in that world before Wonka came along,” avers Neil. “In life, there are flawed characters that demand to be immortalised in song. And regrettably, there are more of those than ever.” And so to Mar-a-Lago by the Sea, for which you are invited to imagine a dystopian future in which The Divine Comedy has become the house band in the Florida resort being kept open for the infirm Donald Trump once he’s been wheeled out of prison. For this most queasy of mambos, Neil “kept saying to the guys [in the band], ‘It has to sound sicker.’ And we made sure that none of the instruments were tuned before we laid it down.” 

Even the detuned instruments, however, can’t detract from the fact that Rainy Sunday Afternoon is the most sonically sumptuous album to which The Divine Comedy have put their name since Neil’s realisation, with 2004’s Absent Friends, that “it’s ok to prefer Rachmaninov to the Rolling Stones; Alan Bennett to Batman Returns.” Weeks of feverish rehearsal and scoring (by Neil and co-arranger Andrew Skeet) preceded the intense fortnight in Abbey Road Studios which saw the songs come together. “It’s still,” enthuses Neil, “a moment of pure magic and huge relief when the orchestra comes in and suddenly, all these dots on sheet music are released into the air like butterflies! That’s a feeling you can’t buy. Except that, actually, you can buy it. I did buy it. But I could barely afford it.” 

And yet, here he is, thirteen albums down the line, delivering what might be the most quintessential of all Divine Comedy albums. What keeps him coming back for more? Quite simply, it’s the fact that Neil Hannon remains obsessed with the next song and what it might have to tell him. “In pop, we privilege teen-angst over the challenges of middle age and beyond, and that’s fine,” he smiles, "But as a songwriter, if you choose not to live in denial of it, age is a gift.” Long may it keep giving. 

Written By Pete Paphides.
Photography By Kevin Westenberg.