Everybody Knows (Except You)

When The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon recorded the seven-track, A Short Album About Love, with a live orchestra at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire, the result was a triumph of strings and emotion, with a dollop of Hannon’s trademark twinkling wit thrown in for good measure. Recorded during soundchecks for the tour of their previous album Casanova, and released in time for Valentine’s Day 1997, the album charted at No.13 in the UK and breached the Top 10 in Ireland.

The stand-out track ‘Everybody Knows (Except You)’ spoke of the soul-twisting agony of loving someone from afar. Released as a single on three separate CDs, each featuring an extra three live tracks, the song became one of the band’s biggest hits and secured a place for the record in the tome 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Immaculately written, with a killer tune drenched just to the right measure in classical instruments, this beautifully elegant love song has an epic quality to it that has impressively stood the test of time.

The official video for The Divine Comedy's 'Everybody Knows'

The Story Behind The Song

Born in Derry and raised in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Neil Hannon – main man with chamber pop wizards, The Divine Comedy – is the son of Church of Ireland Minister (and later Bishop of Clogher), Brian Hannon. Neil cites the Human League and OMD as having provided the soundtrack to his formative musical years, at the start of the 1980s.

“As a child, I was ridiculously shy, and the pop thing was a great way of me asserting myself,” he told Under the Radar magazine. Remarkably, Hannon was just a teenager himself, six months shy of his 20th birthday, when he released the characteristically punningly-titled Fanfare For The Comic Muse – before decamping to London and beginning to find his audience.

“I had planned it since I was 15,” he added. “Any kind of pop stardom rarely happens by accident, you really do have to want it. It seems weird to some of my fans that a person like me would care about fame, but I had grown up on Top of the Pops and I kind of accumulated this terrible need within. So, when I found, later on, that I could write songs, I thought, well, maybe I can be like my heroes on Top of the Pops. It was a question of finding the right record and moment.”

Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, in the 1990s. Portrait by Kevin Westenberg

The Divine Comedy were always above any kind of musical fashion. Hannon wrote increasingly finely wrought, well-finished songs that were notable for their intelligence, shaded with an element of knowing eccentricity. The band made their first serious commercial breakthrough with Casanova (1996), which included ‘Songs of Love’, the theme tune for the massively popular sitcom, Father Ted, written by former Hot Press writers Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan. With his career already in the ascendant, Neil Hannon decided to record A Short Album About Love, using an orchestra, The Brunel Ensemble, at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire, on 20 October 1996.

“This album is about really, really wanting to love, and getting glimmers of that but not just being able to go for it, in its totality,” Hannon told Hot Press on the release of A Short Album About Love. “There is no doubt that when I wrote some of the songs on the album I was in love.” And what better way to declare it than with a 25-piece orchestra?

A Short Album About Love was the band’s fifth album and ‘Everybody Knows (Except You)’ was the stand-out track. Released at the height of their commercial success, it was their finest single, with its resonant brass arrangement and winding, 60s-influenced melody – pop music at its finest. In the video, a foppishly elegant Hannon uses a quill to pen a lyric that he rumples into a ball before throwing it away. In real life, that wouldn’t have happened. A natural-born lyricist, Hannon had already built a reputation as a wordsmith – bringing his trademark wit to the theme from the IT Crowd and Father Ted’s 1996 Eurovision entry ‘My Lovely Horse’. ‘Everybody Knows (Except You)’ revealed that there was a more obviously sincere, even sentimental side to Hannon, and that he was capable of writing songs that just about anyone could sing.

Sharp suits and louche charisma: Neil Hannon photographed by Miguel Ruiz

With his sharp suits and louche charisma, Hannon would have made an odd bedfellow on the Britpop bandwagon with which he was sometimes associated. “A lot of bands were lumped in, who I wouldn’t have thought of as Britpop, like Oasis,” he observed, “but at the time I was just happy to be making music that chimed with the times. A lot of what was going on was kind of an anathema to my personality. I desperately wanted to be a kind of ‘Great Gatsby incredible man of parties’, but it just wasn’t me.”

Overall, thus far, The Divine Comedy have enjoyed a gloriously eccentric career. They’ve had nine UK Top 30 hits, with ‘National Express’ from Fin de Siecle, climbing highest, peaking at No.8 and ‘Everybody Knows (Except You)’ next in line, reaching No.14. From the theme tune to Father Ted to ‘Generation Sex’, Hannon has continuously presented different poses to the world, drawing comparisons with David Bowie, who Hannon describes as “the overlord of eccentric pop genius.” He sang ‘I’ve Been To A Marvellous Party’ on the Noel Coward tribute album 20th Century Blues: The Songs of Noel Coward, as well as ‘October’ on the U2 tribute album Even Better Than The Real Thing. And he has collaborated with Dublin songwriter Thomas Walsh (aka Pugwash) on the quirky pop brilliance of their joint project, and album, The Duckworth Lewis Method.

Despite his teenage hankering to appear on TV, Hannon didn’t court the life of a rock star – something he later credits with his longevity as an artist. “I suppose the lucky thing for me was, a lot of artists lose momentum because they want to have lots of hits or they want to break America. I think during the 2000s I managed to talk myself out of all that – it wasn’t really necessary. Instead, I focused on the thing that I did rather than the accoutrements. I ignored the symptoms such as fame and fortune, I concentrated on the disease itself—making music.”

Now living in County Kildare, in his guise as The Divine Comedy, Hannon is still a major live draw. “I’ve been luckier than most,” he reflects. “I get to sing songs to people for a living and they almost always applaud.”

Not just songs: great songs, like ‘Everybody Knows (Except You)’.

Duckworth Lewis Method: Neil Hannon (right) with Thomas Walsh aka Pugwash