Neil Hannon's one-man band that also wrote the Father Ted theme
The Divine Comedy has had many players since 1989, but only one constant: Neil Hannon, a Northern Irish songwriter who sometimes plays everything except drums and orchestra. Between 1996 and 1999 his baroque pop put nine singles into the UK top 40, and he also wrote the theme for Father Ted.
The start was shaky. A debut album made little impression and was withdrawn, two EPs in 1991 and 1992 flopped, and the first line-up broke apart. Hannon went back into the studio in March 1993 with drummer and co-producer Darren Allison to make Liberation, an album stuffed with literature: one song nods to an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, another to Chekhov's Three Sisters, and a third squeezes three Wordsworth poems into a pop song. Its successor, Promenade, borrowed so openly from Michael Nyman that Hannon reportedly mailed the composer a copy and jokingly asked him not to sue.
Small success in France kept him going, and so did television. Hannon and Allison recorded the Father Ted theme, and he composed the show's parody Eurovision entry, My Lovely Horse. The breakthrough came with Casanova in 1996, after the Radio 1 breakfast host Chris Evans championed Something for the Weekend. A Short Album About Love, cut live with the Brunel Ensemble, came out on Valentine's Day 1997, and the more sombre Fin De Siècle in 1998 still produced the cheerful hit National Express.
Then came reinvention. For Regeneration in 2001 Hannon hired the producer Nigel Godrich, swapped his trademark suit for a Britrock look, and won more praise than sales, after which a split was announced. Within a year he was touring again. In January 2005 he bought back the worldwide rights to his recordings for his old label, Setanta, and set up his own imprint to reissue them. Along the way he sang on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy soundtrack and on Doctor Who music.
Later albums kept arriving: Bang Goes the Knighthood on 31 May 2010, the band's first double album, Office Politics, on 7 June 2019, and a 24-disc box set for the 30th anniversary in October 2020. The thirteenth studio album, Rainy Sunday Afternoon, recorded at Abbey Road, appeared on 19 September 2025. Its song Achilles draws on a poem a First World War officer wrote inside his copy of A Shropshire Lad.
Source: The Divine Comedy (band)
