Day 45: "A Secret History - The Best Of The Divine Comedy" - The Divine Comedy (1999)
Given my previously recorded feelings on how live albums as a format are generally terrible, you might be bracing yourself for a similarly musically snobbish post filled with outrage at the very notion of "Best Of" albums when you should simply go back and experience each bands entire back catalogue in album form. Fortunately, I am not that much of a hypocrite. "Best ofs" can act as an excellent sampler for a band you are late to discovering, where you're not really sure where to begin; in the case of this band, it's more a reflection of a weird mass of conflicting feelings I have about their whole enterprise.
listen to me here
When I was 17 there was probably only one band I hate more than The Divine Comedy, and that was incessantly cheery indie pop band "The Boo Radleys", who managed to have a name that managed to be meaningless, stupid and pretentious all at the same time, and their song "Wake Up Boo" was insufferable, self-referential, and relentlessly upbeat to the point of making me want to throw up a little every time I heard it.
My gripe with The Divine Comedy was a simple one. When I would spend my Tuesday nights in Chesterfield's only rock night in the basement of La Montmatre, the arrival of "Something for the Weekend" would signal the beginning of what I came to think of at the time as the "Girl Block" of songs. As soon as Neil Hannon started singing, we knew it was time for us to vacate the dancefloor for at least 30 minutes while the DJ quite selfishly played music that people in the club other than me would enjoy; why the women who came to the club couldn't be satisfied with Faith No More and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and Metallica I will never understand.
I didn't really know any other Divine Comedy songs apart from "Something for the Weekend". I just knew that immediately following it would come "Good Enough" by Dodgy, and "Wake Up Boo" by the Boo Radleys, and "Brimful of Asha" by Kula Shaker, followed by something by Cast or The Las, and I would slink away into a dark corner and stare daggers at the dj booth until my american shouty men returned and I felt confident going back to the dancefloor.
When your introduction to a band comprises a pavlovian response where you hear their most famous song and get immediately angry, that's not a promising start to a musical relationship.
The next time The Divine Comedy crossed my path was a more literal one. In the summer of '97, I went to my first music festival, which was the V festival at Temple Newsom Park in Leeds. I'd gone because my soon-to-be-housemate at the time Dave had a summer job doing ticketing and working for the Festival in return for basically not having to pay to be there. Dave convinced me to just buy a weekend pass (without camping) and he would sneak me and my friend Col into the staff campsite he was staying in and it wouldn't be a problem. We did, he did, and it wasn't.
On the Sunday morning of that Festival, Dave came back to the campsite with exciting news. A BBC crew they'd been expecting had cancelled, and Dave had several Press wristbands which were now going begging. He offered them to us and we snatched them up.
That pink wristband was worth its weight in gold.
The advantages of the pink wristband were plentiful. First, it allowed us to get into the festival arena through the side gate, which saved us a good 25 minutes walking from our campsite. The side gate was also not subject to careful searches of what you were bringing in with you, a useful thing to note if, for example, you are planning on bringing in most of the contents of a bottle of vodka in 3 or 4 plastic coke bottles. However, the key benefit was that the pink wristband permitted access to the backstage area and the hospitality tent, and once some portion of the aforementioned vodka had been consumed, me and Col plucked up enough courage to blag our way backstage with the power of the pink wristband.
Like the idiotic 21 year olds we were at the time, we wasted this precious resource by immediately gravitating to the backstage hospitality tent, which offered the magical possibility of free beer at the expense of not really seeing any of the rest of the festival. The hospitality tent was close enough to the main stage that we saw several bands drift in and out on their way to watching the main stage acts from the side of the stage.
The main stage acts on the Sunday were Reef, Dodgy, Kula Shaker and then Blur headlining. Having nothing but antipathy for the first 3 bands on that list, we spent our time drinking. By the time Blur headed on to the main stage, we decided we would be happy to listen to them from a distance and stay in the hospitality tent. Also in the tent during Blur's set were Neil Hannon, his girlfriend and the rest of The Divine Comedy. I didn't really know who they were until Col clued me in, but they were sat directly enough in my eyeline for me to witness about 40 minutes later, a what seemed to be fairly drunk Neil Hannon be violently sick on his girlfriends shoes, and her to get promptly very annoyed about it and storm out of the tent, followed by a swift evacuation of the entire band.
Another couple of years passed, and I guess my breaking point to where I thought "Fine, I should maybe listen to this band and stop hating them for no reason" was seeing them perform live on TFI Friday. They did their version of the Noel Coward song "I've been to a Marvellous Party" live, and I remember thinking it was cooky and weird and interesting. Then "The Pop Singer's Fear Of The Pollen Count" was all over the radio in the summer of 1999 and it was catchy as hell (and as a fellow Hay Fever sufferer, very relatable), so I caved and bought the Best Of, specifically because it had those singles on there, and none of their albums did.
I listened to it again today. I've mentioned before how one of the things I can find the most immediately engaging is when music comes with an attached narrative, and so I definitely feel that appeal when listening to songs on this album. But the more I listened to it, the more I felt the narrative thread was almost too much; this entire album feels almost like its a series of songs from several slightly disjointed musicals in search of a plot. I dare you to listen to "Tonight We Fly" or "Summerhouse" or "Too Young To Die" and not imagine them being performed on stage as part of some grand set piece.
By the end of it, I was so caught up in this notion that the narrative had actually detracted from my enjoyment of the whole album. There's no doubt that lyrically The Divine Comedy have some of the best drawn songs-as-stories, and with this glut of musicals "based on the songs of X band", it's a shame The Divine Comedy might not be a big enough musical force to warrant such treatment, as I'm sure it would be spectacular. But as a stand-alone listening experience, it weirdly left me cold by the end of it.
However, no matter how slightly self-indulgent it might be, The Divine Comedy have a perpetual get out of jail free card in my eyes. They could commit any crime you could name, and I could not hold it against them, as they are responsible in part for 70 seconds of the greatest actual comedy of all time.
The Most Divine Comedy
