This week, I joined the legions of people who commute to an office and sit behind a desk every single day. As such, leisure time has taken on a whole new meaning, predominantly because if you stare at a screen long enough you can start to feel like you’ve taken leave of the real world. Sure, it’s not professional to talk about holidays in the first quarter of the year, but I think I’m finally starting to understand that almost pathological need to relax that seemed to pervade the conversations of all my friends in any social situation. I was told by a doctor last Wednesday that exposing your body to excessive amounts of sunlight is tantamount to stress. I would argue the exact opposite; I’m inside right now, and I’m stressed out by the fact that I’m not in the sun. However, there’s always one piece I can turn to when I’m facing unwitting amounts of tense vibes. I know this because it’s the song that I’ve had set as the wake-up alarm tone on my phone for over three years now. It could only be one thing, the pop equivalent of Incubus ‘Aqueous Transmission’, albeit without the crickets and the frogs. And that it should belong to a constructed girl group perhaps makes it all the more inappropriate. Sue me.
Most people heard ‘Pure Shores’ for the first time when they saw Leonardo DiCaprio descend into the depths of beautiful Thai hell in The Beach. As the soundtrack to the moment the teen dream enters the walkway into Maya Bay, it’s a place both D and I have been to and one which lives up to its reputation as perhaps the most calming place on the planet. There is a very good chance that an influx of people who have seen The Beach may have totally ruined the cove by now, but nobody can touch this song. At the turn of the millenium, on the second album that many of us didn’t buy, All Saints managed to push close to a million copies of this slice of chillwave-before-there-was-chillwave in the UK alone. Thanks to its immortalisation in film, it’s endured longer than any other item of their back catalogue aside from their breakout smash ‘Never Ever.’ Now, with considerable shamelessness, I’d like to tell you why.
Shaznay Lewis, who I always imagined to be the Left Eye of All Saints (she could rap, in fact she was the only member of the group who wasn’t white) was actually their secret weapon. Responsible for the songwriting of most of the group’s hits, she was perhaps overshadowed by her very blonde and very attractive counterparts Nicole and Natalie Appleton. It’s her knack for melody and harmony that you hear all over ‘Pure Shores’, those great, delayed synth lines that crash over each other like waves and the killer lines like ‘Many places I have been/many faces I have seen/walked the deserts, swam the shore.’ Produced by William Orbit, aka the British geezer who did ‘Ray Of Light’ by Madonna, it’s probably the one of the few instances of pop musicians who weren’t Moloko that I know of deliberately releasing a song that employed elements of downtempo to critical and commercial success. Particularly in this amped-up, high information age, you don’t really see people sharing music that makes them calm. I’ve been given meditation tapes, breathing exercises, all kinds of shit because apparently I’m the kind of person who can get wound up really tight without knowing it. But all I need are the lead-in notes to that opening C# chord and I’m practically asleep.
Chillwave indeed.
All Saints – ‘Pure Shores’
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