Two years ago, it seemed as if Something Happens' future was non-existent. Despite the minor success of their first two albums, Been There Seen That Done That and Stuck Together With God's Glue, their third long-player, Bedlam-A-Go-Go, was released just as their record company decided to drop them. A band that had slogged (well, OK, slouched) hard for seven years, and always seemed to be on the verge of major commercial success were now label-less, and very pissed off.

But just as the begrudgers were whooping with joy, getting ready to celebrate the death of yet another failed Irish band, the Happens went and released CC Incidentally on their own label. That was just over a year ago, and now the band are back safely within the bosom of another major record company, leisurely recovering from the birth of their fourth album, Planet Fabulous.

For the most part, the contrived heaviness of Bedlam A GoGo has disappeared, the band returning to the warmer sounds of their previous work. "You get wiser every time," says drummer Eamon Ryan of the band's ups and downs in the business of recording. "Every time you make a record, there's a totally different set of things happening. People tend to think of it as just a record that comes out and it's over in one day, but it's more like the year previous to it, writing it and making it. It's happened every time, and every time we do it, we learn a bit more. It's kind of important not to get too caught up in the business side of it, and the business side of it has been a feature of a lot of the interviews we've done around this album. People are interested in how we actually did get by in the last year and a half, but it doesn't really matter."

Tom Dunne, sporting a just-woken-up look, isn't that concerned with discussing the hardships of their time in musical limbo either, probably because there weren't any.

"It was really easy," he claims. "It's more the album that's important. I think it's been a while since we made an album that's really good, and I think how good it is is going to become clearer as time goes by. I found that one thing that's happening already here is that people are saying it's a great album because say, Fataler Femmes is a brilliant track, or people are saying it's a great album because of A 70s Wedding. There's no concensus at all, people are just picking different songs out. There's fourteen songs, and I'd say some of them are a bit similar, and we might have cut one or two of them out, but there isn't one that you could take out without disappointing somebody."

Then again, Tom's biased.

The band refuse to make any big predictions for Planet Fabulous, modest lads that they are, but having experienced the 'almost there' failure of their previous efforts, are Something Happens going to push as hard as they did with their first two albums?

"I don't think we were ever ambitious!" laughs Tom Dunne, "The two most important things are writing great songs and playing great gigs and see where we go next."

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