Underminers
Underminers
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The Dead Salesmen
About Underminers
“A dream you touch the surface of / Ain’t a dream that’s good enough” (from A Dream You Touch The Surface Of) Many of our best songwriters balance passion for music with parenthood and day jobs. Even unsung, they are compelled to create. It’s certainly true for two of the most criminally undervalued songwriters working in Australia, Justin ‘Happy’ Hayward and Chris Morris, the duo at the core of Underminers. “Baby can you wait a little longer / Before I join the throng and / Say my whole life was wrong…?” (from Self-Made Man) Beyond The Stars, the second album from these pop craftsmen, delves into the central dilemmas facing any thirty-something practicing artist: disillusionment, balancing your craft with your responsibilities and what you gain and lose with the resulting shifts in priorities. Working with producer Dave Beattie ('The Hard Word', Snog), and despite a backlog of great songs, Hayward and Morris started fresh for the new album. “With Beyond The Stars, we made a conscious effort to write a set of songs from scratch, Lyrically, I was looking back over my 20’s. I was in bands all that time, but at the end of my 20’s I went back to Uni and became a teacher. As you get older, you start focusing on other things: family, home…” Hayward muses. “A big part of the album is about losing connections. You lose that contact with people you were really close to in your 20’s.” This is powerful, intimate songcraft, celebrating simple joys like birth notices posted in the local newspaper for your child (Page 21) or spitting out uneasy sentiments like Stand For Something’s “…I’m not fucking around / The real estate agent bleeding in my basement / The bank manger in the boot of my car.” Hayward reveals, “I’ve never felt like I was very political, but I’ve come to think that expressing ourselves, making music, is a political act, because so often individuality and expression are not encouraged.” Singer-songwriter Hayward and guitarist Morris are well-respected in Ballarat, coming from a particularly rich period of the town’s musical history. Underminers formed in 2002 after Hayward took long service with cult band The Dead Salesmen. Hap and Chris had collaborated on various side projects but finally recorded Let's Get T-Shirts Made in 2002, working with Black Cab’s Andrew Coates. On the strength of those songs, Mushroom Publishing signed them in early 2003. Last year, new demos found their way to Croxton Records label bosses Mick Thomas and Nick Corr who fell in love with Underminers’ songcraft, thus Beyond The Stars. At 33 minutes, this album is brief but filling, carrying its substance gracefully, ripe with melancholy pop gems where bittersweet melodies traverse the undercurrents in Hap and Chris’ trademark intelligent, emotive writing. "Underminers have found words and names for those emotions you could never quite put your finger on... with imagination, emotion and infectious melodies." - Beat Magazine
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