{"id":741,"date":"2017-11-07T22:03:50","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T22:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/?p=741"},"modified":"2017-11-07T22:20:37","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T22:20:37","slug":"neil-hannon-sunrise-and-remembrance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/?p=741","title":{"rendered":"Neil Hannon, Sunrise and Remembrance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CS1220920-02A-BIG\"<\/a>\u2018Sunrise\u2019 by The Divine Comedy is a song that begins in the murk and ambiguity of Northern Ireland in the Eighties. Neil Hannon puts out the idea that his birthplace, Londonderry is also known as Derry City. His home is Enniskillen but historically it\u2019s about the mythology of Inis Ceithleann<\/em>, water and land and ancient footfalls. The singer gives his dues to the different narratives and steers a self-conscious path between them. Then on November 8, 1987 the bomb goes off at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday and there is no easy way to walk that line:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cOh what a clever boy<\/em>
\nTo Watch Your hometown be destroyed<\/em>
\nI knew that I would not stay long<\/em>
\nSo I kept my head down and carried on.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Eleven people were killed and 63 were injured by the IRA bomb in Enniskillen. As with many incidents of the time, it was followed by claims and revisions, numbness and trauma. The singer Christy Moore was one of the artists who began to re-evaluate his politics. Chris de Burgh wrote \u2018Remembrance Day\u2019 and dedicated it to Marie Wilson, who had died holding her father\u2019s hand in the rubble. \u201cI am ashamed to be Irish on Remembrance Day<\/em>\u201d, he sang. Bono was on tour in Denver and his onstage revulsion was captured in the \u2018Rattle And Hum\u2019 film:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd let me tell you something. I’ve had enough of Irish-Americans who haven’t been back to their country in 20 or 30 years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home, and the glory of the revolution, and the glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution! Where is the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old-age pensioners, their medals taken out an polished up for the day? Where’s the glory in that? To leave them dying or crippled for life or dead under the rubble of the revolution that the majority of the people in my country don’t want.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neil Hannon released \u2018Sunrise\u2019 on the 1998 album \u2018Fin de Si\u00e8cle\u2019. The song had the benefit of distance, a chance for the writer to be more considered.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Sunrise\u2019 was the most difficult song I have ever written,\u201d he told me in 2004, \u201cand it is still the most difficult to actually perform and I don\u2019t want to sort of make it into some sort of \u2018Sunday, Bloody Sunday\u2019 where I will never do it again. Because I will, because it is cool. But it was just so hard, it was like walking on eggshells trying to write the lyrics for that song.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet he definitely wanted to dismiss the patriot game. In mid-song, he grows weary of the different semantics and name-calling.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn many ways you want to put people\u2019s backs up – to not cow-tow to the kind of general political correctness of the North. You are meant to talk in hushed tones about various situations, and I just wanted to lay on the line and say that you know pretty much nothing is worth being buried for.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"exposition\"<\/a>But \u2018Sunrise\u2019 was also born into a peace process and so there was a cautious release in the final verse, the idea that transformation was possible. That\u2019s what makes the song resound as a mature work. However it wasn\u2019t his first try. Interestingly, there was a previous Neil Hannon song on the subject. Back in 1988 he had released a collection of songs called \u2018Exposition\u2019. The band was October, named after a U2 album and featuring a musical accomplice, Lawrence Hoy. The music was very much of its time, with spatial guitars, a drum machine and too much flange pedal. \u2018Remembrance Day\u2019 summons the bottomless dolour of Joy Division as Neil tries to relate to the atrocity.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw the wall, row upon row<\/em>
\nOf those who fell so long ago <\/em>
\nI watched them fall again today <\/em>
\nNo uniform, no rifles, they <\/em>
\nHave lit a flame for all to see <\/em>
\nNot just for you, not just for me\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018Remembrance Day\u2019 may be Hannon juvenilia, but it comes directly out of the experience. There is no artistic cover. As the subject came up in 2004, Neil was rueful about this early creation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was teaching myself to write songs in the Eighties I was definitely under the tutelage of Sting and Bono and I came up with some truly awful political statements, you know, very simplistic. When the Enniskillen Bomb went off and I wrote a song and it was truly terrible. I called it \u2018Remembrance Day\u2019 it\u2019s on some demo somewhere and I hope you never find it and you know I listened to it once about five years ago and I have since decided to never, ever think about it again because it is too awful.\u00a0 You know it is very difficult to write things about the situation. It\u2019s very difficult to write pop songs about serious issues. So I generally don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet he committed. Several times. It\u2019s important that he did.<\/p>\n

Stuart Bailie<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(with acknowledgements to ashortsite.com<\/a>)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Sunrise\u2019 by The Divine Comedy is a song that begins in the murk and ambiguity of Northern Ireland in the Eighties. Neil Hannon puts out the idea that his birthplace, Londonderry is also known as Derry City. His home is Enniskillen but historically it\u2019s about the mythology of Inis Ceithleann, water and land and ancient […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":748,"href":"https:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions\/748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digwithit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}