The Underground of Happiness

A playlist from the first half of 2017. Some were reissued this year. One is an extract from a longer piece. Most will be familiar if you're a regular listener. Part 2 of this selection comes up next week. Say hello to Laetitia and friends. Enjoy. The Underground of Happiness uplifting pop music of every creed www.theundergroundofhappiness.blogspot.com www.facebook.com/theundergroundofhappiness Twitter: UndergroundOfHappy Playlist 456 Tues July 18 2017 11.00am-12.00pm (repeated on Tuesdays 8.30pm) UCC 98.3FM listen live on the web at www.ucc.ie/983fm *listen back to this show here goo.gl/73FkiB Playlist The Comet Is Coming – March of the rising sun ( playing Liverpool Psych Fest, Sept 23 ) Snapped Ankles – Jonny Guitar calling Gosta Berlin Percolator – Crab Supernova Golden Retriever – Pelagic tremor Matthew Bourne – Isotach The Roger Webb Sound – Moon bird (English Weather compilation) Kamasi Washington – Truth (extract) G...

In a way this is the sound of the past. The mid 1980s. Flying Nun Records. A hazy but thrilling jangle. A band of women. Insouciance. Nostalgia can be beautiful. But another way of looking at it (or listening to it) is that this is the sound of now. Psychedelic pop with gauzy back of the room harmonies. Without this the likes of Warpaint wouldn’t exist. In the 80s they operated in a parallel world to The Pixies. One where they used flutes. A more democratic one, maybe. The yang to the yin of The Chills. That fed into all kinds of what was known as indie. A wonderful uncaring looseness. They also call it unselfconscious. With some hard to pinpoint connection to The Go Betweens. A glorious thing to sustain you in hard times.

One of the more heartwarming returns of recent years in (let’s call it) popular music is the story of Martin Phillipps and The Chills , who are contenders for most cruelly underappreciated band in the history of the world. This piece by Michael Hann from The Guardian last year does excellent justice to Phillipps’ rollercoaster backstory (although the quoted paragraph does contain one glaringly debatable statement which I’ll come back to). http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/24/the-chills-martin-phillipps-comeback “In the late 80s, the Chills were one of the groups most likely to. After several years of adored singles, EPs and one album on New Zealand’s Flying Nun records – which made the proper charts there, and gained a devoted cult audience in the northern hemisphere – they’d signed to Warner Brothers. Their first album for Warner, 1990’s Submarine Bells, was critically adored, with a single – Heavenly Pop Hit – that was all over radio. But by the time its hit-and-m...