The Divine Comedy at the Greenwich Summer Sessions

Hannon was in very fine fettle last night, opening the Greenwich Summer Sessions for 2011.  The set was an unusual one, Hannon choosing to perform Bang Goes the Knighthood in its entirety, followed by “the hits”.  It was a surprisingly successful strategy; though not bulletproof, showing up weaker songs such as “Island Life”, it provided good pacing and varied material in the first half, followed by the tried and true in the second.  It was also a strategy which made much of his setting — the beautiful surroundings of the Naval College were referenced in some of his classic hits’ baroque stylings, while “The Complete Banker” was leant greater immediacy by Hannon’s invocation of the view across the river, just behind the audience, of the towers of Canary Wharf.

As ever, Hannon is not a technically reliable musician (nor a lyrically reliable singer, for that matter)*, but I minded it last night a great deal less than I often do.  This was largely down to a good line of self-deprecating patter: fudging the solo of the otherwise totally groovy “The Lost Art of Conversation” on the piano, he remarked that he’d always been a fan of Les Dawson.  He carried the winning self-deprecation even further when, after a perfectly serviceable guitar solo on “Perfect Lovesong”, he mocked himself by saying that “it’s like watching Eric Clapton, isn’t it?”

The gig was undoubtedly helped by a very game audience, the sort who gave charming but totally demented “yeah yeah yeah yeahs” during “National Express” and who really went along with Hannon when, after saying that his last London audience had been woeful at clapping along to “Indie Disco”, he produced a metronome and said we were to stick to that.  The crowd even maintained their good humour in the face of a very long-winded and self-indulgent joke from another audience member during the joke section of “Can You Stand Upon One Leg?” (a frankly bizarre use of a Jewish mother joke, something I don’t really expect to hear outside of Woody Allen movies — and not really even then).

“Jiggery Pokery” has clearly established itself as a favourite with crowds, and last night’s was a particularly enjoyable rendition as the singer himself acknowledged, with probably the most satisfying audience-participation “baboons” I’ve yet witnessed (strange: I don’t deign to clap along to just about anything but I’m all over the “baboon”-shouting action whenever it presents itself).   We even got a rendition of “Geronimo” — as far as I, with a cursory glance through my old setlists, can recall, that’s a first for me.  I probably enjoyed it all the more as Hannon gave the audience the choice between it and “Everybody Knows”; for one heart-stopping moment I thought “Everybody Knows” would be preferred (for the TOTALLY BIZARRE reason that the cheer for “Geronimo” was predominantly female-sounding, which led Hannon to comment that it was a “very girly” song — a comment that I have a whole raft of musical problems with, let alone political ones) but, happily, he played both.

I am, as has been pointed out to me on more than one occasion, a grumpy person.  As such there is no higher praise in my arsenal than to say that when Hannon came out for a second encore (and, at that, to do “National Express”, a song I’ve heard him do live roughly a million squillion times) I cheered heartily, rather than moan about the insulting formality of the encore.  It was a good night.

[Only somewhat marred by the fucking compere, announcing Hannon before his appearance as probably one of the best English singer-songwriters around.  You know, from that famous English town, Enniskillen, the one in that English county of Fermanagh.  GOD.  (I think the compere immediately sensed he'd boobed, because after "English singer-songwriter" he said something along the lines of "or, er, from the UK".)]

*A Word podcast that I listened to recently had either David Hepworth or Mark Ellen positing Hannon’s onstage lapses in memory as an intentional decision to heighten the audience’s sense of theatre, a plausible hypothesis and far more convincing than others that I’ve considered in the past, such as the fact that Hannon has now made 10 albums and as such has a lot of potential chords and lyrics floating around in his head — as is abundantly clear, he doesn’t regularly play every song off every album, but rather draws from a distinct and finite pool of material that he’s ready and willing to play, which does fairly kill that theory.

See comments for setlist.