Could there be a musical enterprise more antithetical to the values of rock’n’roll than a concept album about cricket? A long think on the matter yields no clear answers. Had Prefab Sprout’s album about the life of the late Princess of Wales made it to fruition, it would surely have been a contender. Al Stewart’s Down in the Cellar is a more likely candidate. With titles such as The Shiraz Shuffle and Waiting for Margaux, the sometime Year of the Cat creator put together a fearlessly uncool 12-song testament to his well-stocked cellar of fine wines.

Part of the joy in listening to those songs was imagining the reaction they might elicit in an unreconstructed proponent of rock’n’roll values. In creating The Duckworth Lewis Method, however, Neil Hannon and Thomas Walsh, the frontmen respectively with the Divine Comedy and the Irish powerpoppers Pugwash, may have set a new standard. If Liam Gallagher was locked in a lift with any of these songs, you suspect that the angry surge to his synapses would incinerate his mental fusebox in an instant.

Ironically, considering the shared billing, Duckworth Lewis Method heralds the return of Hannon the fruity misfit, the little man with the big vocabulary, whose aggressive literacy made him the unlikeliest of Britpop stars. Insofar as it evokes a bygone age, the Sidney Bechet style jazz break in the current single The Age of Revolution is a red herring — an acknowledgement of the way the former colonies have come to dominate the sport in recent years.

It’s also as “thought-provoking” as the Duckworth Lewis Method gets. As Smash Hits in the early 1980s and any decent football fanzine prove, a proper shared passion for something is best expressed through irreverence and plain silliness. That’ll be Jiggery Pokery then. Sung by Hannon from the perspective of Mike Gatting, this ivory-plunking paean to a famous Shane Warne ball that saw off Gatting for a duck peaks with a male chorus repeating the word “baboon” 28 times. Stephen Fry has already been tweeting effusively, but you suspect that even he would struggle with a whole album of such overcaffeinated Noël Cowardising.

Over the course of 40 minutes, however, Hannon and Walsh’s stylistic versatility results in an album whose scenery keeps shifting. Sometimes it’s an ELO-like dream concerning a road trip to meet the Pakistani cricket legend Javed Miandad, sometimes the stately, sun-dappled inertia of Gentlemen and Players or Test Match Special, whose mention of a streaker astrally chauffeurs you to Hannon’s mid-Nineties Casanova persona.

Elsewhere, The Sweet Spot gives Hannon and Walsh a chance to rustle up a chugging glam racket from the titular metaphor. The brisk instrumental canter of Rain Stops Play is so perfectly evocative of the very thing its title suggests that its use on sporting montages should provide its creators with a steady revenue stream.

Anyone averse to cricket would be forgiven for thinking there’s nothing among all this to detain them. But they would be wrong. The Duckworth Lewis Method is no more an album about cricket than the Indiana Jones films were about archaeology. Sitting around in the sun on the tenuous pretext that you’re taking part in some “sport” has never had a finer soundtrack.

www.myspace.com/dlmethod

Divine Comedy Records, TS £11.74

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