ES7132 seven-inch features The Divine Comedy
‘RADIOACTIVITY’
The A-side of this month’s exclusive seven-inch is a cover of Kraftwerk’s ‘Radioactivity’ by The Divine Comedy, the celebrated chamber pop outfit. First released on the group’s 1999 CD single ‘National Express’, it takes the mournful melancholy of the original and builds the track into an explosive and epic finale.
“I didn’t investigate Kraftwerk properly until the mid-1990s,” says Divine Comedy main man Neil Hannon. “I’d been aware of them, of course, from when I was a kid – they gave me some of my earliest musical memories – but that was the point when I went out and bought all their albums.
“I’ve always particularly loved ‘Radioactivity’. It’s a simple but hypnotic tune. As with all their best songs, the chord changes move in glacial time, yet each one feels massive. When it finally goes to the tonic after circling through the relative minor and dominant, you think, ‘Yes, home!’. It’s almost like Beethoven – immense, inevitable and powerful.
“Kraftwerk basically invented electronic music, of course, but it was the amazing tunes and the incredible atmospheres they created that appealed to me. They weren’t really a pop group. They were developing sounds they wanted to hear and couldn’t find elsewhere. In a sense, it’s kind of romantic classical music that happens to be made with synthesisers.
“I remember in 1994, when The Divine Comedy was just piano, cello, violin and me on acoustic guitar, we played a cover of ‘The Model’ in Germany. I thought, ‘We’re in Germany, let’s do a Kraftwerk song!’, but the blank looks we got from the audience made me wonder if maybe they weren’t so big in their home country. Perhaps they were too German for Germans. Their German-ness, I think, is what’s partly so attractive to outsiders.”
‘THE SYNTHESISER SERVICE CENTRE SUPER SUMMER SALE’
The other side of our seven-inch is ‘The Synthesiser Service Centre Super Summer Sale’, a track from The Divine Comedy’s 2019 album ‘Office Politics’. If Noel Coward had deigned to write a witty list song about synthesisers, it might have sounded like this.
“All you need to know is this is my manager Natalie’s least favourite Divine Comedy work,” says Neil Hannon. “The first time she heard it, she shook her head and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding’.
“I’m very proud of the track myself. It’s a live recording, more or less. We recorded a lot of the ‘Office Politics’ album at my house and we did this when we got a bit pissed one night. We turned the lights off, so it was dark except for the flickering buttons and the computer screen, and just went for it. It’s nonsense, really, but hopefully it will make some people smile. I didn’t have an amazing synth collection at that point – a Prophet-5, a microKORG, a Korg Delta and a Solina, plus a Moog app on my iPad.
“We came up with the list between a lot of googling and some advice from my synth-mad bassist. It’s probably not all-encompassing, but the important ones are in there. It’s a sort of sales pitch for a fictional synthesiser shop. Having said that, there is apparently a real Synthesiser Service Centre. I’m not sure if they have a Super Summer Sale, but they really ought to. I also mention one band, Nine Inch Nails, because I was trying to rhyme something with ‘sales’.
“I’ve always had this sneaky synth fetish actually, right from the moment I saw Gary Numan on ‘Top Of The Pops’, poking at those black boxes with one finger. It was very cool. I didn’t know why back then. I still don’t. Best not to ask questions.”
