Wilts
New member
The O'Jays - never really kicked off over here and were incredibly underrated. Did well enough in the States.
The msot underated pop band / artist of all time are
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Uncle Spielberg
Well-known member
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I thought I'd check to see what I wrote last night as I was 3 sheets to the winds when I wrote this !. I still maintain in the cold light of day in a sober frame of mind that A-Ha are the most underated pop band of all time, so there.
Beach Hut
Brighton Bhuna Boy
Poor choice - Fine Young Cannibals
Thimble Keegan
Remy LeBeau
Safeway said:Yeah, BOLLOCKS. Coldplay have NEVER done anything 'rather good'. Apart from be WANKERS.
That is a tad harsh as I think the first album is quality but the second album is a load of pony.
Strangely, it is the second album that has seen them become massive throughout the world.
Albion & England forever.
Thimble Keegan
Worthing BHA
B.M.F
New member
It has to be showaddywaddy. the best band ever. Under the moon of love is an all time classic. And as for the Pink suits and lime green socks. These boys had style as well as talent
bhaexpress
New member
Thimble Keegan said:
Coldplay = matter of taste. However, as I have some I agree with Safeway.
NMH
Banned
bha.fatboy said:It has to be showaddywaddy. the best band ever. Under the moon of love is an all time classic. And as for the Pink suits and lime green socks. These boys had style as well as talent
They were surely overshadowed by Mud.
Anyway, they were just the Brit copy of Woodstock faves Sha-na-na.
Lush
Mods' Pet
Gareth - i saw your thread title and was all ready to post about a-ha - but you got there first! They are an awesome band - and unusually they are getting better as they get older. The last two albums - "Minor Earth Major Sky" and "Lifelines" are terrific. Morten's ethereal voice is the main strength, I think, but teh songs are good too - apart from a few dodgy lyrics.
I went to see them at The Albert Hall last year. Here's a review from The Indy that backs up our argument...
Remember when pop didn't have to be stupid?
By Simon Price
30 June 2002
The years have been quite kind. Pal Waaktaar, A-ha's tiny-faced guitarist and Norway's official curator of the letter "a", merely looks as though he's spent a few years moonlighting in The Verve. Keyboardist Mags Furuholmen, as much as ever, still resembles Craig McLachlan's stunt double, and he's still the only member to speak fluent English. Above all, Morten Harket looks like a waxwork of himself that has been kept in cold storage since 1984. His cheekbones might have been sculpted by the same glaciation which shaped the Norwegian fjords, his biceps are straight out of a showroom dummy designer's wet dream, and his voice has lost none of its operatic power and choirboy purity.
Somewhere in his Oslo attic there's a picture of Van Morrison. At the age of 42, he looks so unfeasibly handsome that you wonder whether, if he were coming at this for the first time, he couldn't still have a crack at being a teen idol.
And that's when you have to snap out of your reverie, and remind yourself that a band like A-ha would never be allowed to exist nowadays. In the compartmentalised music market of 2002, with its tidy little boxes marked "Pop = Stupid" and "Rock = Slightly Less Stupid". They wouldn't get past the A&R meeting, never mind the radio playlist committee.
It's an alien concept now, but in the Eighties, it was quite a commonplace one: a populist band who dared to aspire to "magnificence", who wrote about existential angst, and made records which sounded like palaces of ice. Who's responsible? Easy. Lest we forget, A-ha, who have more in common with The Associates, say, than with Take That, were the last great mainstream pop group before Stock, Aitken and Waterman took over and forever turned the charts into an end-of-the-pier bouncy castle. Incidentally, I'm no fetishiser of "real" music, but since A-ha, when was the last time a pop act played its own instruments? BB Mak? Let Loose?! These are second-class times, "Scoundrel Days" indeed.
As if to emphasise the gap between "then" and "now", the stage at the Royal Albert Hall has been dressed to resemble an Eighties Top of the Pops set, all blue neon, pink gels and green plasma. A set largely culled from the two albums made since their comeback (Minor Earth, Major Sky and this year's Lifelines) is received with patient indulgence, but this crowd has come to the Royal Albert Hall for a classical recital. Although the trio are audibly under-rehearsed and visibly stage-rusty, the great songs still glisten.
The first, "Manhattan Skyline", is their strangest and their finest. A multi-part mini-symphony which lurches between light orchestral and heavy rock, it's their "Bohemian Rhapsody" (only infinitely more poised, graceful and romantic). If "I've Been Losing You", "Cry Wolf", "The Living Daylights" and, inevitably, "Take On Me" bring the Hall to its feet, the ballads bring it to its knees. When "Hunting High And Low" turns the audience into a spontaneous choir, it's a genuinely haunting moment. As they close with the devastating Euro-drama of "The Sun Always Shines On TV", no doubt remains: A-ha are Kierkegaard with a backbeat."
I went to see them at The Albert Hall last year. Here's a review from The Indy that backs up our argument...
Remember when pop didn't have to be stupid?
By Simon Price
30 June 2002
The years have been quite kind. Pal Waaktaar, A-ha's tiny-faced guitarist and Norway's official curator of the letter "a", merely looks as though he's spent a few years moonlighting in The Verve. Keyboardist Mags Furuholmen, as much as ever, still resembles Craig McLachlan's stunt double, and he's still the only member to speak fluent English. Above all, Morten Harket looks like a waxwork of himself that has been kept in cold storage since 1984. His cheekbones might have been sculpted by the same glaciation which shaped the Norwegian fjords, his biceps are straight out of a showroom dummy designer's wet dream, and his voice has lost none of its operatic power and choirboy purity.
Somewhere in his Oslo attic there's a picture of Van Morrison. At the age of 42, he looks so unfeasibly handsome that you wonder whether, if he were coming at this for the first time, he couldn't still have a crack at being a teen idol.
And that's when you have to snap out of your reverie, and remind yourself that a band like A-ha would never be allowed to exist nowadays. In the compartmentalised music market of 2002, with its tidy little boxes marked "Pop = Stupid" and "Rock = Slightly Less Stupid". They wouldn't get past the A&R meeting, never mind the radio playlist committee.
It's an alien concept now, but in the Eighties, it was quite a commonplace one: a populist band who dared to aspire to "magnificence", who wrote about existential angst, and made records which sounded like palaces of ice. Who's responsible? Easy. Lest we forget, A-ha, who have more in common with The Associates, say, than with Take That, were the last great mainstream pop group before Stock, Aitken and Waterman took over and forever turned the charts into an end-of-the-pier bouncy castle. Incidentally, I'm no fetishiser of "real" music, but since A-ha, when was the last time a pop act played its own instruments? BB Mak? Let Loose?! These are second-class times, "Scoundrel Days" indeed.
As if to emphasise the gap between "then" and "now", the stage at the Royal Albert Hall has been dressed to resemble an Eighties Top of the Pops set, all blue neon, pink gels and green plasma. A set largely culled from the two albums made since their comeback (Minor Earth, Major Sky and this year's Lifelines) is received with patient indulgence, but this crowd has come to the Royal Albert Hall for a classical recital. Although the trio are audibly under-rehearsed and visibly stage-rusty, the great songs still glisten.
The first, "Manhattan Skyline", is their strangest and their finest. A multi-part mini-symphony which lurches between light orchestral and heavy rock, it's their "Bohemian Rhapsody" (only infinitely more poised, graceful and romantic). If "I've Been Losing You", "Cry Wolf", "The Living Daylights" and, inevitably, "Take On Me" bring the Hall to its feet, the ballads bring it to its knees. When "Hunting High And Low" turns the audience into a spontaneous choir, it's a genuinely haunting moment. As they close with the devastating Euro-drama of "The Sun Always Shines On TV", no doubt remains: A-ha are Kierkegaard with a backbeat."