‘Out of the Blue’: The first album Neil Hannon ever fell in love with
“It was pretty much a mind blowing experience for little Neil,” reminisces Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy on discovering his first favourite album, Out of the Blue by ELO. The pop masterpiece has stayed with him ever since.
At a tender age, hearing Out of the Blue would go on to shape Hannon’s chamber pop output. It seems we all have a moment where the future presents itself, and this was his. “I was six or seven and this is the first record, basically, that I really remember,” he told Far Out.
Describing the record like some sort of illicit treat, he went on with misty eyes, “My eldest brother bought it, and he waited for the parents to go out. He turned off all the lights in the front room and played it incredibly loudly”. That was it. That was the moment Hannon may well have become a songwriter before he even knew it.
The oft-referenced ELO album is echoed in the grand instrumentation of The Divine Comedy’s opening of ‘National Express’, which also leans into jazz codes and comedy. “When you experience something like that at such a formative age,” he continues about Out of the Blue, “every single last second of it goes in. It’s like it has been vinyled into my head. When I listen to it now, it’s like every single last moment I know inside out.“
In fact, every subsequent listening experience has somehow been tethered to that initial flooring experience. As he adds, “Sometimes, over the years, I’ve found it hard to really hear it from a subjective viewpoint, because it was like a part of my childhood, it was weird.” It was just profoundly moving and contained such depth that he simply had to explore it further.
Conversely, he described the sound of contemporary pop music in 2025 to Rolling Stone as “rancid” following up with, “That brain mulching sound they put on vocals makes me feel slightly sick.”
On this new music, the artist did politely add, “But I’m sure they’re enjoying it, or else they wouldn’t do it. There’s lots of like alternative stuff underneath, which has a bit more spunk, and there have been times with pop music where you only realise it was good after the event.” Autotune hyperpop production continues to divide.
In its own way, Out of the Blue was also divisive. ELO’s sound was driven by innovation, but that also meant Hannon had never heard anything like it. It was pioneering that its freshness remains, with Hannon adding, “I still think it is a wonderful, wonderful album and I love Jeff Lynne’s attention to detail. That’s the thing that I get from ELO. It’s like there’s no little bit at the end of a verse where he just kind of goes, ‘Oh, just play that for a while’. It’s all filled with goodness all the way through.”
This has markedly stayed with Hannon throughout the years, with the singer-songwriter attempting to never waste a note. Clearly, this met with his hero’s approval. According to Hannon, after a chance meeting in Sheffield, Lynne said to him words to the effect of ‘Hey, I really dig the tunes’. He’s been thinking about that ever since. As Hannon recalled, “I just thought, oh, bloody hell. That’s amazing. He’s heard of me.”
Recording his own new album, which came out this September, it’s the oldies that continue to inspire as he told Rolling Stone about recording in Abbey Road, “I don’t believe that Syd Barrett’s hand is on your shoulder or John Lennon is guiding your fingers across the piano, but there’s something really cool about the place.“
He concluded, “It’s like a sort of good old music factory. And there’s always cool people in the canteen too. I was walking up the stairwell and my eyes weren’t drawn to photos of the Beatles and the Stones, it was Shirley Bassey and people like that. I love the fact that those records were made there.”
