The Underground of Happiness

Just in case it gets lost in the Christmas haze, the promised podcast for the recent Smile Special is now available. The special guest for the show was my UCC 98.3FM colleague Stephen Purcell and you can read Stephen's accompanying article on the background to the Smile sessions, as well as plenty of other Beach Boys and Brian Wilson related discussion, on this link. Enjoy and compliments of the season. http://www.theundergroundofhappiness.blogspot.com/2011/12/beach-boys-smile-special.html Smile Pod by Underground of Happiness3

This week's show (the last of the year before the Christmas break) was another special (after last week's Christmas extravaganza , which, not surprisingly also featured The Beach Boys ), dedicated to The Beach Boys and in particular the Smile album, which was finally officially released this year. I was joined on the show by guest Stephen Purcell , who is a colleague at UCC 98.3FM . After meeting for the first time recently at the station, we quickly established a love of The Beach Boys as something we had in common. However, whereas I would call myself a big fan of the band, Stephen is "hardcore". So, to mark the end of the year when the original Smile recordings were finally released, we decided to devote a show to talking about the album, the band and Brian Wilson as a creative force in popular music. And Stephen also kindly agreed to contribute a superbly detailed background to the album, giving a great insight into the personalities involved in these landmark...