If I make impossible demands of The Divine Comedy, it’s the fault of Absent Friends. The album of the year set the bar for the gig of a lifetime. (For which title it would have to go toe-to-toe with Dexys miraculous gig in Vicar St. last November.)
And so an impressively grandiose orchestral ensemble and a half-cut Neil Hannon, playing one of the songbooks of the decade, provided an abundance to enjoy. A stuffed Gaiety even heard Ed Byrne spread the word of Bill Hicks backed by the blissful ‘The Booklovers’. This was all good; really, really good.
But not good enough. Absent Friends is great not because of the return to strings and suits and Scott Walker. It’s because at heart even its most ornate songs are simple, economical, uncommonly truthful expressions of primal emotions. Either Neil Hannon misrepresented his album tonight or I’ve been giving undue credit.
Take the narrator’s aching remembrance in ‘Our Mutual Friend’: “We sang a song that I can’t sing anymore”. Why not? Well, once he duetted with a would-be, long-gone lover and now the ever-intruding memory—“When I sleep, I visualise her” — hurts like fuck. It is unapologetic tragedy.
So let it be tragic! Tellingly, Hannon tonight delivered the line that copyright law prevented from appearing on the album: “We sang ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”’. Why sing the perfect words you wrote yourself when you can revert to the clever, superfluous Scott reference? Why make the crowd uncomfortable with solemn beauty — ‘Freedom Road’ was nowhere on the lengthy set list — when you can toss out, with a nod and a wink, a ‘National Express’ you no longer care about at all.
Also, Neil Hannon will not enter the pantheon — where Bill Hicks and Kevin Rowland hang out — until he learns to play songs as explicitly close to his heart as ‘Charmed Life’ and ‘Sunrise’, minus the self-effacing, ingratiating spoken intros. The need to keep the mood light, when it’s not, suggests a lack of confidence in the ability of his songs to move people as deeply as he was moved to write them. It’s a small point but it continues to niggle. Dexys never had to hide behind irony.