The Divine Comedy - Live in Manchester

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you. Yes, I've updated my blog. Of course, nobody will read, or care about what I've written, but hey-ho.

On Tuesday evening I had the privilege of seeing The Divine Comedy live at Manchester Academy in Manchester... well, obviously. I'd seen them previously back in August at The Hard Rock Cafe when I entered a competition in Q and won a pair of free tickets. The first time I saw them was good, but quite short, and I wasn't fond of the venue, even if they do make nice cheeseburgers. Neil Hannon with a piano and a guitar, in the corner of a bar (hey, that rhymes!) with lots of people chattering away, buying drinks and generally being rather rude. In fact, Hannon reflected on the Hard Rock Cafe gig during Tuesday's performance, informing the audience that he'd already played in Manchester this year but hadn't enjoyed it due to people on the balconies being so rude and presuming that they'd only been there for "the free canapes".

I'd gone to a lot of trouble to be in Manchester on Tuesday. I'd caughts train from Grimsby to Doncaster, Doncaster to Leeds and Leeds to Hebden Bridge, which is where my mother currently dwells. It's always lovely to see Mum. We get on swimmingly, probably because I only see her once every two months or so. She's changed her hair colour again. It's brown now. Last time I saw her it was red, or was it pink, or orange? It's so hard to keep track. Mum took me for tea and cake - the most expensive cake I've ever eaten - which was spiffing. Caught another train to Manchester later in the day and got lost. Yes, lost. Really properly lost. Manchester looks different in the dark. I needed to be on Oxford Road but ended up somewhere in Chinatown - there were noodle bars everywhere, so I'm assuming it was Chinatown. I had to ask a scary bouncer outside a casino for directions and eventually found my way on to Oxford Road and made my way to the University.

Manchester University... oh dear God, the memories! It feels like so long ago now, a different lifetime almost. When I was at University, both times, I was properly miserable and depressed, so being back around these familiar buildings and student bars - mausoleums looming up at me in the dark - was a bit strange. All sorts of stuff comes flooding back into my memory, stuff I thought I'd forgotten, stuff I thought I'd permanently banished and erased from my memory. Horrible, seedy, sordid stuff, stuff I'm not proud of, stuff I regret, that I really won't go into now. Maybe I'll write a heavily disguised short story about it all one day.

I found the venue and politely declined to sell my ticket to a group of people stood outside. Hmm, I wonder how much they'd have been willing to pay me...? I wonder what lengths they'd have gone to...? I joined the back of a fairly long queue, which surprised me. I always forget their are other people out there that like The Divine Comedy. Usually it feels like just me. And the people queuing aren't old and ancient and grizzled either - there's a variety of age-groups and I can spot at least two different genders. Wow. We shuffle inside, one by one, and I forego the oppertunity to buy a T-shirt, which I really regret now. I've since ordered one online and I shall tell people that I bought it at the concert. The venue itself is okay. It's a room, with a stage... that's about all I can say. We have to stand. Bah. My poor feet. It's half-seven. I'm near the front. Hooray. The room gradually fills to capacity. It's crowded and hot and I'm feeling a bit claustrophobic. I've nothing else to do so I stare at the crowd. Lots of very good-looking, well-dressed people. I swear people are more good-looking in Manchester. The person stood in front of me was gorgeous; a perfect distillation of human evolution. I spent half an hour fantasising...

Anyways, ahem, where was I? At eight o'clock we get half an hour of warm-up - a woman with a guitar and I believe Neil Hannon's current love interest. She's okay. She plays for half an hour and then we have to wait a further half an hour for Neil himself to appear. And he appears alone, like the last time I saw him, a one-man show, with just a piano, a guitar and a microphone. It would appear that the days of a full orchestra backing him up are dead and gone. But I like the new set up. It feels intimate, and thank God, Neil is on fine form and treats me to, honestly, one of the best nights of my life. Amazing. If I had a TARDIS I would go back in time and relive it.

And he's so funny too - he frequently rendered the audience in hysterics throughout the evening with his droll, deadpan Irish wit. I think it's something about the voice, and I don't just mean when he's singing. He began the evening by accidentally elbowing himself, and then pondering if "to elbow" is a verb or not. His voice has never sounded better, mangaging, somehow, to sound even stronger than it does on CD. He's on his own, just him, nothing to hide behind - no gimmicks or lightshow or trickery - and he's glorious. Nobody sings like Neil Hannon. His voice just... soars. Rant alert, but it really depresses me that he's so underappreciated and underrated in today's current "musical" climate. which, to quote Bill Bailey, "features more evil than an Al-Queda suggestion box". It would seem that today people would rather hear rappers bragging about how they like to beat their girlfriend or whingy mopey insipid manufactured boybands complaining about nonsense than proper meaningful, witty, heartfelt, erudite lyrics. It truly depresses me. Most people dismiss The Divine Comedy as that cheesy band who did 'National Express' and 'Something for the Weekend' (nothing wrong with either, but they're far from my favourites) back in the 90s and were moderately successful for a short time... they have no idea. Incidentally, he didn't play either track.

Neil played lots of songs from his most recent album - the wonderful Bang Goes the Knighthood - and that's certainly no bad thing. We get his satirical take on the current economy with 'The Complete Banker' (a song about "greedy fuckers", his words), 'At the Indie Disco', a fluffy silly song that I didn't really like upon first listen back in May but now I love it, and loved it even more live. Its cheesy but also very catchy. We had to clap our hands and click our fingers in time - which, as a general rule, is something I wouldn't ordinarily do, having to uphold my reputation as a melancholic curmudgeon - but all my inhibitions went out of the window and I joined in like a normal fun-loving human being, like your average lunatic. He performed 'I Like', which I like, 'Assume the Perpendicular' ('Ben's impressed by the Buttresses thrust up the Chapel nave' - never has architecture sounded so smutty), 'The Lost Art of Conversation' (good lyrics) and the very silly 'Can You Stand Upon One Leg?', which saw him hold onto that final note for dear life, managing to draw it out for well over thirty seconds and also required a member of the audience to contribute a joke. 'How many mice does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. But the real question is - how did they get there in the first place?' Yeah, hilarious.

He performed plenty of material from his older albums too, which was awesome. Promenade is, and forever will be, my favourite album of all time, my desert island CD and a record I'm not ashamed to admit I paid over £30 for over 3 years ago (I wanted to own a physical copy), so I was very happy that we got a few tracks from that. We got 'Going Downhill Fast' (which is beautiful and joyous) and his magnum-opus 'Tonight We Fly', aka the single best song ever written, the song I want to be buried to. Hearing it live was... words cannot express, all the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. He also played, among many other fantastic songs, 'Absent Friends', 'Our Mutual Friend' (the best song of the last decade, heartachingly beautiful), 'A Lady of a Certain Age' (the second best song of the decade), 'Sweden' (bonkers and Broadway-ey), 'The Pop Singer's Fear of the Pollen Count' (very catchy and summery) and the divine 'Songs of Love' (a variation on the Father Ted theme tune). It would have been nice to hear 'Don't Look Down', 'Bad Ambassador', 'Count Grassi's Passage Over Piemount', 'To Die a Virgin', 'Sunrise', 'Down in the Street Below', 'Europop', 'The Dogs and the Horses' and of course 'My Lovely Horse', but you can't have everything.

He also did a duet with his current love interest - 'I Only Have Eyes for You', which was lovely, treated us to a song from his new Swallows and Amazons musical and did a cover version of The Human League's 'Do You Want Me?', which was inspired and hilarious. He went all high-pitched and falsetto and desperate. You had to be there. The one downer on an otherwise flawless evening was having to leave during the encore to catch the last train home. I felt so rude pushing my way through the crowd as Neil belted out 'The Frog Princess', which called for the audience to imitate silly French accents.

On the train back to Grimsby in the wee small hours of Wednesday morning, I randomly listened to Divine Comedy songs on my iPad and realised that Neil Hannon is, pure and simple, a GENIUS. I had 9 albums, 1 Best Of, his Duckworth Lewis Method concept album about cricket (and I don't even like cricket), his two songs from the 2006 Doctor Who soundtrack 'Song for Ten' and 'Love Don't Roam', his 'So Long and Thanks for All the Fish' contribution to the 2005 Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy film (the best thing about the whole movie), his cover of No-One Knows, which, I think, controversially, is better than the original and a whole load of B-sides. That's well over 100 songs, and you know what, I pretty much love each and every one of them.

Boredom

I have not started this blog for creative purposes. I have no wish to express myself. I don't want to use this space as a forum for debate or to advocate some political point of view that I feel I can no longer suppress. I don't even like blogs. I have, my dear reader, set up this account out of sheer boredom. Nothing more nothing less.

Summer is upon us, which surely means that good times are upon us too. Summer is about strutting around the garden shirtless drinking ice-cold beer, right? It's about laying naked in hammocks reading chunky bestsellers whilst your entire body braises like some delicious steak and a lowly peasant massages suntan lotion into your back and fans you dutifully. It's about beaches and sunglasses and blue skies and ice cream. It's about It's about swimming pools and barbeques and iced tea and revealing outfits. Nope. Summer, for me, is the worst of the four seasons. The loser. The runt of the litter. Give me the rain and sleet and snowmen of winter anyday, or the rebirth of spring or the flurrying leaves of autumn... Summer, by contrast, is one three-month long sweaty haze. Going outside is a chore. The heat makes me nauseous and sick. It makes me want to insult random people in the street. It allows people to wear baseball caps and get away with it. My lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer are spent indoors, in the dark, with the curtains closed, aggressively muttering obscenities.

So, I've been thinking long and hard. How can I make these boiling days of torture more bearable? I was going to say pleasurable there, but hey, let's not run before we can walk. Bearable is a good place to start. I have no summer holiday to look forward to - well, not as such. I was offered the oppertunity to accompany my Mother's side of the family to France for 2 weeks. I know what you're thinking - why didn't you want to go to France you lunatic? Well, banish all images of crusty baguettes, snails and The Eiffel Tower... the French "holiday" upon which I was invited was to be spent in a Buddhist retreat. Now, I have nothing against any of that, but to me, the notion of being awoken at 6am by a loud ringing bell and spending the day doing chores, meditating or attending lectures in Vietnamese didn't sound like fun. Why not just invite me to go and hang out in the slums of some third world country and call that a holiday too? I politely declined.

But all things considered, I do want a holiday. Just not that holiday. A holiday that sounds, well, um, you know, like a holiday. All the people I know, which to be fair you could probably count on the fingers of one hand, would rather go abroad on holiday to a place that is even more hideously hot than it is here. No thank you. They want to go to places like Ibiza, where they'd sunbathe and dance and drink cocktails with sexually suggestive names and sleep with strangers. Not for me. So, I span my globe and decided that my holiday destination of choice would be - *drum roll please* - Cardiff. Yep, that's right. Cardiff. C - A - R - D - I - F - F. The capital of Wales. I know what you're thinking - Cardiff??? Why would you want to go to Cardiff? That Buddhist retreat sounds preferable to a few days in Cardiff! But I've always wanted to go. I like the Welsh accent (a lot) and the place is renowned for its perpetually torrential rain. It'd be perfect. Of course, nobody in their right mind would agree to go with me. I can't think of anyone I could ask who might say yes. I can't even think of anyone I could pay to come with me. So, unless you're reading this and thinking 'Wow, Cardiff, what a great idea! I'd LOVE to go!", I think I am destined to go alone. Still, I could stay in a cheap B&B, take some books... soul search, clear my head, use a false name. Who knows what might happen?

The other route to cautiously tip-toeing down is the world of work. Except I've submitted CVs until I'm blue as a Smurf's face. I had an interview for the local library, except I didn't put enough emphasis on the fact that you can now buy coffee at libraries, so apparently I wasn't what they were looking for. And I'm not yet well-qualified enough to get a job in a supermarket... still, gives me something to aspire towards. So my Mother suggests on a twice-weekly basis that I should do some voluntary work; give something back to the community, not that I feel I owe them anything, mind. I was thinking the Samaritans, maybe? Problem there is that I'll get somebody desperately suicidal ring up, I'm bound to say the wrong thing and then I'll end up with a dead body on my conscience. Mum says it'll make me feel good about myself, but if I end up feeling responsible for a death then I'm not convinced I would feel good about myself at all.

Idea Number Three - Read. Read lots. Read books, lots of books, long books, short books, old books, new books, books with pictures, books without, hardbacks, paperbacks, bestsellers, classics... can anybody recommend any of the following? I've got a teetering pile of books on my bedroom cabinet: The Plot Against America (Philip Roth), 1984 and Animal Farm (George Orwell), Fremder (Russell Hoban), The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen), Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Woolf), The Catcher in the Rye (J D Salinger), Brick Lane (Monica Ali), Life of Pi (Yann Martel), The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger), A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens), Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier), Tess of the D'Ubervilles (Thomas Hardy), Lunar Park (Bret Easton Ellis), The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks), The Line of Beauty (Alan Hollinghirst), Solar (Ian McEwan), The Accidental (Ali Smith), The Dark Tower (Stephen King), The Sea (John Banville), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami). And breathe! Plenty to get on with there, books of all varieties there. And books alleviate boredom, right? Right?

Other potential ideas include drink more - you can't be bored if you're drunk. You can get headaches, you can vomit and you can become overly sentimental, but I defy anybody to equate drunkenness to boredom. I could kill myself of course... problem solved in the blink of an eye. I could sleep more. You can't be bored if you're asleep. Unless of course you dream about being bored. I could devote these long, sticky days to exercise; time well spent. Turn my keg into a six-pack, or at least a four-pack. And I've got my dog's 4th birthday party approaching at the end of the month; that'll take planning. Scary how quickly they grow up.

Right, off now to stare blankly into space for a bit.

Byyyeeeee!!!