Apr, 2025
Achilles In The Trench
'Achilles' now has a video every bit as beautiful and moving as the song it accompanies. Taken from the forthcoming album 'Rainy Sunday Afternoon', the new single is yet another example of Neil Hannon's peerless songwriting.
"‘I saw a man this morning who did not wish to die’. So goes the opening lines of Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s 1915 poem, Achilles in the Trench. I read a newspaper article about it around the time of the various WW1 centenaries, and was very struck by it. The growing dread of the young classics scholar as he waits to board a troop ship for Gallipoli. ‘Shells and hells for me’."
"I instantly felt tremendously grateful to have grown up in the postwar oasis of calm. To have made it to my forty-third birthday, outliving Shaw-Stewart by some fifteen years. I trust he wouldn’t mind that I pilfered a few of his lines. I hope it draws attention to his writing, his sacrifice, and the sacrifice of his contemporaries. Especially in these fraught times."
"As you may have gleaned from 43 becoming 53, this song has been around quite a while. It wasn’t right for the romantically inclined Foreverland. Then we recorded two very different arrangements for Office Politics, but it stubbornly refused to put its best foot forward. I made another attempt at it for this record almost out of habit, and lo, it was good! A sort of Morricone/Cash mash-up. I like to think that Achilles somehow knew that a moody reflective album like Rainy Sunday Afternoon was its last best chance of being heard, and got its act together pronto."
The video for 'Achilles' was entrusted to long-term collaborator, Raphaël Neal who has now produced six videos for The Divine Comedy. The French director and photographer worked closely with Neil to bring this unique vision to life.
"The ‘Achilles’ music video is probably my favourite work I've ever done for The Divine Comedy. In the past, our videos often had a narrative, but this time, there would be no story, Neil visualising instead a tableaux-based studio video."
"Some scenes, like the one where the WW1 soldier imagines himself as Achilles, illustrate the song and the original poem by Patrick Shaw-Stewart. Others take us somewhere else. Yet they all say something about the themes of the song: getting older, reflecting on death and, at the heart of this existential struggle, bravery.”