The Divine Comedy: Office Politics review
Over the past twenty-five years, Neil Hannon, founder and supremo of the band The Divine Comedy, has quietly established himself as one of the most interesting musicians working today. A special skill of his is to produce three or four-minute sketches of people or situations, often over swooning orchestral arrangements, which combine wit, incisiveness and beauty. At his very best, as in his brilliant A Lady Of A Certain Age, a spiritual sequel to Peter Sarstedt’s Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? or in his towering adultery drama Our Mutual Friend, Hannon can be placed alongside his great hero Scott Walker in the song writing pantheon.
On other occasions, however, an innate tendency towards self-regard and jokiness has led to the Divine Comedy being strangely underrated. While their first big success, the witty Something For The Weekend, still holds up very well today, the song that they remain best known for, National Express, is little more than a catchy novelty hit revolving around the indignities and amusements of long-distance coach travel. Therefore, the arrival of each new album comes with some faint trepidation. Which side of Hannon will this display – the peerlessly talented singer-songwriter or the purveyor of bumptious and disposable pop music?
Office Politics, the Divine Comedy’s twelfth album, is both reassuringly familiar and a complete volte-face. Listeners who are expecting inimitably witty lyrics, declaimed in a baritone voice over swelling orchestration, will not be disappointed, but they will also be baffled by the way in which Hannon, for so long the knowing young fogey of contemporary music, has updated his sonic palette. Not since his 2001 album Regeneration, an intriguing but ultimately derivative collaboration with Radiohead’s producer Nigel Godrich, has the Divine Comedy sounded so unlike what we expect. Hannon has decided to move away from his usual influences of Scott Walker and Jacques Brel, and instead embrace the synthpop of his youth, and beyond. Never before has a Divine Comedy album made explicit its debt to Yazoo, The Human League and the Pet Shop Boys; never before has it featured a song, Psychological Evaluation, which features Hannon being interrogated by a robot.
This is the Divine Comedy’s longest album to date at sixteen tracks, and several of them feel as if they could have been relegated to B-sides. It is doubtful, for instance, the quasi-patter song The Synthesiser Service Centre Super Summer Sale is going to become a favourite amongst even the most committed of admirers, and the first track released, Queuejumper, feels oddly lightweight and ephemeral. Hannon wrote a memorably scathing attack on the financial industry, The Complete Banker, about a decade ago, and Queuejumper returns to a world where its loathsome protagonist boasts “I jump the queue/’Cos I’m smarter than you”, but the arrangement feels half-hearted and lacklustre.
The successes, thankfully, considerably outnumber the failures. Hannon’s unexpected detour into Eighties-inspired pop and glam rock throws up a couple of songs, unusually for him, that one could imagine being played without irony on the dancefloor. The aptly titled Infernal Machines comes on like a swaggering cross between Goldfrapp and Depeche Mode, with a pounding bassline and Human League-esque backing vocals; meanwhile, Office Politics, an account of the travails of the financier Sir Hillary Oldmoney, sees Hannon emulate Neil Tennant’s deadpan monotone, as found on the early Pet Shop Boys songs, to splendid effect, as he “recalls the days/You could use your position to get your way”. And the experimentation sometimes pays off remarkably. Philip and Steve’s Furniture Removal Company, a semi-instrumental based around Philip Glass and Steve Reich’s days in Sixties New York as furniture removal men, begins slowly but builds to a stirring polyphonic climax that pays appropriate homage to its inspirations.
Inevitably, though, it’s the most Divine Comedy-esque songs on the album that are going to appeal to Hannon’s loyal admirers, and there are several that rank amongst his best. Norman and Norma is a beautifully observed character study of a couple whose dull marriage is enlivened by their taking part in Civil War re-enactments, and Dark Days Are Here Again, written in response to Trump’s election, features Hannon, in full Richard III mode, moaning “Now is the winter of our discontent/The good times came, and then the good times went”. He has never been an explicitly political songwriter, but Office Politics’ overarching theme – sometimes told through jokes, and at other times not – is how dehumanised and isolated the world of technology has rendered us all, allowing frauds and charlatans to break through. It is purely a coincidence that it is released in the midst of the Conservative leadership election.
It is a lengthy listen at over an hour, and some may be flagging by the end. It would be a pity, however, if any listener did not make it to the final song, When The Working Day Is Done. Over a steady beat and a gradually swelling march-like arrangement that recalls the chanson tradition of Brel and Serge Gainsbourg, Hannon’s lyrics sketch out a saga not a million miles away from Bowie’s Life on Mars. As its protagonist suffers the twice-daily plod to and from work, they meditate on how “the movie posters scream/It’s the best film ever seen/But it’s all a different world/To which you’ve never been”, before they are finally driven to explode and shout “We give, but we get nothing back!”. Office Politics demands a few things from its listeners – time, interest and a wry engagement with Hannon’s sensibility – but this sophisticated and highly enjoyable album gives plenty back to those who are prepared to go along with these particular shenanigans.