Gin Soaked Boy: Neil Hannon on paradoxes, spirit and a tune that wasn’t the hit it deserved

Neil Hannon has been performing as the Divine Comedy since he was a young man in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s, and he’s still going strong. I think he’s a remarkable songwriter, and so underrated.

Gin Soaked Boy was released as a single in 1999, when Hannon was in his late 20s. It wasn’t the hit I thought it should be (more on that below).

The lyrics are filled with contradictions and paradoxes:

I'm the darkness in the light
I'm the leftness in the right
I'm the rightness in the wrong
I'm the shortness in the long

The rapid words keep coming after that, and the song builds and builds, fit for a barroom singalong. It’s possible Hannon was inspired by a Tom Waits song of the same name, but I think he was going for something all his own.

But what is he getting at? In a 2010 interview, he said the meaning of the song was deduced by his mom, who equated “gin” with “spirit.” Indeed, that is kind of where the song ends up, with a cryptic movie reference and then the question of what all of us sooner or later ask ourselves:

I'm the spirit in the sky
I'm the catcher in the rye
I'm the twinkle in her eye
I'm Jeff Goldblum in The Fly
Well, who am I?

Hannon is known for writing the themes to the shows Father Ted and The IT Crowd, and for a sizeable number of hits in the U.K. Gin Soaked Boy was not one of them, even though it holds up well. This is from a 1999 profile on Music OMH (this is alas behind a paywall):

The music press thus despatched, what does Neil make of the record-buying public? His most recent single, Gin Soaked Boy, wheezed its way up to a peak of Number 38. After the success of National Express wasn’t he expecting better things?

“Whether the public liked it or not we’ll never know. Nobody played it on the radio and we didn’t get any TV!” He’s in jovial spirits about this anyway. It’s not like he’s just released his first single, after all. The Divine Comedy have been around for a very long time. “But I’m perfectly calm about it,” he confirms. “The Certainty Of Chance got to Number 41 last year, so we were not pressured. You win some and you lose some. To be honest we’re veering away from having to have constant pop hits because we’re calmer now.”

Hannon could use some more appreciation on this side of the Atlantic, although his music is quite well known at home.

As to that, consider the interview below with Graham Norton in early 2022; after the Divine Comedy performs Something for the Weekend, Norton asks Hannon — there to promote a new anthology called Charmed Life — how difficult it was choosing what would make the cut. (Gin Soaked Boy didn’t make it. It was, however, on a prior collection.)

Take a look at the performance and interview.

Hannon, who is now 55, is going strong still.

He released the latest Divine Comedy album Rainy Sunday Afternoon in the fall. It’s lovely.

Other Dot Dot Dot posts you may (or may not) like about music:

• All the songs referenced in X’s True Love Pt. #2
• Imagine if this football-powered hit kept its cringy original lyric and title
• Move On Up, served 3 ways

Meanwhile, I’ve been building a playlist in Spotify of songs mentioned here on the blog.