Happy Meals in session for BBC Introducing in Scotland
Nicola Meighan
Presenter, BBC Introducing
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They're good for you, are Happy Meals. The Glasgow duo's woozy techno, tropical disco and cosmic torch-songs are bright, escapist and uplifting, as showcased in their recent glorious BBC Introducing live session.
Sonic voyagers Suzanne Rodden (who sings in French and English) and Lewis Cook (The Cosmic Dead, Mother Ganga, Yahweh) only formed Happy Meals in 2014, but they've already bagged a Scottish Album of the Year Award nomination for their debut album, Apero, which was issued last November via Night School Records (Julia Holter, The Space Lady).
The duo launched their session with a radiant take on one of Apero's stand-out tracks (which you can watch above) – the slow-burning, celestial 'Crystal Salutation' – flanked by banks of analogue trickery, synths and mics and amber light.
Honing their penchant for super sonic deviations, Happy Meals followed this with a cover of a song by folk-rock legend Gordon Lightfoot: they re-animated the Canadian country king's 1970 classic, 'If You Could Read My Mind', as a gorgeous astral synth lament. (Listen back and you'll hear why Lightfoot once brought a plagiarism lawsuit against the writers of Whitney Houston's 'The Greatest Love of All'...)
After a chat with the band, which variously touched on musical escapism, the influence of Orange Juice, and the liberating benefits of belting out Devo songs – not to mention the time they played inside a glass office, surrounded by statues, in a winter park, in Moscow – Rodden and Cook served up a thrilling electro pass-it-on track, courtesy of 'Everybody's Night', from 1980s synth-wave trailblazers Deux.
And they treated us to another (extra) sensory delight from Apero, thanks to 'Altered Images' (which you can watch above), a synth-funk disco-chanson trip that spotlit Rodden's bilingual vocals, which – like Happy Meals themselves – are ice cool, white hot, enlivening, and wonderful.
