Promenade

Product Information

Our Love Goes Deeper Than This" by Duke Special, on the 2-CD version of Songs from the Deep Forest (2006) Promenade is the third album by Northern Irish group The Divine Comedy. It is a concept album, telling the story of two lovers who spend an entire day together, eating and drinking, visiting a bookstore and a movie theater, and riding a Ferris wheel. Oscar the Hypno-Dog", on the various artists charity album Oscar the Hypno-Dog and Other Tails (2012) The CD release consists of 2 discs: the original remastered album, with a second CD of b-sides, demos and alternate versions lovingly curated by Neil Hannon, much of which has never been heard before. The CD comes with a booklet of photos, credits and extensive liner notes written by Neil covering the context and inspiration behind the album and its songs.

A Drinking Song - We return to the house, and our couple have now moved from the food to the drink, and a lot of it too. A companion piece to "A Seafood Song" in lyrical terms, musically this is very much a sea shanty with Michael Nyman invading the middle eight. Absurdly infectious, and the sort of drinking song only an Irishman could write; soused in literary references (Chaucer, Wilfred Owen etc.) and never once hinting at lager. Thematically, the album may be best summed up by the quotation from John Dryden’s Imitation of Horace with which Hannon closes the album:

Larkin, Colin (2007). Encyclopedia of Popular Music (4thed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195313734. The finale is a dazzling piece of wordsmithery, as time stands still at the top of the wheel, and the man feels the need to have a conversation with god. Out pours a startling atheist diatribe, all the most brazen when it's written by the son of a Protestant bishop. In 1990 Neil Hannon started recording and releasing under the name The Divine Comedy. Thirty years and twelve great albums later, Hannon is rightly adjudged one of the finest singer songwriters of his generation. To celebrate,Divine Comedy Recordsare remastering and reissuing nine of the band's classic albums. Hannon isn't adverse to a spot of constructive plagiarism either - 'Timewatching' is a gloriously flamboyant re-write of 'When I Fall In Love' while 'Lucy' takes Wordsworth's 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal' and turns it into the lushest of love songs. The moral here, I think, is that if you're going to rip something off, do it with a sense of panache! Promenade is even more overtly literary than Liberation. It opens with a quote from Isaac Watts' hymn "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past" and ends with a quote from John Dryden's translation of one of Horace's odes (which is also sung as the chorus of "The Booklovers"). "The Booklovers" is a list of over seventy different authors.

The sample in "Ode to the Man" features Micheál Mac Liammóir quoting John Dryden's English translation of one of Horace's odes ( Imitation of Horace, book III, ode 29, vv. 65-72) [12] in the 1963 film Tom Jones. Tonight We Fly - A Nyman-inflected gallop of a song, and a lot of people's favourite in the Hannon Canon. They have a point; it's supremely addictive, beautifully sung and instrumented, and gloriously touching. Finally, our couple fly over the world, one presumes metaphorically, looking down on everyone and everything, pondering where they've been and what they've learned. One hopes this is a metaphor for the final consummation of their relationship (if it was required), because if not there's been a LOT of foreplay in the last 11 songs.....Three Cheers for Pooh, Cottleston Pie, Piglet Ho", on the various artists charity album Colours Are Brighter (2006) The CD release consists of 2 discs: the original remastered album, with a second CD of B-sides, demos and alternate versions put together by Neil, much of which is from his personal archive and has never been heard before. This 2CD Set comes with a booklet of photos with extensive liner notes written by Neil covering the context and content of each album. Review Summary: Neil hannons second album as The Divine Comedy takes us through a day in the life of two lovers with a lyrical mastery that will leave you both in awe and reaching for your encyclopedia. Yer man is not, it has to be said, the happiest of campers. In fact, the likes of 'Death Of A Supernaturalist' and 'I Was Born Yesterday' are downright miserable but unfurl their tales of woe with such eloquence that Morrissey and Marc Almond comparisons are, I'm afraid, unavoidable.