Casanova

Product Information

Truly a poet of his age, he has a magnificent skill of encapsulating everyday woe, everyday love, and the everyday feelings of every day into witty, deprecating couplets. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. As his voice rose in the song, my heart opened and so did my mind; I had never heard music anything like this before.

Also included is the iconic 'Song Of Love' - a reworking of the tune originally written for the Channel 4 comedy 'Father Ted'. 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. Talbot was beginning to play an increasingly important role in the band; he arranged and orchestrated "The Dogs and the Horses," and he co-arranged "Theme from Casanova" with Hannon. This album is also more complex than I think it seems at first, with lyrics both frothy and deep, light and intense.Seen here in a more stripped down version and with a beautiful set of harmonic vocals playing blissfully over the harpsichord melody it's certainly one of the highlights of the album.

Casanova is Hannon at his best, showing his range, his talent, and his inventive mind as he takes in the world around him. Singles Something For The Weekend, Becoming More Like Alfie and The Frog Princess became chart hits and airplay staples while an alternate version of Songs Of Love became the theme music for legendary Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted. The gloomy neo-swing jaunt of “A Woman of the World” (which is a reworked rejected first iteration of the Father Ted theme) casually ambles into cavernous depths as the Hannon explores the origin of feelings of love and hate (“Maybe I love her ’cause I’m jealous of her…Maybe I hate her ’cause I didn’t create her).

Recorded at the famous Abbey Road Studios the song is the most grandiose of 'Casanova' and may even have you shedding a tear as Hannon plays out the record's last goodbye.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.By far the tightest of the band's earlier works it paved the way for not only more ambitious music from Neil Hannon over the course of the next few years but also left a permanent mark on the Brit-Pop genre, making The Divine Comedy a must have to many an indie lover. The remastering work, on my copy, really does make such a huge difference in the definition of the sound, when compared to the OG pressing. The song was later covered by Ben Folds on his EP Sunny 16 in 2003 and Peter Bjorn and John as part of Under the Radar's Covers of Covers album in 2022. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. For some, the lyrics might not make for easy listening (even though a lot is left to innuendo and imagination), but it also speaks to Hannon’s skill at painting characters with depth and arcs over the course of just a song.