FEATURE:
Groovelines
All Saints – Pure Shores
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ONE of the best songs…
of the early-2000s, All Saints released Pure Shores as the lead single for The Beach: Motion Picture. It was also included on their second studio album, Saints & Sinners. Written by group member Shaznay Lewis and producer William Orbit, it was released on 14th February, 2000. To mark twenty-two years of one of All Saints’ best singles – it reached number one in the U.K. and charted well around the globe -, I wanted to spend time with it. War of Nerves came out in 1998. That was the final single from their successful eponymous debut album. The Saints & Sinners album came out in October 2000. Some noted stronger songwriting and better vocals from the group (Melanie Blatt, Shaznay Lewis, Nicole Appleton and Natalie Appleton). Alongside other huge songs like Black Coffee, Pure Shores is an excellent tracks that is still played regularly to this day. 2018’s Testament is their latest album, so if the group are in concert at some point, I am sure they will play Pure Shores. Definitely one of the best Pop tracks of the past twenty-five years, I want to start with a Wikipedia article that collated some of the more positive reaction to Pure Shores:
“Pure Shores" was well received by music critics upon release. In his review for The Times, Ed Potten characterized the song as the "musical equivalent of a pina colada: faintly exotic, syrupy sweet and ultimately quite intoxicating." Similarly, Tom Horan of The Daily Telegraph deemed the track "fiendishly catchy". Uncut's Chris Roberts praised the production's "beauty" and said it "will sound as floatily motivating in a decade's time". John Walshe of Hot Press wrote that it "marries William Orbit's swirling galaxies of sound with their harmony-driven pop to perfect effect", while Caroline Sullivan of The Guardian argued that All Saints "lend radiance to [Orbit's] twinkling fairy lights" and their vocals "would be haunting even without Orbit's sparse production".
Dan Gennoe of Q named it the "crowning glory" of The Beach soundtrack which "confirmed All Saints' position as pop's coolest girl band." In The Sydney Morning Herald, Stephanie Peatling said the "lush" song "puts the streetwise cousins of the Spice Girls back on the block." Fiona Shepherd of The Scotsman described it as a "classy single" to "offset all the gossip column inches". Dorian Lynskey wrote for Mixmag that "Pure Shores" provided "a twist" to All Saints, regarding it as "a heady, sensual melancholy better suited to headphones than the Met Bar." Playlouder's reviewer wrote that the "bewitching" track found the group "ditching the famous-for-being-famous tag, and finally becoming the statuesque pop goddesses they always claimed to be." Stylus Magazine critic Dom Passantino gave the song a rating of eight out of ten, calling it "the last time any member of All Saints, William Orbit, and Leonardo DiCaprio were worth a collective damn”.
Although some remarked Pure Shores was lightweight and did not have sufficient weight and a big enough chorus to demand repeated listens, reaction has changed a bit since 2000. It is a song that has clearly endured and connected with people of various different generations. At the 2001 BRIT Awards, Pure Shores was nominated for Song of the Year but lost to Rock DJ by Robbie Williams.
Pure Shores was written by Shaznay Lewis, and William Orbit. Legendary DJ Pete Tong was the A&R man for All Saints in 2000. He wanted the song to be part of the soundtrack for Danny Boyle’s The Beach. Boyle hated the idea of a Pop act being associated with the film. It was Orbit’s name on the song and his production reputation that persuaded Boyle to relent. It seems rather short-sighted in retrospect, as All Saints were never a really commercial or sugar-sweet Pop band producing banal songs. They had depth, attitude and cool that was more than respectable for his film! Orbit wrote the backing track and provide Lewis with a short scene from the film. Based on that composition and imagery, she did not have to work from scratch. She read the novel the film was based on, and she needed no brief regarding the song’s story. It is said that Lewis penned the first draft whilst flying out to Los Angeles to meet William Orbit. Having misplaced Lewis did not need to rethink her original approach. She came up with the title after writing the song. Pure Shores is a great cut that you do not need to necessarily associate with the film, even though the music video does reference it. One can put it on fresh and without context and appreciate it. Some stunning vocals, excellent production and great lyrics by Shaznay Lewis make it a song that will last and be heard for decades! I want to finish with a review from Freaky Trigger. They noted how Pure Shores is All Saints in a more sophisticated mode. I often think that they were inspired by Madonna’s Ray of Light album from 1998. That was also produced by William Orbit:
“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”.
In my view, one of the finest releases from the first decade of this century, Pure Shores is a real gem. A perfect introduction to the Saints & Sinners album of 2000, Pure Shores is twenty-two today. Despite one or two back in the day who were not big fans of All Saints, one cannot deny that Pure Shores is…
A Pop classic.