Baroque and roll - The Divine Comedy's Foreverland

Let's face it, there is no one in pop, rock or any other genre who writes a lyric like "Who pulls the strings? Who makes all the deals? Five-foot-three in Cuban heels" and gets away with it quite like Neil Hannon. Or, indeed, anyone who would, to begin with, write a song like Napoleon Complex, one of the many delights on Foreverland, the first album in six years from The Divine Comedy, and an enduring treat to boot.

Six years after Bang Goes The Knighthood, Hannon is back with a wry romp through history, further demonstrating that popular music needn't be some autotuned, Simon Cowell-curated homogeneity. There are strings, harpsichords and brass - all vintage Divine Comedy sounds - and a playful landscape that is part 1960s musical and part ironic rock, with the occasional nod to spy film soundtacks (A Desperate Man especially).

Hannon's lyrical and stylistic dexterity reminds me of Ian Dury at his sharpest, even Bowie in his Tony Newley phase, but with the added twist of applying it to songs about the French Foreign Legion and even Catherine The Great (a history device, as it's actually about his partner and collaborator Cathy Davey and is, according to Hannon, "the kind of love song you write if you have been watching too much BBC4").

Coming from the man who wrote a Top Ten hit single about Britain's leading intercity bus company, Foreverland cuts a fine line - as so often is the case with The Divine Comedy - between irony, novelty and earnest musoness. It rarely fails, however. If at all. It is clever, as all of Hannon's work is, but never disappears up itself. After all, who else could write a song entitled How Can You Leave Me On My Own containing a line like "When you leave I become a bad-smelling, couch-dwelling dickhead"? Exactly.

Humour is always there with The Divine Comedy, with Hannon pitching lyrics somewhere between the words of Spike Milligan and even Noël Coward (viz Funny Peculiar - "You’re strangely attractive/You’re oddly adorable"). Amid the baroque and the theatrical there is real romantic warmth: "Finding the one who’s got it - who is with you besotted is like finding the lesser spotted Dodo in Soho - so rare," Hannon confesses on The One Who Loves You with a flourish of Lewis Carroll. Even To The Rescue's line about "Got a vigilante sleeping in my bed/I looked for Marilyn, I got Che instead" pays a clever compliment to Davey.

Listened to on a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon, crossing London by train, Forverland was the perfect soundtrack, It's also a rare pop album - one combining wit with the heartfelt, quirkiness with familiarity. What an absolute pleasure.