OLIVE – "You're Not Alone"

This was popular still on the radio later that summer when I started my first ever job, washing pots in an Italian restaurant. £2.40 an hour and it gave me terrible, terrible headaches. The kitchen that is, not Olive which I quite liked.

After its initial stall just outside the top 40 the previous year I think this is another case of a subsequent remix having a very strong hand in its second life – in this case the remix by Steve Osborne and Paul Oakenfold which starts off as a more stripped down Orbital-y version of the original before launching into the signature epic trance style Oakie became a figurehead for, establishing himself as the archetypal jet-setting superstar DJ in a superclub era getting paid many thousands of pounds per set.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCyaP76w_8I

Unlike ‘Professional Widow’ it wasn’t a remix already available with the original release but I certainly remember it as inescapable throughout the rest of the year in the same way BBE’s ‘Seven Days And One Week’ had been in ’96 and probably the best thing Oakie did since the remix of Happy Mondays ‘Hallelujah’.

Love this, and loved it when Tinchy Stryder reused it a few months before Naughty Boy/Sandé/Wiley reused the White Town track in a similar manner.

Leftfield “Original” had been ubiquitous at 95 festivals. This was or seemed to me to be the late 96/97 equivalent — though again (like Pro-Widow) I’d forgotten why the prolonged life and revival (and I don’t even recall the Oakenfold remix Steve links there). However my brain might be confused by having seen them perform this at the Brighton Essential Festival in 97, which the internet tells me must have been either during or right after it was number 1. Coo.

Another standout track in this vein, Lamb’s Gorecki (a 10), made an imperceptible dent in the charts 2 months earlier than this finally hitting the top.

8 no 9 (changed my mind)

Hm, quite liked this at the time and it still sounds pretty good now – those backward synths, and Ruth-Ann’s excellent, understated performance. It’s a low-key track though, it’s true, and it doesn’t do much to stand out, but that doesn’t have to be a fault. There’s room in the world for this kind of thing, and while it’s not worth more than a 7 I’d absolutely rather listen to it than Enigma, EBTG or The Lighthouse Family.

Good call on Gorecki, Alan at #6, BTW.

The Oliveblokes had previously been in Simply Red and Nightmares On Wax, and in the tiny intersection of that Venn diagram lies You’re Not Alone. Polite, bland Radio 2 90s easy listening with enough dread seeping in via the synth lines to distract. It’s not terrible or memorable. FIVE.

Another vote for Lamb’s superb Gorecki, which led me to buying wire a wodge of classical music over the following couple of years. Would have been a ten from me as well.

The space-filling, thumb-twiddling verse really lets the song down, because the hook is terrific and the chorus vocal decidedly eerie.

I wouldn’t have guessed they were from the north east – I’d have laid good money on Surrey. There’s something quite Guildford or Godalming about this.

I do like this, for all the reasons cited above – bar comment no.3, which is a lovely story. It’s also got a bit of Faithless about it I’d say. The whole chill-out-goes-pop nexus is quite a pleasing pop current. I was going to lament its getting blander as time went by, but by definition it must have been bland to start with.

Anyway the slightly spooky minor mood, heavy delay on the synths, plus a nice vocal, raise this pretty high for me. (8)

Moody and rather gorgeous. I really don’t hear anything trip-hoppy in it, and very little of the Lighthouse Family. I also prefer it to ‘Missing’.

Surprised to see people describing this as unmemorable, because I could instantly recall it when I saw the title, despite never owning it; it had a decent amount of radio play in Australia, even though it peaked at number 40 there. The 4:15 radio edit is the one I remember, not the Oakenfold/Osborne remix or the original album mix. The radio edit loses some of the sense of development of the album mix, so I wouldn’t score it too highly, but there’s certainly enough for a 6.

As with Gary’s previous, there’s a Madonna connection for Olive too: they contributed to one of her movie soundtracks (which we’ll encounter here, though not for their track on it) and then signed them to Maverick for their second album.

#16/17 – I concur.

This sounds very similar to Not Over Yet by Grace. Enjoyable then and still the same now. Up there with White Town in terms of pop that seemed so normal yet distant in Popular 97. And both one hit wonders! 7

The most surprising chart topper of the year I would say.

The disconnection between the off-kilter synth pulse and the eerie chorus melody acts as a hook in its own right in this. I was never fond of polite Morcheeba-type trip-hoppish stuff and am not particularly fond of EBTG’s ‘Missing’ but this track manages to find an atmosphere of its own and transcend the usual limitations of this style. Worth at least a 7.

I didn’t mean to make a ‘this sounds like’ comparison point with Gorecki. More like a ‘also going on in this genre’ fixed point for orientation. Compared to Gorecki most songs sound sleight! And I’d agree this is sleight, but memorable and with a move into new-age ‘feels’ as it moves up near the end.

I love this song, I spent hours pursuing it across the radio when it was big to fill an entire side of a C90 with it.

Can someone with music-technique savvy describe what ‘a happening in the ‘delayed beat’ effect of the main synth hook. Is it just that? Something unusual is happening there, right?

32: no musicologist, but I think what it is is that the synths are playing triplets, which the strong delayed beat is doubling into six-beats-where-four-should-be, emphasised further by it being the strongest element in the mix that’s operating to a different metre. It’s an effect I first noticed with the snare on PJ Harvey’s ‘Dress’, and is very disorientating.

Plus the echo is so strong that the stress is in quite the wrong place. The effect in the chorus is almost like two separate tracks playing at once.

Somewhere out there, Ruth-Ann Kelly and Tom Keenan are fronting an Olive tribute band.

#35: Your capitalised correction looks somehow angrier than mine (and mine wasn’t angry at all). Do you find that you get angry about quite a lot of things quite a lot of the time?

Hmm. There’s definitely something in this, in particular the way the gentle singing delivers the title hook in the chorus, and it would have been far better if it had been taken in a more atmospheric direction befitting its mood rather than drowning it in the genre-mandated electronic drums and staccato keyboards. As it is, the verses sound underwritten, and the overall effect is of two completely different songs played at once in the hope that they’ll work together, which they unfortunately don’t. Should have been more, but a mere FIVE.

Of the top of my head, I can think no reverse-tape effects in pop prior to Revolver. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop had certainly routinely used them — possibly even on the original Doctor Who theme-tune — and the idea was well known to musique concrete composers in the 50s, when the switch was made from vinyl disc to magnetic tape. It’s certainly curious that it didn’t appear sooner in a pop context: loops had after all been been used (in the sense of repeat gags, like “Wipeout!” in the Surfaris’ “Wipeout”, 1963). It may just be that studio-time was too expensive for experiments that basically required dismantling the machinery — whereas Stockhausen or the Radiophonic Workshop were there to experiment and had anyway built their own studios from scratch and weren’t renting them by the hour, most pop outfits before 1966 were working on much tighter margins, and hence in and out of a studio much too quickly, with no standing to require that the engineers be as playful as them. But the Beatles by then pretty much lived in Abbey Road, time no object, so the rental issue didn’t really arise — plus EMI more or less gave George Martin carte blanche, and experiment became possible.

#43: Aside from it being the most comprehensive answer to this vital question in the history of the Internet, aren’t search algorithms now set up to identify the types of sites that you regularly go to and “promote” them up the order of what you might see when you search for stuff? So, beforehand, it might have been that that answer was in the search engine but on page 4 but, knowing your internet habits, cookies, etc, it’s been helpfully bunged on page 1.

Or do I, on search engines as with much else, know nothing and have grasped the wrong end of the stick?

Cool. First I have heard of duckduckgo. Should probably be using them more often – especially at work, so as I can get find stuff more easily from outside my usual circle of suppliers, etc.

#23 – I reckon Settle could give it a run for its money.

#38 – “The Popular comments feed is now brought to you by ELIZA”

Another “Oh THAT track” moment for me. It all comes flooding back, the song and the sound of the era. The start of the post-rave era at the pop level, not that I ever raved. Over time the this sound would place a heavier emphasis on the acoustic: Moloko, onto Turing Brakes etc, but in 1997 we were in the last vestiges of large creative underground electronic scenes and it was from here the chills came.

I’ve felt it was around 1997 tracks sounded like they were being produced for compilations rather than compilations being assemblages of disparate elements. I always find it interesting comparing the first couple of Cafe Del Mar albums to both the later ones and the slew of Ibiza titled comp which subsequently came out on Ministry of Sound etc. A producer could just slap down some strings, a Spanish guitar and a few wave noises and get picked for a comp.

(Meanwhile the creative edge of underground electronica turned towards glitch, which only had one endpoint – samples got smaller and smaller until the whole scene, and the last vestiges of the the great 90s electronic exploration disappeared into nothingness. Or so it felt to me.)

I’m not saying Olive is part of this continuum of deliberate commercialisation, but as the sounds of the underground leached upwards and cross-pollinated with Massive Attack/Portishead-isms leaching downwards, some bands were at the right place at the right time. This was trip-hop’s year.

I have a far better memory of Lamb from this period, after being introduced to them via the remixes of Kruder and Dorfmeister and Fila Brazillia etc which appeared on Cafe del Mars and Rebirth of Cools etc

I always felt Lamb had a bit of a cult following, at least here in Australia. I started my radio program in August 1997, and over the next 7 years one of the few requests I got was from Lamb. There was a girl who used to ring up and request them but only once every 18 months. Those few phone calls were the only times I heard from her. It was her interest which led me to track down a full album and give them a spin. I liked their schtick though it is the better known tracks – Gorecki, Trans-Fatty Acid etc stayed with me.