The Divine Comedy – Casanova – Review

The Divine Comedy

Casanova (Setanta)
by Nik Rainey

Make no mistake, only an Englishman could’ve made this album. You don’t even need to put the CD on to suss that – look at the booklet’s portraits of the artist as a pale young man striking coolly self-conscious poses around Venice that would cause even Paul Weller in his deepest pseudo-Continental phase to blanch, the melodrama-dripping too-clever-by-three-quarters lyric sheet that would turn Oscar Wilde a heavy shade of Dorian Gray, and the credits that list sixteen violinists, six trumpeters, five cellists, two gigglers and even put the umlaut over the “u” in “Würlitzer”! You can just hear Neil Hannon (who, for all his auxiliary, is The Divine Comedy) chuckling phlegmatically and saying, “Pretentious? Moi?

And then you actually listen to the thing and cast all remaining doubt aside – this is Anglo-lemme-philia self-indulgence nonpareil. Hannon presents himself as sort of a photonegative of Morrissey. Not to say that he’s dark-skinned with a big white Jim Jarmusch `do, but that he plays the decidedly uncelibate, self-assured girl-chasing cad in his O-level-racked, too-many-hours-browsing-in-the-coffeehouse-bookstore way, and every bit as convincingly as Moz (that is to say, yeah, right). Early on, he sings about “Becoming More Like Alfie,” and that’s precisely what he’s shooting (from three inches left of the hip) for, delivering asides to the audience about his multitudinous libidinal conquests just like Michael Caine did in the French-kissing-clever British flick. And he chases the thickly-orchestrated ’60s soundtrack music with lyrics and vocals that are positively operatic in their sublime ridiculousness – I especially liked “Charge”‘s uproariously overwrought love-and-war analogy (“Carefully cut the straps of the booby-traps/ and set the captives free… Cannon to the left and cannon to the right/ they’ll go bang bang bang all night”). Its martial misogyny is made even sillier by Hannon’s alternating shift into Barry White grunts and a bleached-soul falsetto… Wow! Hetero camp!

As stated before, Casanova is as English as Mum and meat pie. Who but a Limey could blow his arrogance to Empire-sized proportions and slyly deflate it with every over-emotive syllable from his stiff upper lip? No one, I daresay. And should you entertain any lingering doubts, I refer you to the penultimate track, “Theme From Casanova,” where Hannon recites the closing credits in a Vivian Stanshall-at-the-BBC voice that says, yes, this is a concept album. But that should be no surprise – every English record released since 1967 has been a concept album. Singles included.