“You’re Not Alone” walks a line between the mind-expanding and the tediously polite, a nexus point for a handful of mid-90s trends and ideas. There’s trip-hop in the mildly skippy beats, or at least what was left of trip-hop after all the scuzzy, stoned, party-friendly elements had been siphoned off elsewhere. There’s the well-groomed soul of the Lighthouse Family in the songwriting – particularly the drab verses: when I started my business career, the Lighthouse Family had already become the conference call and lobby music of choice, and they were more than fit for purpose. And there’s Everything But The Girl’s “Missing”, too, a dance track whose yearning, thoughtful tone had earned it plenty of post-club usage. As the rave generation settled into their mid-20s and beyond, the music of the chill out room found its way out of the club and into the home.
Olive – whose main songwriter Tim Kellett had even worked for the Lighthouse Family – feel part of this rather tepid moment, but there’s a little more happening here. Mood music shares DNA with new age, and as such it’s easy for a group to take a step or two towards the mystical. Olive’s shifting, echoed chords and promise to “stay till the end of time” are as spooky as they are soothing, and the multi-tracked keening at the end is an eerie moment, making the title a warning as much as a reassurance. But the song, in the end, is too slight to make much of its haunting elements: its sense of the uncanny proves a wisp, something easily forgotten in the cold light of, well, whatever you listen to next.
Score: 5
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Another quick plug for this http://notquiteaspopular.tumblr.com/ – which is where videos of the tracks and relevant side material are being posted (without editorial comment, in general).
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.
In May 1997 I took a phone call fom an old friend of mine. My immediate reaction upon hearing his voice was to offer my condolences to him, following his favourite football team’s relegation from the Premier League. Sunderland had lost 1-0 to Wimbledon , a few days before, on the final day of the season, and under absurd circumstances had fallen foul of another of Coventry City’s great escape acts.
“Aw, I don’t care man, me sister’s number one!” he responded.
I’m sure my response must’ve been “Eh?” – but I was so surprised I don’t remember exactly how I encouraged him to explain himself. But explain himself he did.
“That Olive record, that went in at number one last week? That’s our Ruth-Ann”.
This must have prompted a further reaction. I imagine I swore, heartily and repeatedly, with a mixture of joy and disbelief.
I’d not seen this coming. Over the years, my friend had said his sister was a great singer – and he’d recounted a particular episode where, hearing the singing from her bedroom he thought he was listening to a Rickie Lee Jones tape. I never doubted that – my friend just isn’t the sort to exaggerate. But obviously I did wonder how good. And here was the answer.
This number one comes from the time between two dominating chart forces.
It came after the era when a new chart act would have to climb its way to the top of the chart (1952 – 1994); now, it was possible for an act to spend its first week in the Top 40 at number one – even if the act and the record were relatively unheralded by TV and radio.
And it came before the era when chart acts would repeatedly be manufactured in public on national TV (2001+)
And yet in this spell between the eras, its remarkable how very few UK bands – once the dominant form of chart act – made their top 40 debut at number one. DJs did it. Solo acts did it. Singing groups did it. But not many bands. But Olive did. No ITV1 or BBC1 to propel them there, either.
No matter how transient they were, Olive’s story is a fairly unique one. A story of the extraordinary talent of ordinary people.
To me, it’s a complete fairy tale. 10.
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’.
this reminds me of a slowed down version of “It’s a fine day” by Opus III – the come down after the high – also reminiscent of William Orbit’s work with Beth Orton from a few years earlier . I like it.
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.
8no 9 (changed my mind)To finish off squaring the circle – you mentioned new age; Ruth-Ann Boyle’s next work with was with Enigma on their The Screen Behind The Mirror album, and it’s fair to say that she knocked Gravity Of Love completely out of the park.
Enigma, EBTG, Lighthouse Family. All music that I’d rather listen to than this, I’m afraid. 3.
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.
This got a smidgen of US airplay that fall and peaked at #56. It had been a while since I heard it and I couldn’t figure out which of the three music videos and multiple remixes was the definitive one so I listened to a bunch of them the other night. I don’t love it, but I do like it enough for 7/10.
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.
I really like this song, this is one of the best no.1s of the 90s for me. I don’t remember this at the time, I was 9 years old and still fairly new to the UK at this point (my family relocated from NZ in October 1996) so I wasn’t really in tune with British pop culture in the first year of living here until I discovered the Spice Girls (cringe). Anyway, I have a soft spot for songs that have an atmosphere or have a sentiment that grabs me which this song achieves, and I have a nostalgic soft spot for 90s electro-pop. 9.
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.
Not loads to say about this one. It’s alright but not much more – the chorus is quite hooky though and was something I was able to recall before I pressed play on it. Decent enough.
That pulsing synth hook sounds like Moby – Play, which won’t trouble the top on Popular but, in 18 Popular months time, was absolutely everywhere and the sound definitely reminds me of that (don’t own any Moby though, so don’t know whether he used similar sounds on his earlier records – though I am aware one of those records is a vegan metal record or something (?) so unlikely to be a sound on that record I suppose).
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)
Manchester again, and the number one which the Durutti Column helped enable. Both keyboardist/trumpeter Tim Kellett (please note – NOT “Tim Keenan”) and singer Ruth-Ann Kelly worked with Vini Reilly before joining up with Robin Taylor-Firth, on a busman’s holiday from Sheffield’s Nightmares On Wax, to form Olive. Although their general musical tenor was that of a pasteurised Morcheeba – polite variants on trip hop with a long-term eye on Radio 2 – “You’re Not Alone” was strikingly different and proved to be their moment, even though it took a Northern Radio 1 broadcaster the best part of a year of dogged airplay, as well as the band applying some remixing, to make it a hit.
But when I first heard it on the abovementioned Northern broadcaster’s show in 1996 – in its original and best form, as it appears on their Extra Virgin album – I was immediately struck by its difference. For the first verse there is almost nothing save Kelly’s uncertain voice; only remote bleeps with occasional bursts of squalling interference, trying to contact the uncontactable. Then Kellett’s grandly emotional and oceanic OMD string synth chord sequence cuts through in jagged signals as she sings “You’re not alone, I’ll wait ’til the end of time.” There is a four-bar pause before the drum n’ bass lite beats skittle their way into the picture and the chorus becomes grander, near hymnal. The subject is nearly the oldest of number one song subjects, the reluctant, temporary parting with reinforced faith that their love will be strengthened and their eventual reunion will be joyous (“I will not falter, though/I’ll hold on ’til you’re home/Safely back where you belong/And see how our love has grown” – Kelly taking that “grown” and making it sound like fully-formed pink gladioli springing out of the formerly dry earth) – it was the subject of the second number one single, Jo Stafford’s “You Belong To Me,” and a subject which evidently still spoke deeply to many; in a nineties context, the performance sounded like an ecstatic reaffirmation of unshakeable faith, desire and patience.
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’.
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.
Hm – wonder where I got “Keenan” from?
#16/17 – I concur.
Huge gulf between chorus and verse quality here. Among recent number ones, only Simply Red’s Fairground springs to mind as comparable for that.
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.
Edited the name – thanks for the correction Punctum.
I am out of step with a bunch of commenters here – I’ll go back to the song and see if it comes across as less ineffectual. Grace is a good comparison point, “Gorecki” I don’t hear quite as much – but, like “Missing”, those are both tracks which seem a lot more substantial and purposeful than Olive. Which I get might be the point – what I like about “You’re Not Alone” is its mood not its events, but the idea that this is a contender for the 90s best is really startling! Still, that’s the fun of Popular and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Their second LP was called Trickle, which is about the most underwhelming album name I can imagine.
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.
Chillout-style breakbeats, as here, sound very generic to me. Where do they come from? Is there some Al Foster sample that’s been repeated ad infintium, or are they individually programmed with subtleties I’m missing?
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’m with Rory on this one. Easy to recall, but not something I invested in. By this stage, I was only buying albums anyway, but still had an interest in what was happening on the Singles Chart.
This is what I would tentatively call drivetime dance music. Not a club banger, but takes its cues from what the clubs are playing. Radio-friendly, smoothed out and non-threatening. Compared to the previous #1, it’s a reassertion that love will wait and will be stronger as a result. I like it when #1 records talk to each other.
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.
Hmm, I suppose this is a bit watered down/mainstream radio fare alongside the dance side, but it is a good example of it, and has a haunting aspect that is rather appealing. I rather like it though.
Re the Lighthouse Family (they are still around, really?): inappropriate tweet of the day https://twitter.com/lighthousefamly/status/439914901403074560
#27 You can nearly always get number ones to talk to each other
(I sometimes try and avoid it, sometimes give in to the narrativising urge). Easy enough with this and the next one too.
#24 is a bit unfair on Morcheeba – they weren’t just a watered-down version of Massive Attack or whoever. The way they mixed slide guitar and other organic sounds with programmed stuff, on the first two albums at least, has dated remarkably well to my ear.
Later on they started going for songs rather than sounds and the songwriting wasn’t really up to it (Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day), which is probably where the bad reputation comes from.
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?
#31 Morcheeba’s problem: building their reputation through two, subtle, intriguing, appealing albums (I was first introduced to them by a friend who’d heard them in the rather decadent clubs of Moscow c. 1998) – and then, having come to public attention [in the UK], blowing it on the third, by dabbling with mostly fairly mediocre pop. Still, their fourth album, “Charango” was a rather enormous return to form, if anyone noticed it…
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.
#15. Ruth-Ann BOYLE.
Somewhere out there, Ruth-Ann Kelly and Tom Keenan are fronting an Olive tribute band.
Kenan And Kel!
#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?
#32, 34 – I could be wrong, but I think each note played by the synth/sampler is also reversed so that each begins with the ‘fade’ and then comes to a sharp end. If so, it’s a bit like the technique used by Stephen Street to create some of the ‘abbatoir noises’ on the title track of Meat is Murder (of all things).
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.
39: I don’t know if they were first, but the Beatles were fond of backwards sounds (vocal on Rain, guitar on Tomorrow Never Knows, percussion on Strawberry Fields Forever). Led Zeppelin’s When The Levee Breaks is supposed to do amazing things with backwards echo, but tbh I’ve never been able to identify it (if anyone can help, I’d love a pointer).
Backwards cymbal is a common production trick, unnecessarily so imv as a closing hihat produces a similar but much more controlled and pleasing effect.
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.
(hells bells, the internet can be scary some times – i just duckduckgo’d “reverse synth olive’s you’re not alone” and got sukrat’s comment from just 40 mins ago)
#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?
Nah you’re right except IIRC duckduckgo’s USP is specifically to avoid that filter bubble effect – it’s search results are “clean”. Though recency probably plays a part.
It’s a good point about the Beatles – that their innovation isn’t just a case of having great ideas but of having the R&D budget/commitment to realise them.
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.
the only thing I find DDGo lacks is a replacement for or quick link into google’s image search
#23 – I reckon Settle could give it a run for its money.
#38 – “The Popular comments feed is now brought to you by ELIZA”
Flahr – very funny comment re 38.
Those capitals look a bit angry. Why do think those capitals look angry?
You’re Not Alone – 8
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.