Sunrise

An anthem, I hope, to sing in about 18 hours. Change, perhaps, to eight not 30 years of night, but it sets my mood at the moment with that "hint of blue in the black sky."

Who cares where national borders lie
Who cares whose laws you’re governed by
Who cares what name you call a town
Who’ll care when you’re six feet beneath the ground

From the corner of my eye
A hint of blue in the black sky
A ray of hope, a beam of light
An end to thirty years of night
The church-bells ring, the children sing
What is this strange and beautiful thing
It’s the sunrise
Can you see the sunrise?
I can see the sunrise

- "Sunrise", The Divine Comedy

I Kept My Head Down and Carried On

With the potential of reversing eight years of night, this tune plays in my head often. Having kept my head down and carried on, it's hard to trust too much optimism and easier to retreat to cynicism. The local references may not be relevant, but the spirit of a hint of blue in a dark sky is. It's one of my favorite anthems by The Divine Comedy.

Super Rich Divinity

Two exciting bits of The Divine Comedy news. Neil Hannon is at work on a London West End musical for children. Man, are we pissed that this never made it into U.S. entertainment news. As if we gave a rip about which no-talent loser won American Idol or what that Fergie creature is up to. Maroon 5? Yeah, right, who cares... (Okay, JunkThief does get the fuss about Brandon Flowers...completely, especially with the beard and glasses.) But we digress.

It's very easy seeing Hannon doing some Van Dyke Parks meets Brecht and Weill/dark but sweet kiddie show. As if that weren't enough, JunkThief came across these incredible MP3s of Hannon covering everything from Bowie's Life on Mars to Randy Newman's Lonely at the Top to Nelly Furtado's Man Eater to Krafwerk's Radioactivity to a version of The Good Life with strings so plush they'd make Nelson Riddle and Mitch Miller blush. Okay, he's not gloss magazine pretty, but this guy puts JunkThief further and further over the edge in a very different kind of way.

Too much. Get out of town. As if this guy could not get more divine.

Don't Mutilate My Mink

Tonight at dinner with my writing group at the Baghdad Café (which we sometimes dub the Algonquin West), I was interested to learn the varying level of awareness (in part due to Saturday’s post here) about Neil Hannon and the Divine Comedy. Some had gone so far as to explore his YouTube videos, such as the stunning "Sunrise", the finale of his Fin de Siecle, the sort of song U2 might cut if they were…oh, I’ll hold off on my U2 barbs for now.

Based on the few comments and many more emails I’ve received as a result of that post, it seems that all my female friends are rushing and gushing to buy CDs and my gay male friends think I’ve lost my sanity. They are even more brutal when I pull out my (I have to admit completist) Mark Eitzel/American Music Club. Sorry, Kylie, Madonna and Whitney and their ilk just don’t sing to my heart or pocket book.

Now, don’t think I don’t have my female musical muses that range from Vashti Bunyan, Nina Simone, Francoise Hardy, Nico and, on the right day, Ute Lemper. The recent increased interest in Divine Comedy made me pull out her release Punishing Kiss which was sort of a cross over disc, and I saw her at Davies Hall during that tour. Half the crowd walked out around the time her piercing voice sand Nick Cave’s "Little Water Song," a really brilliant murder ballad sung from the perspective of a woman that was being drowned by her lover. I was going through a particularly nasty break up then, and it spoke to me a little to closely – the sentiment was that “you may be killing me, but you’ll never be able to be inside my head or soul.” Listening to Punishing Kiss 3/4ths of a decade later, it sounds comfortably distant and 50% brilliant and 50% goofy and click ahead to the next track. Ute could potentially be in my top 10 list because she is willing to belt out so harshly, almost a Weimar Joplin at times, but then she will go into these over affected, Al Jarreau on crack mannerisms. But she can be hilarious at times, and I will never forget her self-introduction of “I come from Berlin, that little scar of a city on the arse of Europe.” And revisiting Scott Walker's epic 11 minute "Scope J" in a post-9/11, post-Tilt world gives it much greater resonance.

Thinking of women that I’d add to that list, I was reminded of Cristina Monet or just Cristina who was the grande dame of No Wave and the Norma Shearer of Ze Records back in the early 1980s. Well, I’ll be darned, she is the first beloved artist that actually stumped YouTube. I have her two complete LPs from Cristina (1980) and Sleep It Off (1984) that opened with the killer track "Don't Mutilate My Mink", and I think her version of "Ballad of Immoral Earning" is my all time favorite. Those tunes, especially on the latter LP, are very much where I was at that time -- all downtown angst channeling Weimar energy. She had one of the best Christmas tunes of all time, "Things Fall Apart" as well as a mean, snarling cover of "Is That All There Is?" that pre-dated P.J. Harvey's version by a decade or so. But it does not seem that there will be a behind the music until I become CEO of VH1. At least there is a fansite out there for Cristina. If you really love me, I'll burn you a CD of my favorite of her tracks

In the meantime, I am really wanting to take a blogger/youtube, et. al. holiday this Memorial Weekend. Time for Proust, friends, haute Japanese cuisine, gardening and exercise. Oh, and brushing up the Castilian and Catalan.

Late for the Party of Absent Friends

Sometimes JunkThief tends to be a cultural Rip Van Winkle. After all, having done plenty of Mayfair and Beekman Place dumpster dives, it’s not unusual to be dressing up in smoking jackets and opera togs from a season or two back. But JT’s mother always said, a classic, well tailored silhouette has no expiration date.

So now and again something from the recent past comes to JT’s attention and just knocks him on his arse and feels like a…you know…religious experience.

Case in point is the slow boil of Neil Hannon of the “band” The Divine Comedy. JT has liked Neil for quite a while. He's never done more than make the tiniest mark in the U.S. with too obscure and dark of a sensibility, though he did show up for one tune on Air's new Pocket Symphony. Neil and DC are a weird hybrid of Noel Coward, Scott Walker, Paul Weller of the Jam and the Style Council, cinema scores and tortured poet. Add in a dash of Richard Harris signing the Jimmy Webb catalogue and you get the full picture. There are 3-4 of DC’s past albums in the JT library with a few favorite singles such as “Your Daddy’s Car” sample lyric: "Can't you feel the sadness in our love?/It's the only kind we're worthy of.") and “The Perfect Love Song,” but none of them have ever gelled as a cohesive album. What little press he gets in the U.S., is usually on websites like this.

For quite some time JT has admired the cover of the 2004 DC release Absent Friends that looks like it could have been shot in his York Street living room. Neil and JT share an almost identical fashion sense that says you can never have too many velvet suits and blazers, Ben Sherman and Munsingwear shirts and Josef Seibel shoes. The fact that Neil is a flaming straight man with more operatic melodrama and camp than Rufus Wainwright and Lance Loud put together is all the more intriguing. Perhaps that he’s from Northern Ireland explains a lot about his tortured, romantic soul.

Although when some straight guys’ hearts are broken they’ll go out and sing a rumbling blues or gurgling, bourbon soaked dirge, Neil feels the best way is to do so is with a huge string section, operatic flair, martini glass raised in the air, and the most perfect mix of art nouveau/1965 London mod suit and shoes. It’s exactly what JT does when he’s hung up on or just got dumped by or just dumped some boy.

Those are the themes of Absent Friends, each tune building and building like all the best, most intense moments of Scott Walker’s first four solo albums only ramped up a few notches, like sipping double shots of absinthe on Montague Terrace while Gaudi and Poulenc dance a tango with Cocteau and Coward looking on while gossiping with Anita Berber and Man Ray.

It’s the first tune on Absent Friends that sucked JT in – amazingly weaving together the sad fates of Jean Seberg, Steve McQueen and Oscar Wilde all into one tune – with the perfect mix of heart ache, hope, camp and frantic energy. While I used to think Neil was a bit of a goof, overblown, hanging out with Ute Lemper for too long (speaking of wacko drama queens), he’s convinced me that he’s the real deal. How fitting that this odd little straight man has sung the most touching tribute I’ve ever heard to Oscar Wilde. Watch him with this full, gorgeously overblown orchestration in the clip below. (At this link until the YouTube embedding is back up.) Sure, the boy’s off pitch and really reaching for the notes several times, but his passion on the last passage reaches me on such a deep level as I think of my own many absent friends. Just hearing his grand tribute makes me know the tune is not just about the short list of celebrities but all those who left the party too soon. The Pet Shop Boys came close to reaching this vibe on "Being Boring", but this take of those feelings is less glib.

He’s even recently moved from the personal to political with a powerful, yet-to-be-officially released tune about Guantanamo Bay.

I gotta tell you, at the risk of losing all homo-cred, that I find there to be something incredibly sexy about this guy in a way that none of the usual six-pack oh-so-manly gay cartoon/blow up muscle men can ever do for me. That’s pretty shocking, I know, and most of my gay friends tell me they think he’s ugly as hell. It’s not that he’s attractive in any check list sort of a way but appealing in that he’s such a quirky, gawky original. That’s probably the ultimate “I’m dating myself (‘cause nobody else will)” statement, but there it is. Then again, I sort of get turned on when Thom Yorke twists and shouts (or bleeps and screeches).

In the meantime, if you want to know what an album by JunkThief might sound like, go to iTunes now and catch all of Asbent Friends and hear the tales of everything from a rusting battleship, a weary international traveler and imaginary friends.