Friday 25 October 2025
Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
A magical musical journey from sorrow to joy
*****
A recording of the English composer Edward Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ from his Enigma Variations (1899) introduced Friday night’s concert. This felt appropriate in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, which has often hosted orchestral concerts that have included Elgar’s masterpiece. There’s a quintessentially English melancholy about much of Elgar’s music, and the music of Neil Hannon, leader of the Divine Comedy (although he was born in Northern Ireland).
There’s also something of the English wit of playwright, singer and songwriter Noël Coward in Hannon’s songs. Coward would undoubtedly have appreciated the sartorial elegance of Hannon’s guitar roadie, ‘Alistair’, who was impeccably dressed in a jacket and white turtle neck sweater rather than the traditional long black shorts and black top commonly sported by a guitar tech.
Hannon came on sporting a natty black fedora and a black suit, and his band were similarly attired but without the headwear. The hall was packed, and the adoring audience hung on Hannon’s every wry witticism. Hannon’s rich baritone was warm and inviting, and his manner was easy and relaxed. One suspects he may have done this before.
He was joined by an excellent band – two keyboard players, lead and bass guitar, violin, and drums. The band provided gorgeous, multi-layered backing vocals and was equally at home playing rock music, sophisticated lounge jazz, and French-style chansons (with accordion but Anglophone lyrics).
The nearly two-hour set included 24 songs, demonstrating the range and variety of Hannon’s songwriting. The set was beautifully structured, flowing from one song to the next to create an engaging musical journey.
The concert began with the thoughtful Achilles, which ends with a meditation on mortality about a man of 53, the same age as Hannon when he wrote the song, whose ‘mind was turning/To thoughts of mortality.’ An early highlight was another song about death, the extraordinarily poignant The Last Time I Saw the Old Man, about the final physical and mental deterioration of Hannon’s late father, Neil Hannon, Bishop of Clogher in County Tyrone. The song ends with the moving words,
As we left, the sun was setting on the land
The last time I saw the old man
Hannon sang this beautiful, moving song with his back to us, and raised his hat at the end, as if in silent tribute to his father.
A lighter sequence of songs followed, the best of which was a lovely version of I Want You, with a gorgeous piano introduction, an evocative additional violin part, and jazzy drumming. Hannon brought out the melancholy minor key of the chorus of this song, which is from the new album Rainy Sunny Afternoon. Hannon’s storytelling, present in most of his songs, came to the fore in Norman and Norma, which tells the story of a couple who got married in Cromer in Norfolk in 1983. This also illustrated Hannon’s skilful and witty wordplay. Perhaps only Coward would have dared rhyme ‘Chroma’ with ‘pneumonia.’
There was more overt humour in the staging of Our Mutual Friend. Hannon came into the audience and, on the words about sitting on ‘our friend’s settee’, sat in a vacant seat. A woman returning from the bar wondered whether she should give him one of the drinks she had bought. As the characters in the song ‘sank down to the floor’, Hannon sank down to the floor at the front of the Stalls, and lay there while the band entertained us with an instrumental break. Hannon acted out waking up the next day and stumbling out to the bathroom as he regained the stage to huge applause.
There were some punk stylings in Generation Sex and At the Indie Disco, Hannon swinging his hips and almost knocking his knees together like an early Elvis Costello. The lounge jazz theme returned in Neapolitan Girl, a dark tale of a post-war woman whose ‘innocence can be restored/With a visit to the Professore.’ The story’s darkness was belied by the sophisticated music, including a deliciously off-beat rhythm with which the audience gamely (and accurately… this was after a Divine Comedy audience…) clapped along. We stayed in lounge jazz mood with Hannon’s ‘favourite part of the show.’ During an extended version of the new song Mar-a-Lago, with its elegant samba beat, Alistair brought on a drinks trolley. Hannon introduced each member of the band and prepared their favourite tipple for each of them. We stayed with the theme of cocktail parties with A Lady of a Certain Age, who ‘sipped Camparis…. At Noël’s parties.’ Another rhyme of which Coward would have been proud.
Freedom Road (played for the first time on this tour), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and In Pursuit of Happiness provided a triptych of tristesse (with apologies to Neil and Noël). But Hannon has also written danceable songs, or to use the technical term, bangers. The audience leapt to its collective feet for five floor fillers, starting with Absent Friends and ending with the exuberant fan favourite National Express. As the song says, everyone sang ‘Ba-ba-ba-da.’
The encore began with a couple of songs Hannon said were ‘not up-tempo but swayable.’ There was a gentle version of Songs of Love, with warm backing vocals and lovely harmonies. Hannon threatened to ‘leave for other places’, but the audience wouldn’t let him go yet. He obliged with Invisible Thread, which could have described the invisible but unbreakable link between Hannon and his adoring audience.
There will always be
An invisible thread
Between you and me
After this song ended quietly, the final encore was the anthemic Tonight We Fly. And with that, we flew home on the wings of song, this joyful concert still resonating in our ears.