'Casanova' by The Divine Comedy

‘Casanova’ was Neil Hannon’s breakthrough album. For a few short years, the Divine Comedy became a vaguely famous band, and though ‘Fin de Siecle’ and ‘A Secret History’ maintained the momentum, ‘Casanova’ is responsible.

It’s also a remarkably confident album. Despite having two very low selling albums behind him at that point, Hannon sings like a star from the word go. ‘Something For The Weekend’, the song that would be his first hit single, is bold, overstated, slightly daft, and still rather wonderful a decade and a half later. Starting the album with this track, and then ‘Becoming More Like Alfie’ contrasts with his earlier albums which tended to build up a little more slowly. ‘Middle Class Heroes’ slows things down a little, but builds up the layers of orchestration wonderfully. ‘In and Out of Paris and London’ and ‘Charge’ are both wildly overblown chucks of innuendo, but tremendous fun, with ‘Charge’ in particular showing Hannon’s remarkable vocal range stretched to its limit. ‘Songs of Love’ is a perfectly placed moment of calm before the well formed stories of ‘The Frog Princess’ and ‘Woman of the World’.

‘Through A Long And Sleepless Night’ is both the climax of the album and it’s dark heart. It’s an intense rambling epic of a track, and another opportunity for Hannon to show what he can do with a bigger budget. ‘Theme From Casanova’ is slightly throwaway, but it provides a useful buffer between the previous track and ‘The Dogs and the Horses’ which plays out like the final song of a musical that hasn’t been written.

You could hate this album, easily. If you did, you’d criticise it for being excessive, overblown, pretentious, even absurd, and to be honest, it is all of those things. It’s also wonderful, and a fine example of why Neil Hannon is a talent to be treasured.