The Underground of Happiness

It's been a good month for Double 6 . The ex-Coral guitarist’s debut album is an imagined soundtrack for the Italo Calvino novel If on a winter’s night a traveller . I’m a pushover when it comes to soundtracks (isn’t all music a soundtrack for something?), but even so this is still a beautiful album with lots of shading and texture, aswell as an emotional punch. The considerable talents of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra are employed throughout for many memorable and sweeping, cinematic moments (the majestic Enlace , in particular, has a series of wonderful brass smears), but for my money the vocal pieces have the most impact. The plaintiff Leaning (Star of Sweden) has an air of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci to it; By the Church of Apollonia sets a wordless, female keen brilliantly against a military tom beat, which manages to suggest Ennio Morricone without sounding anything like him as such; the miniature guitar picking and intimate/lost vocal of Le Grand Désordre are striking e...

We had a couple of excerpts on this week's show of a recent interview with Neville Skelly , the Liverpool singer-songwriter, whose debut album Poet & the dreamer is out now through Setanta/PIAS . It was a very interesting conversation, taking in Neville's early big band and song stylist influences (courtesy of his father and uncle), how crooning is not a dirty word, how he hooked up with near-neighbours The Coral who introduced him to Dion Dimucci (of Dion & the Belmonts fame), earning his chops on open-mic slots, and more. Listen to the full interview here. Particularly interesting I thought was Neville's mention of the invention of the microphone, as the catalyst for the style of what he called "lyrical singing". The phrase was new to me but he explained it as a more intimate or soft-spoken singing technique. Up until that time, singers with backing bands would have had to belt out their vocals to be heard, or depend on the consideration/skill of t...