6/11/07: The Divine Comedy “Come Home Billy Bird” (2004)The Divine Comedy is the work of the UK's own Neil Hannon, and he’s been recording since 1993. Those early songs built Hannon a fanatical following that was slightly delusional. In truth, each Divine Comedy album only had one or two charming masterpieces. Things really came together for Hannon when he became a husband and father. His cultured (and judgmental) decadence works a lot better in a suburban setting.
That brings us to “Come Home Billy Bird,” which captures how the trappings of a glamour profession eventually become a trap. We like to think of our titular hero as being the kind of businessman who’s a credit to the World Trade Organization. Hannon’s got a typically rich and jangly setting to Bird’s travails, beginning with him waking up with a hangover and having missed his morning call. Billy Bird had fallen in with “a bunch of Belgian businessmen and a strange drinking game.” The song chronicles his mad rush to the airport in an attempt to catch a flight back home.
Bird first endures a cab driver who prefers talking to speeding, and then unabashedly begs at the check-in desk to be allowed entry onto his flight. The next twist is tragically familiar:
Drenched in sweat, he finds his seat
And with the luggage squeezed down beneath his feet
He begins to think that things can’t get no worse
And then a voice says, “Bags that can’t be stowed
In the overhead lockers must go below
In the hold—please let go. Thank you, sir.”At least this final barrier makes for a spectacular ending once Billy’s flight arrives blessedly on time:
He runs on past the carousel
Screaming, “Damn my luggage all to hell
I can buy a new shirt and tie any day!”
He rides from the airport into town
To the high-school football ground
Where his son has just begun his big football gameSo it’s a happy ending for both Billy and Billy Junior, and we don’t even care that Hannon’s singing about a football game that’s really soccer.
But is it fair—as we head towards Father’s Day—to suggest this sort of touching tale is strictly a conservative notion? Yes, and here’s why: “Come Home Billy Bird” is exactly the kind of thing that the
New York Times would dismiss as a useless ’50s fantasy. It’s like how the paper once said that nobody grew up in a house like the one on
Leave It To Beaver, and illustrated that article with a still from the show that looked exactly like our childhood living room of the ’70s. Why don’t those creeps at the
Times just come over and shoot us and put us in a shallow grave?
Make it your own: First, all the best of the early Divine Comedy albums was neatly assembled on
A Secret History. “Come Home Billy Bird” is from
Absent Friends—which, like everything Neil Hannon has done since 2001, is a consistently fine album. For a cheap thrill, though, pick up the “Come Home Billy Bird”
CD-single. The import includes
a fun video and Hannon’s excellent demo, which improves on the album track as an atypically soulful stomp. We’ll also note that last year’s
Victory for the Comic Muse was the best yet from Hannon, and can be had
cheap.
