OF COURSE IT´S ART, IT´S GOT A FUCKING OBOE IN IT
Mar 4th, 2008 by Conor McCabe
There are people out there who do not see the three minute pop song as an art form. They need help. Now, there are thousands of pop songs to choose from, but here´s one that I find particularly wonderful.
The Divine Comedy will be a subject of our Great Irish Bands series soon, but for now, here´s “Tonight we fly.”
Enjoy.
Nice one Conor - get the words in Castillan and all. Are you sure there’s an oboe there, can hear clarinets alright. Wouldn’t want to be caught appreciating somehing oboe-free now…
I do believe you can see the oboe if you pause the video at 0.25 seconds. So yeah. It´s art alright. Phew! Close one.
By the way, everytime I hear this song it reminds me of swimming pissed drunk and bollick naked at the 40 foot one summer´s morning after an all-night party in Dun Laoghaire. (Cough. Too much information?)
Ahem - I’ll have to consult my lawyers before replying to that one.
Me and Bertie did have our ‘valuables’ in small brown envelopes, as I recall - his envelope was considerably smaller than mine, of course…
Speaking of brown envelopes, what it always reminds me of is the time that we went to see the Divine Comedy and Seán pushed his way to the front of what is now called the Village so he could hand up a brown envelop containing some printed sheets with the words for Lucy on them. Neil Hannon had only forgotten the last time we’d seen him when the Devine Comedy played support to some useless Smith’s copycat band who are now long forgotten.
Hannon was completely bemused to be handed a brown envelop and tentatively opened it up. “These…are the…lyrics…to Lucy” he said. Then someone shouted out that he’d forgotten them last time and he flung the pages in the air saying dramatically ‘I don’t need these’.
Here’s them playing it some time later
Actually, “Lucy” was the first song I heard by the Divine Comedy. Seán played it for me. I fell in love with them right there and then.
Donagh - thanks for that memory of our rash and foolish youth (and Conor too for the previous one). And your honour, in case you’ve picked up on the brown envelope in the Mean Fiddler, it was a wee voice in me head made me do it - he called himself Mr. Wordsworth, the voice… and spoke in Myles Dungan’s accent….
I just thought it was because you were always a gas man. And I have to thank you for a lot of my musical education. Although I think you got a lot of it off Professor John Peel.