Caught Live: The Divine Comedy, Dublin

"It's just me this year… It's the austerity tour!" Neil Hannon tells Ragged Words with a giggle a few hours before taking the stage at Dublin's Sugar Club. Tonight is one of a handful of shows that will see the thirty-nine year-old roadtesting songs from The Divine Comedy’s tenth studio album, Bang Goes The Knighthood, which will be hitting shelves at the end of this month. Hannon, with only a piano and glass of red wine for company, says the stripped-back setup reminds him of some of his favourite artists ("I've always wanted to be Cole Porter"), and it's a natural step that most Divine Comedy fans will surely have always been anticipating. What’s more, kicking the tour off in the intimate, comfy surroundings of The Sugar Club is nothing short of a gift for fans in Hannon's adopted hometown. And just to make us wet the plush cinema seats a little more, he's brought all the hits along tonight. 

It's an utterly brilliant set, with impossible-to-find debut mini-album Fanfare For The Comic Muse and über-fan favourite Regeneration the only Divine Comedy albums not featured in tonight. New songs are, of course, deftly teased in, with 'The Complete Banker' – a typically witty lampooning of the financial community – and the bouncy, Georgian architecture-inspired (this is Hannon after all) 'Assume The Perpendicular' going down particularly well. He begins with the new album's opener 'Down In The Street Below', and this writer – whose concert-going began with The Divine Comedy some 12 years ago – can confidently say it's among the best numbers Hannon's ever written. Much of the rest of that personal list - 'Tonight We Fly', 'Our Mutual Friend', 'A Drinking Song', 'If', 'Something For The Weekend' - also gets an airing tonight. It was perhaps too much to expect 'Through A Long And Sleepless Night' as well, but there are plenty of other back catalogue gems to compensate. Hannon easily convinces the audience to participate on 'The Frog Princess', and we need no encouragement to join in on 'National Express' and 'Songs Of Love'. Aided by the miming/backing vocals of Thomas 'Duckworth' Walsh, the Derryman then has us in stitches for the duration of the pair's 'Jiggery Pokery'. 

Crowd-pleasers aside, though, are the new songs any good? Well, yes; they certainly are. Ragged Words is currently digesting a promo copy of Bang Goes The Knighthood, and while it may be a very good Divine Comedy album, and not (yet at least) a great one, the seven songs premiered tonight don't let the standard slip once. In fact, 'Can You Stand Upon One Leg?', a song that's perhaps a little too silly on record, sounds far more at home played live. 'Have You Ever Been In Love?' and 'I Like', two sickeningly loved-up songs, are the real highlights, though, as far as we're concerned. They're so goddamned lovely that Cathy Davey, the other half of Dublin's premiere indie couple, tonight sits head-in-hands, unable to watch. What else can she really be expected to do when one of this generation's best songwriters has penned lines like “Have you ever figured out the meaning of life / just by looking into someone else’s eyes?” just for her.