Album Review: The Divine Comedy - Bang Goes The Knighthood

Neil Hannon goes back to his Divine Comedy roots in Bang Goes the Knighthood for a punchy, if at times incoherent, tenth studio album.

As the photo on the front featuring Hannon in a bathtub with a bowler hat, a pipe, and a dog with a bejeweled collar suggests, the theme of the album is the tumultuous lives of the rich and famous. Hannon’s typically satiric and consistently amusing style achieves this brilliantly throughout. The opening track, ‘Down in the Street Below’, soars and then settles down to a simple piano and bass line which sees the fantastic line, “Your armchair is round and your glass is square, the clientele straight out of this month’s Vanity Fair”, invoking images of a trendy bar full of money-laden socialites high on…well, the high life.

This theme can take a more overt character in tracks such as ‘The Complete Banker’; for an idea of where this song goes one only needs to look at live performances where Hannon places more than a slight emphasis on the ‘B’ in ‘Banker’. This track sees Hannon vent some anger at recent behaviour on the stock markets with his portrayal of a banker who admits, “So I caused the Second Great Depression, what can I say? I guess I got a bit carried away”. Far from being a Billy Bragg-esque rallying cry to tear down the banks however, a light-hearted piano follows the banker who, ”longs for the good old days” when he rode “in a black Bentley with sweet Samantha riding next to me”. These songs, as well as the title track; a sympathetic account of an establishment figure visiting a dominatrix to escape the mundane realities of a respectable life, are an impressive display as any in Hannon’s career of his talent in developing the intricacies of his characters’ personalities in no more then a few lines.

Outstanding tracks are ‘Neapolitan Girl’, and the single, ‘At the Indie Disco’. The former features bouncy guitars and charming harmonies that somehow do not jar with a story of the exploits of an Italian lady of the night in the aftermath of the Second World War who, “does not care about right or wrong, just where the next meal’s coming from”. ‘At the Indie Disco’ has catchy guitar riffs and pleasant backing vocals in the chorus and features references to the Cure, Depeche Mode and New Order. The song describes a pair of friends who visit their local Indie Disco and always sit at their favourite table, “under the poster of Morrissey with the bunch of flowers”. Hannon is playful with his lyrics and in his descriptions of the ups and downs of teenage love, the boy telling how, “she makes my heart beat the same way, as at the start of Blue Monday, always the last song that they play”.

Unfortunately, elements of the second part of the album do not live up to the effectiveness of the first. ‘Can You Stand On One Leg’ is Hannon’s Beatles moment that doesn’t really come off as a good pop song in the way that we imagine he would have liked. The end of the track sees him hold a high note continuously for, in our estimation, thirty seconds. Though obviously impressive, it gets annoying after roughly the first ten.

Bang Goes the Knighthood is a giftedly perceptive example of Neil Hannon’s ability to make an album brimming with interesting characters and catchy yet intelligent pop songs. Though the second half can be a bit unnecessarily silly in places the Divine Comedy’s latest sees Hannon produce a record that will please old fans and surely attract new ones.