Casanova

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T. Bossenger wrote that, with Casanova, Divine Comedy frontman Neil Hannon "started going for a more straightforward pop tone as the base for his songwriting", resulting in the album having a more Britpop flow to it. When the bass gets slinky and busy during passages on “Charge” and “A Woman of the World” there are echoes of Climate of Hunter to be heard. L'épreuve de force pour le délicat Neil Hannon : recentrer son délirant opéra comique sur sa petite personne, retrouver au cœur du maëlstrom paranoïaque qui lui sert de dispositif guerrier un peu de la vérité d'une jeunesse ordinaire. The Walker style is arguably at its most obvious on Casanova – which makes it all the more enjoyable for me to listen to. The rest of the album is not at all like that, and has definite echoes of Bonzo Dog Doodah Band wackiness about it.

Two other singles released from the album, "Becoming More Like Alfie" and "The Frog Princess", charted at No. No doubt the fame from Father Ted helped make the album a commercial success (making it a gold record as well as boasting two Top 20 singles in the UK charts), but the strength of Casanova is earned in its own right – something all the more obvious in hindsight. The album's closing track, "The Dogs and the Horses", recorded at Abbey Road Studios, features a large orchestral ensemble which includes future members of the live band, namely Joby Talbot, Stuart 'Pinkie' Bates, Grant Gordon, and Bryan Mills.

The album is “inspired by the writings of the eighteenth century Venetian gambler, eroticist, and spy” (which Hannon himself details in the penultimate “Theme From Casanova”, using his best BBC voice as he ushers in a contrastingly gentle and ambling instrumental piece). Casanova featured more musicians than on the band's previous two albums, Liberation and Promenade, but like those two albums, Neil Hannon performed the majority of the instrumental parts himself, with co-producer/drummer Darren Allison directing proceedings. There will be others who can relate to that, but it’s by no means a requirement for enjoying Casanova. I may be ready to leave Father Ted behind in the vault of nostalgia in my mind, but Casanova I will keep coming back to – and not just for “Songs of Love”.

The song was later covered by Ben Folds on his EP Sunny 16 in 2003 and Peter Bjorn and John as part of Under the Radar's Covers of Covers album in 2022. It's probably in some ways DC's crudest album, but it's also crackling with brilliant lyricism and wit, and full of tracks that will stick in your head for days. By far the tightest of the band's earlier works it paved the way for not only more ambitious music from Neil Hannon over the course of the next few years but also left a permanent mark on the Brit-Pop genre, making The Divine Comedy a must have to many an indie lover. As his voice rose in the song, my heart opened and so did my mind; I had never heard music anything like this before. Walker might be gone, but the ways in which Hannon emulates him, captures his nuance and style, is like having someone putting out B-sides to Scott 1-4 across their own career.The album has been remastered from the original tapes at the legendary Abbey Road Studios by mastering engineer Frank Arkwright (Blur, The Smiths. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Thanks to orchestral arranger Joby Talbot, Hannon sounds truly like a timeless icon here, and that that icon is Scott Walker makes the album all the more enjoyable. As the Father Ted theme song was my entry point, it’s only predictable that I first found the original song where the theme appears, as part of the track “Songs of Love”.