Victory For The Comic Muse - Making of The Album

Making of The Album

The album is unique in the Divine Comedy catalogue - and in the catalogue of most recent popular music - in that Hannon's original aim with the album was to record it entirely in two weeks, with the minimum of overdubbing. As such, almost all of the music on the album - much to the chagrin of the classical players involved on almost every track, and the Divine Comedy band itself - was recorded in live takes. At first, they attempted to use no click tracks or headphones, but eventually they did. The band would record their part, the orchestra would overdub theirs, and then Hannon would record his vocals. No further overdubbing took place unless absolutely necessary, in a fairly hurried style of recording, and in stark contrast to the modern recording technique of stacking up tracks.

During the recording, Hannon's vocals had to be recorded even more hurriedly than planned because for most of the two weeks he was suffering from a cold that got progressively worse before finally clearing up.