The Underground of Happiness

It feels a bit strange to be talking about debuts almost 30 years into a music career but this is the debut solo album of Britta Phillips , of Dean & Britta and Luna fame. The album contains five originals and five covers. A couple of the originals have appeared in some form elsewhere before, the driving thrumming New Order-ish ‘Million Dollar Doll’ on the soundtrack to the Noah Baumbach/Greta Gerwig film Frances Ha , and ‘Ingrid Superstar’ from the 13 Most Wanted/Andy Warhol Screen Test project soundtracked by Dean & Britta, with a lovely late night, mellow but slightly haunted, Velvet Underground feel. In general, the album is pleasingly out of fashion, if you know what I mean. There’s a cover of a little known Abba song, also the very well known ‘Drive’ by The Cars, the reasonably familiar Fleetwood Mac song ‘Landslide’ and the sumptuous Dennis Wilson cut ‘Fallin’ in love’. There are pillowy synths but also the signature and beautiful spidery guitar lines of ...

A few years ago, I came to a conclusion. I decided that the world was divided into two types of people. Not doctors and nurses, as Brendan Behan (quoting the English painter Constable , I think it was) once famously told Eamonn Andrews in an early Irish tv interview. The two types of people I'm talking about are those who love Ennio Morricone and those who don't. I decided that anyone who didn't appreciate the music of this man was a philistine, could not be trusted and could not be my friend. This radical division of humanity was brought on by immersing myself in More Mondo Morricone , a compilation brought out by the German Colosseum label in 1996. The subtitle on the album gives you key information about the content - " more mindblowing film themes by Ennio Morricone from Italian cult movies ". (If ever a product description perfectly matched the contents, that is it.) This was the second in the Mondo Morricone series . There's a great review of the...