The Divine Comedy

My love affair with The Divine Comedy began back in the late 90’s.

I had joined a local theatre group (Chelmsford Theatre Workshop – I know, amazingly they kept going even after I left a million years ago) and would go on to spend the next eight years of my life with and learning from brilliant, creative, funny, talented people and a guy called Piper***.

There was another chap there who was a year or so older than me, but was (and probably still is) a fantastic actor. Instinctive, natural, giving and thoroughly engaging as far as the audience was concerned and despite the fact that I – rightly – lost out on all the best parts to him, like everybody else in the group, I loved* him to bits. It was also him who got me hooked on The Divine Comedy from the moment he slotted the CD into his car and the opening bars of Something for the Weekend kicked in.

In 1998 they released my personal favourite album; Fin de Siècle, which I listened to incessantly with tracks like the cheeky Generation Sex and majestic The Certainty of Chance setting up home in my impressionable young brain. Neil Hannon’s capacity for lyrical storytelling is peerless in my book (exhibit a: listen to the later released tragic Our Mutual Friend), but the stand out track from Fin de Siecle is of course; National Express, which I defy anyone to listen to without smiling and bopping around at least a little bit! I genuinely can’t think of any other song where “crisps” feature or are so beautifully enunciated, nor indeed the reference to someone whose “arse is the size of a small countryyyyyy”.

I am delighted that I have also been able to indoctrinate my children into Neil Hannon’s later work with Queuejumper becoming an absolute mainstay of our holiday playlist.

However, following the rather brilliant couple of weeks I have had, it is Charmed Life which has formed my earworm for the day, sending me down a Neil Hannon rabbit hole and only popping my head back out again to rabbit on about how great they are.

I make no apologies (apart for today’s photo which is of the spacey insulation which has started going into the loft today).


*Yes, past tense. The last I heard was that he had died** in a tragic boating accident whilst starring in a gay porn adaptation of the Jerome K. Jerome classic; Three Men in a Boat. We begged him not to shoot film in an inflatable dinghy. There was never going to be enough room for the crew and the actors. And their fluffers. Begged him.

**This is a lie. The last I heard he was a happily married family man.

***Also loved, worshipped and adored by me.