Scroll through the YouTube reactions or the positive reviews of this record and one word keeps recurring: “Pure Shores” is relaxing. All Saints’ bath bomb voices meet William Orbit’s hot tub production and the result – by comment consensus – is a few snatched minutes of bliss in a careworn world. At the turn of the millennium, the stock of relaxation in music was never higher. In an earlier entry I talked about the turn of the 00s as a “self-satisfied, low-stakes” era in British pop culture, a lull between the self-consciousness of the mid-90s and the defiant fixed grins of the mid-00s. A contented kind of time embraced a contented kind of music: chillout thrived.
It wasn’t just the times, of course: the success of chillout brands like the endless Cafe Del Mar compilation series also spoke to the unshiftable fact that the original generation of British ravers wasn’t getting any younger. There was a little of the old ambient house DNA in the chillout mix – Air’s proggish synth explorations, or the puckish whimsy of Lemon Jelly. But you could draw a stronger line back to the serious-minded atmospherics of trip-hop. More importantly, the success – and global pretensions – of chillout saw it travel on paths broken by the likes of Sasha or Paul Oakenfold. Dance music culture embraced the DJ jet set, and the idea of a shrinking planet – one where you might play downtempo beats in Montevideo before hopping to Kyoto for a big room set – played a big part in establishing superstar DJ mythology. Chillout music offered the sun-kissed day to superclub nights – and its easy, weightless, cultural blends were just as much a soundtrack for a globalised world. So what did you do with your days as a traveler in Ibiza, Goa, Sydney or Madagascar? You went to the beach.
After all, the Thomas Friedman style dream of a flattened Earth didn’t end with the music. British pop and British travel are intimately linked. The story of Popular has tracked British holiday destinations and aspirations, from the exotic dreams of the Shadows, through Cliff Richard in France and naff Spanish souvenirs and onto Ibiza. That British party Empire reached its widest extent as the 90s ended and backpackers spilled out into India, Asia, South America, gluing trinket signifiers of local culture onto dance music as they did. The Beach, the Alex Garland novel that became the film All Saints were writing for, is a creation nailed to its times, a fantasy of self-discovery through strife on a perfect beach in a world freed from geopolitics. Temporarily, as it happened.
In other words, a song about a beach, flecked with chillout bubbles and ripples, called “Pure Shores” is about as 2000 a pop-cultural object as you could possibly imagine. Add in the fact that it’s very good, and no wonder it became one of the year’s biggest sellers. All Saints, from the beginning, kept answering very similar questions: what if girl group pop grew up, got sophisticated, became fashionable? Having ended up at sleek R&B with their final 1998 singles, you could easily imagine the group keeping on in a more American direction, trying to become the British TLC. As the Spice Girls would find out later in the year, this was no easy mission. The choice of William Orbit as a co-writer and producer – a man with very firm roots in techno and ambient music – helped All Saints dodge that particular trap.
And it’s as a pop take on ambient music that “Pure Shores” works. This is a beautifully unified song, as much like “Good Vibrations” as any contemporary pop – form, mood and content all pushing in one thematic direction, an evocation of paradise, soothing spiritually and physically. The lapping of the rising and falling synths, the vocal lines swirling around one another, the patient, strolling pace of the song, the chorus’ giddy surge, and ultimately the crash and spray of the bridge – it’s all going to the same place. It’s not an especially thrilling record, more one that settles quickly into comfortable familiarity. But comfort and relaxation are good things, nourishing things, as long as they aren’t all pop (or culture) aims for. From the vantage point of 2015, where the rest of the world is more often approached with sorrow or fear than touristic zeal, the year 2000 is itself a vanished country, half blessed, half naive. “Pure Shores” is a traveller’s daydream of it, a torn-off scrap of map.
Score: 8
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“Pure Shores” – Pure Moods – it’s all there isn’t it?
The backing track (presumably Orbit’s doing) is utterly, utterly gorgeous, especially that synth sound. Unfortunately I don’t think ver Saints suit the record too well – they were ace vocalists on “Never Ever” (of course) but I think they’re just a bit too present here, especially when they’re doing close harmony stuff. I guess I’d prefer something a bit more ethereal. (OH ALRIGHT I MEAN I WOULD PREFER ENYA ALRIGHT HAPPY NOW.) It’s still really good though. 6/7/8… 7 I think makes most sense.
I like your “what if… Francis Fukuyama was a pop hit?” take on it Tom!
I thought of ending with a “Pop was in safe hands with William Orbit at the helm EH READERS” type flourish but decided against it.
This one did seem to cover all bases, didn’t it? It’s hard to think of any significant demographic who would have disliked it. It re-established All Saints in the pop major league after a two year absence while appealing to adult listeners as well. Not only did it turn out to be one of the year’s few two week runners but it effectively wound up the biggest selling pop record of the year (the second biggest selling single overall but the bunny concerned wasn’t selling to music fans). With Pure Shores All Saints won credibility for a second time and for the second time they squandered it but that’s another story.
This seemed to be a big cultural moment at the time – A film with a British director, based on a book by a British writer, a hit song from a British group on the soundtrack and it’s the biggest thing in the world. Only a bit later did I read the book and realise quite how dark and odd it is, more lariam-induced fever dream than holiday chill-out paradise. (I eventually saw the film on a beach bar on Ko Phi Phi in 2008, and it worked well enough in that setting, though I suspect I’d be more critical if I’d seen it elsewhere)
All-Saints’ song seems a much better fit when you’re unacquainted with either book or film, and works best as presented here – a sample of that odd moment when the worries of the 20th Century had faded away, and the dangers of the 21st were yet to emerge. The ‘chill out’ craze did a disservice to a host of artists, presenting their quieter moments as background vibes in the same way commercial classical and jazz radio stations do, free of context, stripped of any ‘difficult bits’. For All Saints this placement suits them just fine – William Orbit’s production is happy to burble, lap and immerse in gentle rays of sunshine. The only time the song goes wrong is when it tries to do something different – the break at 2.53 jolts you out of the mood, and knocks a couple of points off the score.
Well now…
Where do I even begin here? How about the stat: Final entry in a string of 12 UK #1’s that didn’t appear on the Hot 100. Most of the previous 11 have frankly been a string of mediocrity to my ears. Before that comes across as too smug, note that I wasn’t particularly enamored of US pop music at the time either. But now comes something completely different…
I was curious about “Pure Shores” based on what little I knew about it for some time, but I dutifully waited until Tom got past GLIO two days ago before queuing it up on Youtube. All I can say is…Wow. The synth sounds, the ambient feel, the voices, the beach motif, just incredible.
Why wasn’t it a US hit in 2000? There’s several possible reasons, but who really cares at this point? I can imagine a parallel universe me (we’ll call him Mapman303 after the A303 across Salisbury Plain) where this was my favorite song of 2000. Interesting to note that my real universe favorite song of 2000 was “Everything You Want” by Vertical Herizon, a US #1 that never appeared in the UK Top 40.
So back to “Pure Shores”. Why does this song, which I’ve now heard exactly four times in my life, resonate so much with me in 2015? Tom and others describe as “relaxing” and I suppose it is, but that’s not the first word that comes to my mind. Optimistic? Exotic? Sensual, even? It’s hard for me to articulate my feelings properly, but Tom’s placement of it within the context of 2000 solidifies things a bit. This is as much about me personally as the world in general, but 2000 was perhaps the last year that the future still felt boundless. I had survived the terrible (for me) year of 1999, and the horrors of 2001 and beyond (for everyone) had yet to happen. The sky really felt like the limit in things like travel, career, and yes, even certain ever-elusive-to-me relationships. But while some things were achieved (almost all in the travel realm), much of it was an illusion. So I guess that’s why this song seems so beautiful, and yet simultaneously painful, to me. It evokes a past that never really was, and a future that never will be.
(sorry for getting a bit rambling and personal there, but well, there you go….)
One of those tracks where you want to check out all the remixes? To see if they can stretch the lushness, successfully, to eight minutes or so?
I didn’t, did any of youse?
I was surprised to find this wasn’t any kind of hit in America too, as Never Ever was a top 5 on the Hot 100 so they had something of a profile, and I remember ‘The Beach’ getting a pretty big push. Maybe the inter-group squabbling that marred this era hampered their chances.
Anyway it’s gorgeous. A real headphones record for me, in that there are loads of lovely little moments to discover underneath the already knockout central melody. Orbit was the best thing that ever happened to these girls.
10
I liked it at the time, though I could never quite shake its similarity to Madonna’s Substitute For Love (which, of course, Orbit also helmed) from my head. A solid 7 from me.
High quality wallpaper, Farrow and Ball perhaps, but is there more to it than that? Not convinced there is – the lushness of the production serves to smooth off the rougher (or at any rate rawer) side of the Saints that was one of their more endearing qualities (again, how did “War of Nerves” miss no 1, when inferior tracks by them didn’t?).
PS is just too nice, too lush, and when all is said and done, an advert for a film. So if not high quality wallpaper then, at best, superior film trailer soundtrack. If it is sensual it is only sensual in a superficial glossy-photograph/glossy style magazine is: is profundity? depth? evidence of suffering? there? Not convinced it is. This is the gentrification of Notting Hill, the life being sucked out of it, in musical form. David Cameron personified as CD single? Hmmm.. that’s an idea.
5.
(But: without baiting the bunny too much, greatly looking forward to their vastly superior bunny yet to come)
The first Popular entry that really sounds like the year 2000, in the way people in the 50s or 60s might have imagined it.
Nice call on Good Vibrations, Tom. The wash of sound on Pure Shores is similarly narcotic (but gently so); it sounds close to a 2000 take on Blue Mink’s Stay With Me, one of the most sensual British singles ever recorded. Just the one issue for me – as with previous All Saints entries, there’s still a sense of Pure Shores being slightly pleased with itself… otherwise, near perfect.
Re 9: I’m marking this down slightly, as I agree with you on said bunny.
Yep, sign me up. Best number one in ages – I like this more than Baby One More Time, so I am probably having to go all the way back to Brimful of Asha for something I’d score as highly – everything comes together really well, vocals, backing, the whole lot. As Tom suggests, it seems perfect both for this liminal period between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror and The Beach as an expression of that period: worries washed away, possibilities seeming endless and this puts the best possible gloss on this. Remarkable that a band that I thought of as very urban, very of the city, were the ones who could express the possible bliss that can be found on a perfect, secluded, stretch of sand. Sous les paves, la plage indeed.
#8: Not only does it seem to borrow a bit from the sonic palate of Substitute For Love but, as I mentioned on the Frozen thread, one of the hooks from that Madonna #1 is used again here.
Black Coffee is even better
Wait and see!
As well as the obvious production / writing link to another number one (Frozen), there’s also a connection to a different number one via the song’s other writer, Susanna Melvoin, who was allegedly the subject of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ (she was Prince’s ex-girlfriend).
The production and verses of this are just gorgeous as pretty much everyone above has agreed. For me, the let down is the chorus – it feels far too obvious and poppy compared to the dreamy verses. That, and the poorer comparison to their next bunny means it’s only a 7 from me.
I like the contrast between the verses and chorus – I think the song needs that tension and release to work as pop, rather than pure ambience. William Orbit had been producing similar music since the early 90s, which is where I first heard him, but it had a drifting quality that would be unlikely to trouble the pop charts. Both Madonna and the Saints add that extra bit of grit that creates something more substantial and compelling.
I had to find a high-res image of the cover to check what Nicole Appleton (is it?) has in her mouth. It’s an ice lolly.
I’ve talked in the Vengaboys threads about my 2000 trip to Madagascar (and enjoyed Tom’s reference to the place in his review), but it wasn’t the only far-flung country I wound up in that year. Having racked up three long-haul flights from 1997 to 2000, my wife and I had accrued so many frequent flier points that we were able, with the aid of a FF points “sale” at KLM, to convert them into two free flights from Australia to southeast Asia. We’d never been to Thailand, so we went there, starting our trip with a week in the south, where beach-side hotels were offering knock-down deals in the wake of the post-1997 crash of the baht.
So, like Weej, I first saw The Beach in a beach bar in Thailand, not on Ko Phi Phi but a short boat ride away from it on the mainland. In November 2000, it was playing everywhere there. That it was still going strong eight years later is a bit of a surprise, but understandable, given that it was shot locally. The movie did a good job of capturing the mood and feel of the place, and of that odd sensation of being a young Westerner in an idyllic location so new to you, so culturally different from home, yet which only existed to cater to foreigners like you. I mean here the tourist towns on the coast, rather than the towns you encountered only a few miles inland; the bars and hotels along the Ao Nang beachfront were only there because of us, like the ones on Phi Phi itself. My memory of the movie is of its darkness, and of De Caprio’s character’s disorientation, rather than the lush tropical landscapes.
Our time in Ao Nang was relaxing and enjoyable, all banana pancakes, rides on elephants and longboats out to Phi Phi, and with less interest and incident than the second half of the trip, when we made our way by train to the north and Bangkok. Those memories are also now intertwined with TV images of what happened in the area four years later, when Ko Phi Phi and Ao Nang were both hit by the Boxing Day tsunami. I can’t be sure whether some of the video footage that played endlessly on the news at the time was recorded at Ao Nang itself, but it plays that way in my head. The hotel we stayed in wouldn’t have survived, but I imagine was quickly rebuilt.
All of which makes “Pure Shores” an odd, discomfiting listen now. Its Orbit underpinnings evoke the warm, relaxing feeling of a beach-side tourist playground; but visiting the rest of Thailand that year wiped away any thought of the country as a beach-side tourist playground, and the playground itself was wiped out in 2004. “Pure Shores” sounds in 2015 like a once-loved household object, a souvenir on a shelf, dragged out of its original context by the waves, battered by the ocean, and washed up on another shore. I can still see the comforting details of the object itself, but can’t ignore what happened to it.
7.
Spending eighteen years living on the coast of Norfolk somewhat spoiled me for such notions as sea and sand. Walk to the end of (my stretch of) Church Street in Hunstanton and look down Greevegate and there’s the sea. “Oooooh”, I might have said once. But after that amount of time it kinda loses its lustre. “Oh, look, there’s the beach again.” “Oh look, there’s the beach again.” Repeat. A family holiday in Minorca in 1998 showed a different side of sand – as a place to stop and relax, rather than a place to live – but it was still “just a beach”.
Two years into my time in Manchester though and things were different. Suddenly I’m mingling with people like my best mate, who had spent their entire life in Stoke-on-Trent and had barely ever seen the sea, never mind spent any time near it. And I hadn’t been back there much.
So when Pure Shores turned up… wow. Relaxing maybe, but evocative definitely. Obviously it’s written for a film soundtrack (a film I’ve not seen, I hasten to add, save for the snippets that appeared through the video for this), so it’s its job to be evocative of a scene, a place, a time, a mood. But just because it’s doing a job, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be praised for doing it. And Pure Shores does it pretty much flawlessly.
10.
(Single buying watch: yep, according to my database this was definitively the last time I had a hand in getting a track to the top. I bought two more singles after this – Toploader’s Achilles Heel and Travis’ Flowers In The Window – but neither of them bothered the bunny.)
#17 Oddly enough the video was filmed some 15 miles down the road from Hunstanton on Holkham beach.
What makes this song so great is the urgency: it’s not a dream but excitement about coming closer to something really great. It’s ‘chillout’, but it isn’t slow-and by the end you could call it a belter without argument. It’s all about that balance. The amazing production is certainly helpful, but this could have been (quite) a hit without it.
And it puts its best foot forwards with that bleeping, radar-scan synth at the start before letting the wash of backing vocals come on top. I was getting into classical music at the time (aged 11), and I think this sort of thing sounded a bit plastic and cheap-CGI compared to the warmth and depth of a real orchestra, but looking back that’s part of its charm.
“Pure Shores” coincides with my obsession with all things “chillout”. Not only the countless Ibiza albums, but also the Back To Mine series, which opened a few doors into what the actual DJs and artists were listening to (or wanted the punter to believe they were listening to) after the party was “over”. Yes, it coincided with the time I felt most settled; married, mortgaged, enjoying my work. It did feel that all was right with the world, and if there was any drama during this time, it didn’t seem to affect my mood. So yes, I was the ideal sort of punter for chillout.
I have fond memories of listening to a remix of this track off a friend’s mixtape given to me during the summer. As such, the single edit sounds a little sparse in comparison, but Orbit’s work gives the song a wonderful sense of time and place, even the movie’s own signifiers can’t dislodge. The girls’ vocals breeze around the central guitar motif, that anchors all those layers of whooshes and skating along the fretboard right up to the bridge which seems to offer a hint of tension before it all becomes calm for the fade-out. Simply marvellous. Listening to it now, the whole thing sounds frivolous, but in the context of the times, when Groove Armada’s “At The River” never seemed to disappear from the radio or lifestyle shows on TV, it fits so perfectly, at the risk of setting off the Nostalgia Klaxon. (9)
This does very little for me. But then again, this also owes a debt to an area of music that I tend to find either luxuriously bland or downright irritating, Groove Armada’s “At The River” being the utter nadir (sorry, TheFatGit, I was planning to mention it anyway – this isn’t a pop at you). “Quaint little villages” in-bloody-deed. It’s dance pop with lyrics penned by Kirstie Allsop. There’s something very glossy and ‘weekend colour supplement’ about that kind of work I find both worrying and unexciting.
I possibly was born at roughly the right time to be just about within its target audience – certainly some of my friends lapped this kind of thing up – but I’d wasted a few years of my life trying to pursue a creative career, and as such was completely broke. So broke I hadn’t had a holiday in about six years by this point, never mind gone back-packing or to Thailand – so I don’t feel any nostalgic reverie or frame of personal reference when these records re-emerge, as they often do when I’m abroad and in a beach-side bar these days.
So somewhat unsurprisingly, I find the bubbling ambience of “Pure Shores” too close to functional to suck me in. What saves it from actually outright boring me are the subtle shifts and changes, the way it packs a lot into its four minutes – but it completely fails to hit the spot, addressing needs that I clearly don’t have from music. I can admire the construction of it, but only in the same way that I can nod appreciatively at smooth, high-colour architect’s designs of proposed modern beach-side “creative hubs”.
Or, short version – I suppose I don’t really get it.
I’m with Elmtree on this, ‘urgency’ exactly the word, and even without that there’s something a bit too overripe and disorienting for this to be something I could find straightforwardly relaxing – i hear the “take me too the beach” line as something a bit mysterious and primal, rather than 18-30. (I think I might be influenced by a half-remembered Jane’s Addiction song here).
Top marks also for “I’m coming, not drowning” – way to repurpose Stevie Smith.
9 for me too.
I’m not sure there’ll ever be a better time on Popular to mention The 411, who were to all intents an All Saints tribute band mining the same R&B sophisticated, slightly melancholy girl pop. I absolutely loved them but the wider world seemed entirely indifferent – even Populistas?
If so this is a crime when they did stuff as good as On my knees, which is essentially Never Ever with that song’s self abdigation taken to the next level into some kind of post-domestic violence ratonialisation scenario, while the music is simultaneously lush and harrowing. All this and then a typically heart-stopping Ghostface cameo: “I must of had a bad day or something…”
No worries, 23 Daves. I totally understand, but when you have fond memories of a particular time, the music seems to be that much more evocative. Some of the stuff we’re going to encounter this year will wash over me and leave no trace, but there are a few stand-outs, this being one of them.
#23 Oh, absolutely. My wife loves “At The River” because she was off travelling all over the place and having the time of her life when that was a big record. She was really shocked when it came on a playlist in some bar in Morocco a few years back and I began bitching about it.
The records I have holiday or travelling associations with come much later, purely because it took a while before I could get into a position where a break wasn’t just a couple of weeks in a cheap B&B in Devon. I must confess I regard “Beautiful World” by Coldplay with far more affection than it probably deserves, just because it was never off the radio or TV when I first started living in Australia. There’s a potentially controversial confession.
Re22: The video for On My Knees didn’t have the Ghostface rap on it, so I’d don’t think I’d ever heard it before. But it’s a perfect setting for him, and it makes a pretty decent song even better.
I’d always assumed that The 411 were true failures, , despite heavy rotation on the TV pop channels, as per your statement about indifference, but it turns out they had a couple of top 10 hits.
Contrasting experiences of this time from #20/#21 influencing viewpoints on the song are interesting to see, and add a nice couple of supporting bits of anecdata for Tom’s excellent review.
I was 13 at this point, so the signifiers of those two are not in my life at all. However, the period we’re covering now on Popular *are* life-changing weeks. After a bout of anaemia in November 1999, the fatigue that characterised that period came back with a vengeance at some point during Westlife’s reign of terror, and it turned out that was glandular fever. I spent weeks on end sleeping through part of the day, doing what schoolwork I could from home, generally feeling miserable. I think I returned to school at some point just before this song was #1, but I was frequently having to leave halfway through the day, easily exhausted, sleeping in class. Full physical recovery would take months, and that was just the beginning of the story; in that time, my academic performance went from the top 2% of my year group to more like the top 20%, and with my entire self-esteem predicated on being an elite student at that point, depression was very quick to set in. It never left; there isn’t a calendar year this century, up to and already including 2015, where I haven’t had suicidal impulses. My carefree year was 1999, my carefree nostalgia is for that year’s Eurodance (as I noted in the “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!” entry), and I hadn’t heard “Pure Shores” for years until just now.
And it’s a heck of a song to have forgotten about – I’ve taken to using “Frozen” as endearing mood music even though the song’s clearly not trying to do that, and this particular Orbit production clearly is trying to do that. The whole “beach” thing did nothing for me – that’s what living in the least desirable suburb of a declining seaside town will do for you – but as pure stimmy mood music for my late-20s autistic self, it’s an even bigger “how did I forget THIS?” rediscovery than “Flat Beat.”
Throwing out the waiting/anticipating line in the first verse for all to hear is the only reason I’m not going higher than an 8.
Incidentally, I know one person from university whose mid-2010s life is straight out of this era. She’s a drummer for a touring collective whose marketing hook is being comprised entirely of women – except, this being a group with one foot in club culture, it’s comprised entirely of women who could be models. Or, in the case of my friend, actually is one, including for her own label of floaty dresses hand-crafted in India and sold online from Cornwall. I’ve no idea if she actually likes “Pure Shores,” but she’s still living the fantasy it epitomises, fully exploiting her extensive privilege.
Also, re: “At The River,” my most definite memory of hearing it in childhood was at a fairly upscale restaurant I got dragged to once. I’m not at all sure when it was though, other than that it wouldn’t have been in 2000 because I was sleeping through the evenings for most of that year. A classic signifier of the rave generation becoming a lucrative middle-class consumer group.
“At The River” annoyed me so much BECAUSE I was kinda seduced by it and didn’t want to be. Luckily I then heard “Old Cape Cod” by Patti Page, which it lifts its vocal from, and decided I could like that instead (I’m now happy to admit my fondness for the Groove Armada song too). Of course as a song about moneyed New England harbour life Old Cape Cod probably represents an even more exclusive holiday lifestyle than any South East Asian beach fantasy…
Orbit was a beast during this period and it’s only fair, I suppose, that Madonna shouldn’t get all the glory. Madonna could easily have had another 3 or 4 #1s from the collab: all of Ray of Light, Power of Goodbye, Drowned World/Substitute For Love, Beautiful Stranger got very close and would have been deserving – this was a third career peak for her and Orbit was a huge part of that. Notably, Orbit’s mixes of this stuff are so well-judged they’re essentially unimprovable. E.g., every remix of ‘Ray of Light’ feels lumpen by comparison, and the main BT-Sasha remix of ‘Drowned World/Substitute For Love’ is dire. The optimality and insusceptibility-to-being-remixed of Orbit’s productions sets him apart and in my view marks him as more continuous with Echoes-period P.Floyd or maybe J-M Jarre than late ’90s DJ/remix culture.
So, what can All Saints do in this sonic playground? Tweak it towards TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ (but with no discernible personality) seems to be the answer. The track builds and builds to, well, nothing really (rather like the movie!): a sub-par middle eight followed by a just OK double chorus with the ‘Take Me to the Beach’ overlay feeling a little too much like product placement (I suppose the ‘Beautiful Stranger’ vid though not the record does this sort of thing rather well with comic dialogue between Mike Myers/Austin and Mad. at the end).
For me, then, PS is front-loaded with its best stuff; it declines as it gets more airless. Thus, mostly on account of a rather glorious first 2 mins or so, I give PS a:
7
By now I’m back at school for the start of Spring Term 2000, quickly irritating everyone in my year 6 class with “Lol I haven’t been here since last MILLENNIUM!!” style jokes. First on my mind are the terror of SATS exams, the search for a secondary school and the general fear what on earth my life will involve after I say goodbye to the friends I’ve known all the way back to infant school, and going from being one of the oldest kids in primary to one of the youngest in secondary in the September. Enter a February charting song which truly gives me the biggest and most nostalgic memories of this forthcoming end of an era, making the most of stability while I can.
But it ain’t this. It’s ‘Ooh, Stick You’ by Daphne and Celeste, charting at #8 that month. Learning as many lyrics to this, and the less-remembered followup ‘U.G.L.Y’ (though equally as huge in my North London school) became something of a badge of honour in the Pokémon Card-filled playground though I was only able to get as far as the chorus of both. ‘Pure Shores’, meanwhile, struck me as boring in comparison – music for boring old grown-ups in the same league as something like Martine McCutcheon. Even through my teens I never rated this, seeing it as not representing my childhood era in the same way the likes of the Vengaboys or Steps did.
Not until about a decade later did it start to resonate with me, being overplayed so much I wasn’t in any hurry to hear it through most of the noughties but it finally hooked me enough to add it to my iTunes in 2012. As mentioned, it sums up that wonderfully optimistic, forward-thinking era (which I would put at starting around Blair/Britpop’s arrival in 1994 and going up to the obvious 2001 date) very well, my favourite bit being that sudden gearchange about three minutes in leading to the final chorus. I’ll go with 8 too.
In comparison, ‘Ooh, Stick You’ remains firmly off my iTunes to this day. Best to leave that one in the playground past…
“But it ain’t this. It’s ‘Ooh, Stick You’ by Daphne and Celeste…”
*The viewer is invited to imagine a zoom in on flahr’s pupil as a zoetrope of primary school memories flicker uncontrollably through his mind*
Re: “At The River” – I think this may be a genuine example of the oft-derided “guilty pleasure” – i.e. it stands for a lot of things I don’t really like (inappropriate re-appropriation, chill-out compilations in general, its use as background music in lifestyle TV, “quaint little villages”, etc) but it just seems so atmospheric and seductive that I can’t resist it, and why should I anyway?
Re:”Ooh, Stick You” – I would rather listen to this than ‘Pure Shores’, sorry Billy, I promise I’m not trying to be contrarian here.
Why I find “At The River” exceptionally moving: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jfk-jr-killed-in-plane-crash
Their best chart-topper – just pips Never Ever to the post as I’ve always found the “alphabet” line a bit clunky. A definitive chorus, great minimalist video (of the group) and captures the atmosphere of its film, but I can’t push higher than 7. Why? Because the film, and song, has a legacy of people (the Westerners I mean) like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbbwgnXpoCY
Legacy? What bad legacy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4fIL9S57tA
It’s a bit much to lay the whole Thai brides phenomenon at Danny Boyle’s and All Saints’ doors, ICG. That’s quite distinct from the wave of backpackers on Thai beaches that they were playing on, not least because Thailand’s Western-tourist beaches are in the Muslim south of the country, not the Buddhist north. The people in the vicinity of Ko Phi Phi are in many respects more akin to Malaysians than to the northern Thai majority.
But even when it comes to the north, I can’t bring myself to think of Thailand as “place that produces mail-order brides” any more than I think of the Netherlands as “red-light district with legal dope”. Sure, those things exist, but they’re a small part of the life and culture of the place, blown out of all proportion by foreigners because disproportionate numbers of foreigners come into contact with them. Thailand is a country of 50 million people, with all sorts of things going on – most of them far more important than the dwindling legacy of a 15-year-old Western hit single and movie.
@36 Pinch of salt, mate, pinch of salt.
I hated this on principle, thinking I’d never heard it, then when I played it this morning, realised I’ve casually enjoyed it for years. What a knob I am.
In 2000, if I haven’t already made apparent, I was a self-styled Angry Young Man. I didn’t hate this so much as I hated the teenagers who liked this sort of thing: Ordinary boys (and girls), happy being no-one but themselves… or rather being a more hedonic version of their parents: ‘you’ve got your whole lives to drink lattes in Starbucks and listen to boring music, why are you wasting this brief moment of opportunity to do something exciting’ I thought (where do something exciting probably meant come to one of my gigs!)
To be fair, I was working a very shit job in a factory in Macclesfield so this sort of sundrenched exotica really didn’t mean much to me. I still hadn’t forgiven Leo for Titanic either so I had another reason to hate this albeit an even pettier one.
Anyway, it’s not half bad: I think the opening verse does it best for me, once it drops, it’s almost too lively although the progression captures the feel of afternoon into evening into sunset, beach chillout morphs seamlessly into beach party. As others have noted, there’s just a hint of menace lurking in the shadows: good soundtracks that, hinting at the twists without tetelegraphing the ending (which would have entailed cutting to Madge covering The End instead of Am. Pie!)
Actually the shine has gone off this a bit now I’ve heard “Frozen” and it has exactly the same synth sound. Bad Orbit, no biscuit >:-(
A high point for both band and producer – Lush and atmospheric but not structureless. The film of ‘The Beach’ features what is probably Leonardo Di Caprio’s best performance, even if he is upstaged by Robert Carlyle and Tilda Swinton.
@36: But I see what you’re saying. Please, though, bear in mind that as Popular’s pace is accelerating, so is my reviewing. In the Patrick Mexico days, I’d spend hours analysing a song before I finally made a heart-on-sleeve, blood-sweat-and-tears, if often sprawling and verbose comment. As I’d “now” in Popular time be 14, my reviews have become shorter, snappier and written from gut instinct almost in an instant, especially because I can’t imagine there’ll be any chart toppers I haven’t heard of for the next decade, or many I can’t direct towards some kind of memorable personal anecdote. I also simply don’t have the musical knowledge of, say, Punctum – depth, breadth or context, to stretch my thoughts out over ten paragraphs.
So on paper, it’s a good fit. The downside is, I’ll occasionally come out with foot in mouth disease; there are several number ones in the near future where I’ll be asking for a virtual smack in the mouth. However, I just hope people understand I am only human and like everyone else I have flaws, and one of these is being a straight-talking northerner/Lancastrian to the point where it sometimes becomes too blunt. A droll, warm-hearted, pub philosopher kind of blunt, but still blunt. That’s why I end up sometimes doing things like posting the first video to make some kind of knowingly far-fetched point.
However, the Thai brides/Monkey Dust sketch link really wasn’t meant to stereotype tourists in Thailand, or worse, indulge xenophobic or racial stereotypes of Thais. I have no particular vested interest in travel to South East Asia, so I wasn’t especially aware of the geography; my “exotic” flights of fancy veer southwest towards Latin America (another potential grab bag of naive cultural stereotyping) but that’s for future threads. I would never be so naive to judge a country on a handful of daft cartoon images; I know there’s much more to your land than Crocodile Dundee, koala wrestling and Operator Please!
Though on the video, I posted it with tongue firmly in cheek, the intentions being to:
1. Blow a raspberry at this record’s breezy boho chic. You see, I loved this record, and its film, at the time, but as the years progressed it did become a bit Ultimate Chillout Compilation 14/Gap Yah respectively. Obviously that’s not the demographic in the video, but it’s always fun to tease the hip with dark imagery of the square and blend “high” and “low” culture. I’m not “blaming” Danny Boyle or All Saints for any of the above, it’s just they completely unintentionally (anti)inspired things I don’t find very inspirational.
2. I have a good friend who’s often been to Thailand and waxes lyrical about his experiences there, though often about his string of girlfriends there.. in rather murky contexts. I’m pretty sure it’s more good clean fun rather than Western exploitation though. What did, oddly, remind me of him in the video was the ironic “Rambo 4: Gook Wipeout” poster.. not that in itself, but unfortunately, a few months ago, he posted a “can’t wait for American Sniper” with similarly unpleasant language referring to Arabs, and though it’s unclear if he was, say, just joking in an un-PC way, and/or just referring to the “terrorist” Iraqis in the film, it made me feel quite uncomfortable, given what I’ve heard about the politics of some American (and British) soldiers who can’t differentiate between obviously horrible ISIS/Al-Qaeda/insurgent types and ordinary Iraqi men, women and children on their way to school or work.. :-/
Extra points for the resolutely un-exotic seafront on the cover.
Where is that? Skegness? Southsea? Margate?
#42 Given where the video was shot probably Wells-next-the-sea
Looks way too civilised to be Wells (I’ve been there a few times, it’s a shithole). Most likely Sheringham or Cromer.
It’s second week at no.1 meant we don’t get to discuss Artful Dodger’s Movin’ Too Fast. Damn these slow moving charts!
Oh that’s a shame. Pure Shores is pretty good, and a lot lusher even if I can detect a similar delayed woopiness in the two records’ delayed phrasing, but even so Movin’ Too Fast is a much better record. They had more hits than I remembered, and in fact made it back to the top ten later with an All Saint in tow, but never got as close to the top step again.
(This has sneaked into the FT reader top 100)
2 big comebacks at once.Di Caprio hadn’t made a film since Titanic and All Saints were on a break for 15 months or so.
I watched the Beach in late 2000 and found it a terrible bore. The only thing I can recall is the computer game like part where Di Caprio is walking around in a crash bandicoot setting about halfway in.Lof of hype but a massive disappointment.
Pure Shores though is the best of All Saints Number 1’s by a mile and a lot better than the film. It was out of place for me in the colder wet nights with the frost beginning to bite but it has the feel of a dream of being whisked away to some far idyllic land without a care in the world. Surprised that hardly any travel companies used it.
In Ireland the decade marked a period where people left home to go travelling for a year as opposed to emigrating so I’d associate PS with short term globetrotting as opposed to mass emigration that sadly became a reality all over again by mid 2008.
It was all too familiar by the end of the year but I would put it ahead of ‘Frozen’ and you just can believe in the All Saints way of life a bit more than Madge. A bit of an Ashes to Ashes like Number 1 in that a big act from the last decade opens the door to a new one. An 8 or a 9.
Sorry if comment 41 was a bit “UKIP press secretary makes a grovelling apology when yet another member gets foot in mouth disease on social media.”
So far, it’s been a year of considerable reactionary ugliness in world politics and pop culture, and to fight the good fight against that, unorthodox methods must be deployed by a 29-going-on-16 man like myself with severe social anxiety from a town nobody cares about any more apart from to laugh about it sounding like an Ann Summers version of Guitar Hero. (My real home town, strictly speaking, is also cruelly neglected, but it was where Talking Heads recorded the hit album More Sodding Quotes About Scouse Kids And Milk.)
Sorry ICG, I didn’t mean to give the impression of intentionally not replying to #41 – unfortunately I was off sick when you made that post and not up to writing long blog comments myself. Then the moment passed, as more recent entries came along. Haven’t commented on those yet, either…
I sympathise with your points there; I suppose my underlying point was that the Thai brides phenomenon predated “Pure Shores” and The Beach, and was essentially at a tangent to both. Wikipedia’s potted history of mail-order brides talks about 19th century antecedents and a history of Japanese brides from 1907 onwards; this wasn’t anything new in 2000. I also don’t remember The Beach being much at all about Thais themselves; it was about Western backpackers playing at paradise on a secret island, which could have been set in any tropical country, really.
By 2000 I don’t think young Westerners needed a movie to tell them that Thailand was an appealing destination; Lonely Planet had been telling them that for decades, and the 1997 crash of the baht made it even more affordable and irresistible, assuming you could manage the airfare. Tropical beaches, gilded temples, red and green curries, a decent line in pop: what’s not to like?