In the final part of my in-depth trawl through the string-led sound of the 1990s (read parts one and two here), examining the best and worst records that used strings to augment their sound, regardless of genre, we reach the end of the decade. Here we look at the fall, as the “Britpop” bubble bursts and the orchestrated bombast of the late 90s runs aground in emphatic fashion.
Also, we look at how labels and artists shifted away from paying for big studios and string orchestras towards samples and digital technology. We uncover some of the best singles that bubbled under the mainstream and the records in the charts that managed to use strings as part of their sonic palette in innovative ways; how music began to be more varied and music media fragmented in the late 90s, as digitisation and technology were shifting; and how music was being recorded and consumed as the industry shifted from the physical CD era of the ’90s to the file-sharing era of the early 2000s.
Released at the start of 1997, a single entitled ‘Your Woman’ by music producer White Town (aka Derby‑based Jyoti Mishra) was a surprise number one on the UK Chart. This bedroom pop song was a revelation, utilising homemade sampling techniques most notably a muted trumpet line taken from a 1932 recording of ‘My Woman’ by Lew Stone and his Monseigneur Band. It was retooled it sounds old, yet fresh at the same time, mirroring hip hop records of the 80s and early 90s with the popping melody and bouncing beat with a 70s funk groove derived from a sample CD produced by Parliament/Funkadelic’s George Clinton in 1993 called Sample Some Of Disc, with bouncy synth lines, replete with nagging string stabs inspired by the scores of John Williams. Mishra’s sepia-tinged vocal is like something from an old 1950s movie. It is both emotive and flips the script on Stone’s ‘Anti-Woman’ original, sung from a female perspective: allowing the listener to uncover the duality of the viewpoints and lyrical meanings. It wasn’t just a fresh shot of bedroom pop but massively catchy too.
He told Sound on Sound, “When I wrote it, I was trying to write a pop song that had more than one perspective. Although it’s written in the first person, the character behind that viewpoint isn’t necessarily what the casual listener would expect. “The themes of the song include: “Being a member of an orthodox Trotskyist/Marxist movement. Being a straight guy in love with a lesbian. Being a gay guy in love with a straight man. Being a straight girl in love with a lying, two-timing, fake-arse Marxist. The hypocrisy that results when love and lust get mixed up with highbrow ideals.”
“When you love somebody, it’s not logical, it’s not rational, and you think, ‘This is ridiculous, I can never be with you, I can never be the person you need, why am I even feeling these feelings?’ So, I was trying to write from all these different sides… I wanted people to go, ‘this is catchy,’ and sing it, but then be like, ‘What the hell?’ at the same time”.
“One of the things about ‘Your Woman’ is I designed the production to sound old when you first heard it,” Mishra told SOS. “I wanted to have a track that was like a mishmash of time zones… so you weren’t quite sure what year it was.”
Later, when ‘Your Woman’ became a hit, some listeners mistook the riff for John Williams’ ‘The Imperial March’ from the Star Wars film series. “It is very similar,” Mishra conceded. “But I mean, then again, you could say, ‘Well, it’s just arpeggiating around a minor chord. How many different ways of doing that are there?’“Years ago, a journalist was doing some review and they said people liked the riff because it’s like children at school, going ‘Na na na na na’. It’s hardwired into us.”
Recording was on a budget but so was the microphone that Jyoti Mishra used to record his vocal for ‘Your Woman’: the Realistic PZM that was sold for £19.95 by tech chain store Tandy. Normally requiring one AA battery, he used two mini 6V batteries together to boost it: “You’re putting a stupid amount of voltage in them compared to normal,” Mishra says, “You can do this wiring to adapt it to phantom power and you get even better signal out of it. So, I cut one of mine up and I fucked it and so I only had one!” he laughs.
“When I was working out the vocal for ‘Your Woman,’ I was just experimenting, and I put the overdrive/distortion on it. Once it’d gone through the overdrive, it took out all the bottom, and it just had this nice telephone‑y sound. It fitted because I just thought, ‘Well, it sounds like a ’30s track now.’“But also one of my favourite ever pop singles is the Buggles’ ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, and that’s the sound Trevor Horn has on his vocal. I just thought, ‘Oh, it sounds like the Buggles. That’s cool.’
When Mishra was invited to appear on Top Of The Pops to perform the track he wasn’t exactly sure how to present it: “There were great electronic bands already, obviously, like the Prodigy where it was like, ‘Well, that’s how an electronic band should be. Me, I’m just a fat bloke. I’ll be there prodding a synth. That’s gonna look awful.’ Also, by that time, I’d experienced a little part of some celebrity. And I didn’t like it.”
No Doubt scored a UK hit in February with the break-up ballad ‘Don’t Speak’ from the band’s third album, Tragic Kingdom. Eschewing the ska-influenced pop-punk of their previous work, there was a backlash from their hardcore fans to this lighter-waving tear-jerking ballad. “Mere words cannot describe how abysmally gutless and sugar-smothered it is,” spat Kerrang! “No Doubt suck badly.” The combination of nagging guitar notes, Spanish guitars, and Gwen Stefani‘s simmering vocals shows intimacy, power and control. The diaristic lyrics, detail the dying days of her eight-year relationship with fellow No Doubt band member Tony Kanal, as she tells him to stop harping on about it. With the push and pull of a full suite of strings into a crushing crescendo in the crashing tear-jerking choruses it became the band’s biggest song and helped usher in Stefani’s subsequent solo career.
My Life Story started off as a teenage band in Southend On Sea, Essex, UK in 1985 by the smartly dressed Jake Shillingworth. By 1991, they had become a large outfit with a string quartet and brass section.
“The late ’80s and early ’90s was a funny time. There didn’t seem to be a focal point and there didn’t seem to be any bands coming out of London. The only band from London that I knew was Carter USM…” Noted Shillingworth in an interview with Saying it with Garage Flowers.
“With the early Britpop movement – before Oasis came along – people like Graham Coxon from Blur and I would go to bars and discuss about trying to bringing a Swinging London back – just like Austin Powers! Britpop was totally premeditated – it didn’t happen by accident.”
They worked with Morrissey and Siouxsie Sioux on the strings and arrangement for ‘Interlude’ in 1991. By 1992, the band had grown to comprise a total of twelve musicians. They were regularly playing clubs like the 100 Club and the Marquee. In the autumn of 1993 they signed to Mother Tongue Records, releasing the impish cello-led single “Girl A, Girl B, Boy C’ which tantalisingly details the narrator’s attempt to remember the names of several trysts from the evening before: it was produced by Giles Martin, the son of legendary Beatles producer George Martin. With their wit and extravagant string and brass sound from an ambitious and growing ensemble, in many ways they influenced the likes of Blur, Pulp and predated the Divine Comedy “People very nicely cite us for bringing the sound of epic strings into alternative music in the 90s / Britpop” notes Shillingworth.
“The one thing that I feel quite proud about is that ‘Girl A’ came out before the term Britpop had been coined, and we were really just trying to do something that was the antithesis of what was going on around us.” explained Shillingworth in Penny Black “I suppose the penalty you pay when you do something like that is that you stick out like a sore thumb if you don’t get it right. Now, when people tag us with Britpop, I don’t feel that bad about it.”
In 1995 they released their debut album, Mornington Crescent. Although the record received a positive critical reception, its release was hampered by threatened legal action from London Underground due to a breach of copyright of the station name. While the issue faded it did affect records sales. Following the group’s Dingwalls’ residency, My Life Story was signed to Parlophone Records.
As they recorded their major-label debut, My Life Story played a series of high-profile gigs that increased their standing. Late in the summer of ’96, the group released their first Parlophone single, ’12 Reasons Why I Love Her.’ With thunderous drums and string stabs that wouldn’t sound out of place on a epic Hollywood soundtrack or a Broadway musical, Shillingworth’s delivery is rife with arch, knowing joy as a female character reels him in and he lists the way he is besotted with her. The Golden Mile, My Life Story’s long-delayed major-label debut, was finally released in March of 1997. Their most successful and commercial release yet it showed off Shillingworth’s way for a tune, their ambitiously big sound and wit and charm. Still, there was a critical backlash. Select labelling the record as “the worst album ever made.” Yet time has been kinder on their influence with The Guardian noting earlier this year “They were witty and splashy and knowing and pretentious, intensely melodic and defiantly unbothered by the impossibility of making any money if you went around with a 12-piece orchestra.”
The Verve, who had dipped their toes into the string led sound with 1995’s ‘History’ from their A Northern Soul album, released the strutting ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ in June, 1997. Originally conceived as a solo song by Richard Ashcroft and producer Youth as the band were on a hiatus Ashcroft was eventually joined by the rest of the band to flesh it out. It divides opinion online, but is a memorable recording of that period and another influential song for better or worse. But it also helped herald the death of the string-led ballad as its over-the-top production and pomposity of the strings would act as a signpost for where the string-led sound was heading… to excess.
The trademark opening orchestral motif incorporates a sample from an obscure instrumental version of the 1965 Rolling Stones song ‘The Last Time‘ by producer Andrew Loog Oldham, who included it on a 1966 album called The Rolling Stones Songbook (credited to The Andrew Oldham Orchestra). The Verve got permission to use the six-second sample from Decca Records, which owned the Oldham recording, but they also needed permission from the publisher of ‘The Last Time’ , something they didn’t realise until after the album was completed. “We did 47 tracks of music beyond that little piece,” Ashcroft was later quoted “We’ve got our own string players, our own percussion on it. Guitars.”
It was reported that The Verve’s manager Jazz Summers offered former Stones manager Alan Klein 15% of the publishing to obtain the rights. Klein insisted on 100% of the publishing when he realised the song could be a big hit. The Verve gave in since they had no choice. Richard Ashcroft, who wrote the lyrics, was given a flat fee of $1,000 and had to sign away his rights. Klein made an enormous profit on the song, every time it was used in a TV show, movie or commercial and often at big sporting events. With its bold and distinctive opening motif that acts like a clarion call: it’s still used at major sporting events to this day.
But its big confident sound houses a lack of nuance and melodic dexterity of other recordings. It’s stamped with Ashcroft’s booming ego writ large, for better or worse. Also if you listen to the lyrics, they are a bit, well, miserable, mirroring the sense of disappointment with the New Labour government and a pre-millennial ennui, “you are a slave to money then you die” he sings, reflecting the idea that’s sold to us that our problems can be solved by money. “People have been sold a lottery dream in life that money solves everyone’s problems,” he said in a Songfacts interview. “Suddenly you’re looking at people and you’re thinking: ‘I know they need X but if I give X then that relationship that should have died years ago is going to carry on and spoil.’ It opens up a myriad of things that you would never normally be thinking about, responsibilities on a new level.”
It also became inescapable at the time on the radio and MTV for the video that saw Richard Ashcroft more brazenly and laddishly aping Massive Attack‘s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ video, colliding with passers-by as he strides down the street. This set of songs lacks humility like much of Ashcroft’s work, however, in Nick McCabe they had a guitarist of rare talent who could add textures and a widescreen vista. If you dig back into their earlier albums under the name Verve, this Wigan outfit surfed elements of psych, space rock and shoegaze sounds, infused with Ashcroft’s emoting that was shot through with the melancholia of a life on the edge. The album Urban Hymns also featured the chart topping, elegant string ballad ‘The Drugs Don’t Work‘ with references to escapism through drug use, Ashcroft’s poignant and mournful tone also reflects on the recent death of his father in law, it unintentionally captured the grief of the nation, having been released the day after Princess Diana died.
The album was hugely successful, yet collapsed into a morass of bluesy dirges, especially in its second half. It also paved the way for bands like Elbow and Coldplay, and in the early 00s, the nadir of Starsailor and Keane.
Geneva were based around the singer and Aberdeen native Andrew Montgomery and guitarist Steven Dore, joined by second guitarist Stuart Evans, bass player Keith Graham and drummer Craig Brown. Their debut single ‘No One Speaks’ was released in 1996 to widespread critical praise.
Geneva released their debut album, Further early in June 1997, produced by Mike Hedges, who had found success with McAlmont and Butler and the Manics. Whilst the album itself sounds a little flimsy, listening back there are a few standout moments, ‘No One Speaks’ , ‘Into the Blue’ and an underrated gem of the era ‘Tranquillizer’ a yearning ode to claiming happiness in your youth (“let us be happy when we’re still young”), with Montgomery’s voice almost choirboy-like, the falsetto-led chorus is carried aloft by soaring strings and guitars.
Belle & Sebastian a Glasgow collective who built a career on swoonsome tales of disbanding relationships, little known authors, conflicted religious themes and French films, and built a cult following with a crowd who’d grown tired of the mainstream’s tubthumping and savoured their sensitive, heartfelt brand of bittersweet, lovelorn and stripped back orchestral pop. The band included Stuart Murdoch along with Halt Bar regular Stevie Jackson on guitar and Chris Geddes on keyboards.
On New Year’s Eve, 1995, Murdoch meets 19-year-old cellist Isobel Campbell who sometimes goes by the name Bel. Murdoch says, “She didn’t see how a girl like her could ever play a part in pop music. Somebody who didn’t have a great voice, who was pretty sensitive, who didn’t want to write about macho things. But of course, I was exactly the same, especially around that time, so we gelled immediately.”
Their debut album Tigermilk was released in June of 1996, selling out its initial run. ‘The State I Am In,’ which perfectly captures Stuart Murdoch’s signature mix of intimate folkish sound laced with the sacred and saucy, with lines like, “She was into S&M and bible studies.” Murdoch continued writing songs at a feverish pace, and the band rehearsed regularly in the local church hall. With violinist Sarah Martin also joining them, just months after their debut, the superlative If You’re Feeling Sinister is released in November of that year.
They lay down an album’s worth of new material but split it up into a series of EPs. ‘Lazy Line Painter Jane‘ came out in the summer of 1997. The title track is brilliant, building from brittle verses and twanging guitars and swirling into a 60s-style anthem that captures the end-of-the-night feeling of pulling with out-of-town guest singer Monica Queen adding a powerfully soulful element to the muted verses that swell into a chorus replete with strings, handclaps, Wurlitzers and twanging guitars. It vividly captures the wistful fleeting meetings of new love interests and the end of the night as you pull out of town.
Reviewing the title track, PopMatters said, “There’s really nothing like the sinister tone of “Lazy Line Painter Jane” anywhere else in the Belle and Sebastian catalogue, which came as even more of a surprise when it appeared early in the group’s discography. The darker mood of the song, its throbbing bass, proving they could be a full-on, locked-in rock band with chops and an intuitive feel.”
Recorded in a church, their album The Boy With the Arab Strap is released in 1998 and is their most successful album yet. Bizarrely they briefly gate-crashed the mainstream when they were nominated for Best British Newcomers at the Brits despite having released three albums before 1999. (The Brits never let fact get in the way of a nomination do they?) The award was sponsored by Radio One and voted for online by their listeners. At the time, Steps were arguably Britain’s biggest boy/girl pop band in that year and were also nominated. Despite this the award was won by Belle & Sebastian, an unlikely triumph for a band who had spent most of the decade shying away from publicity, despite the obvious quality of their work.
By 97, the use of strings on records had become a worn-out trope, almost a parody, many acts such as Embrace, Boyzone or the Lighthouse Family et al bolting on (often synthetic) strings to their dreary, overly earnest balladry in a vain attempt to lend their songs grandeur, where little existed in the lyrics. Many acts and producers attached them to songs, driven by commerciality and label head honchos who wanted another hit. Cellist and arranger Audrey Riley concedes “There’ll be moments when it’s really not the thing for strings, and then there are moments when everyone’s got strings on their record, and it always seems to tie up with them when it’s a moment for guitars.”
There were some notable exceptions; songs that used strings to elevate, such as the returning Echo and the Bunnymen’s comeback single ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ replete with yearning string-led sound and anthemic melody fitted the latter Britpop anthem bill. Or the Tindersticks‘ marvellous ‘Another Night In’ from their Curtains album, which took their brooding string-draped sound into the realms of magisterial. Another returning act in 1997 were the inimitable Welsh group Super Furry Animals who released the brilliantly inventive second album Radiator, with songs like ‘Demons’, and the dramatic ‘Mountain People’ that dealt with the Welsh identity in a unique way, unfurling from anthemically strummed balladry into a rave breakdown. Orchestration was supplied by Electra Strings, (COMMUNARDS, Mark Knopfler, PJ Harvey, Massive Attack) a string group founded by Sonia Slany and Jocelyn Pook.
“The dramatic middle eight in ‘Mountain People’, for example, feels like a diversion into a dramatic movie trailer before the music jumps back to the verse again, retaining the strings as it continues to build.” notes Super Furry Animals biographer Ric Rawlins. “With later songs like Father Father #2 the strings come into the song more as a lead instrument with their own slightly sneaky personality, then obviously become quite lush with Sean O’Hagen’s arrangements in LoveKraft. “
“I think where strings work best in the Super Furry cannon is probably songs like Frequency where the band and the orchestra almost melt into each other: you just forget it all and have that incredible submission to melody.”
Björk also released the stunning ‘Joga’ single from her excellent Homogenic album. She called it her attempt at a “National anthem’” that embodied a state of emergency. Its sonics merged richly drawn classical strings (provided late in the production process by the Icelandic String Octet), with her swooping vocals, entirely transfixing as an intricate tapestry of electronica collides with crunchy dubstep textures, tracing her Icelandic terrain to awesome effect.
In August 1997, Oasis returned with the coke-addled Be Here Now, teaming up with producer Owen Morris again, recorded at Abbey Road Studios as well as Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey. A record mired in writer’s block, it contains notably the worst example of over-the-top orchestration with the horrifically kitchen-sink-and-all, Beatles-aping ‘All Around The World’.’ Reportedly written years before they had signed a record contract, the single version was released in 1998. It’s a song sunk to the depths by its over-the-top string arrangement, buried in hundreds of Noel Gallagher’s guitar “overdubs” and slathered with a vastly bloated and unnecessary orchestral section in an attempt to cover up the lack of an actual song. With the clunky writer’s block-inspired nursery rhyme lyrics delivered by Liam Gallagher sounding like a caricature of himself, unlike the best moments of their first two records, it’s overwrought and overlong at nine minutes-plus, drunk on its own self-importance, success and ego.
In a way, this moment symbolised the crash and burn of Britpop as despite strong initial album sales fuelled by hype, Be Here Now would resemble a creative nadir and the jumping of the shark of the string-led sound. “All Around The World ‘on Be Here Now was really as far as you could go with aping that ‘A Day In The Life’ orchestral vibe” explains Suede biographer David Barnett, pointing to their former adversaries Blur who stepped away from the Britpop sound by 1997, looking more across the Atlantic for their influences “Blur were smart and went lo-fi instead. In a way that kind of anticipated the more back to basics approach of the Libertines, Strokes etc that would follow a few years later.“
There was a comedown from the excesses of the Britpop commercial era too, and bands either stepped away through burnout or delivered comedown records. “I think at it’s most basic it’s a simple case of what goes up must come down. As bands got bigger, they got inflated budgets, which as we know doesn’t equate to an increase in quality,” Barnett recalls, discussing the decline of Britpop in the late 90s. “They were also suffering the massive comedown that comes after success and excess.”
This mood was fed into by the disappointment felt by many in Tony Blair’s New Labour government, ushered in on a tidal wave of goodwill and initially the toast of “cool Britannia”. Labour researcher Darren Kalynuk had been schmoozing Albarn and the Gallaghers behind the scenes. Noel Gallagher even famously attended a champagne reception at number 10, shaking hands with Blair, proving their generation had become part of the establishment. But this hope quickly dissipated, Jude Rogers wrote in an article for the Times. “Back then, we believed that pop and politics went hand in hand. Now, as grown-ups, we find it a struggle to identify moments of sense in that mid-Nineties language of meaningless posture and pronouncement.”
“In 1997, I was a state school girl empowered by the political beliefs I had gained through the Nineties. Two months after Blair’s election, I became president of the student union at Wadham College, Oxford — a perfect success-story statistic for Blair’s Young Britain.” She remembers. “Less than a year later, in the same month as the NME put a picture of Blair on the cover and asked if we felt cheated, I found myself leading a crowd of fellow students on a march against tuition fees and getting my photograph taken by police as I asserted our right to protest.”
We have seen a backlash to this era in the ensuing years, in some ways justified, with the distasteful laddism and cartoonish patriotism linked by some in hindsight to Brexit, twenty years down the line. However as Johnny Dean of Menswe@r told me in an interview ten years ago “A movement like that (Britpop) regardless of your opinions about it, will likely never happen again”, where working class and independent label bands gate crash the mainstream because of the nature of the industry where streaming is dominated by pop and R&B, the fragmentation of music media, meagre streaming royalty rates and how expensive it is now to be in a band.
There’s also been a reliance on the nostalgia for the 90s as some sepia-tinged era where everything was better, with the reality being far more complex. There has been a rush to cash in on the nostalgia for the sound of the time for the last twenty years, from the reissue, reunions, repackages, and perhaps farcically a Britpop classical tour. But for some in Generation Z rediscovering ’90s music, without some of the context and prejudices, is refreshing compared to what the mainstream serves up now – see a recent piece about young female Oasis fans in the Quietus.
The sudden and tragic death of Princess Diana at the end of August sent the country into a state of mourning and coupled with the struggles of the Britpop era bands who turned away from the upbeat sound and successes of the previous few years led to a more sombre mood, perhaps more distilled throughout the year by Radiohead’s claustrophobic ode to pre-millennial tension OK Computer that had been released in the May. It was breathlessly and hyperbolically dubbed “the best album of all time” in a poll of readers of Q magazine.
OK Computer’s finest moments ‘Paranoid Android’ , ‘No Surprises’ and perhaps the best track the ominous piano-led ‘Karma Police’ tapped into the existential dread, uneasiness, and alienation from popular culture and politics that many felt as the decade that started with such ecstasy and enhanced hope drew to a juddering close.
Embrace‘s ‘All You Good Good People’ from their album The Good Will Out was released in October of ’97 and clocked in at a whopping six minutes. They were mistakenly billed by some of the music weeklies as the heirs to Oasis or the Verve’s late ’90s crown. As Huddersfield’s Danny McNamara lurches towards notes, the song buckles under the weight of a quite ridiculous and overblown orchestral section conducted and orchestrated by Wil Malone and keyboardist Mickey Dale. Its hugeness totally swamps McNamara’s voice and any barely traceable melody, but maybe that was the point? It sounds underwritten and drowning in self-importance, as it aims for an anthemic festival sing-along but literally falls flat. It’s a big romantic sound, yet these plodding, overly earnest songs had begun to ring hollow by the end of the 90s.
“I think on some records in the 90s, where it sounds like the an A&R man has gone, I would like to slap strings on this, but when we used them it was pretty integral. ” remembers Rialto‘s Louis Eliot.“I think there’s a period in the 80s, where in my imagination, the A&R man’s going, ‘oh, what should we do in this bit? Like, you need something to happen here in the middle eight, so let’s get the sax solo on there. And you had hese terrible saxophone solos, across quite a lot of 80s records that just felt like a sort of lazy bolt-on really, I feel that with some music in the 90s with strings, but I certainly don’t feel that as was what we were doing.”
In some ways, following his departure from Take That and a well documented spell in rehab, Robbie Williams became the heir to Britpop’s mainstream pop crown. Following a run of singles that went in its slipstream such as ‘Lazy Days’ and ‘I Hope I’m Old Before I Die’ , released to a shrug, in December of 1997 he revived his career with ‘Angels’, based on a song written by Irish songwriter Ray Heffernan. Heffernan said he wrote the first version of ‘Angels’ in Paris in 1996, after his partner had a miscarriage. According to Heffernan, he met Williams in a pub by chance in Dublin, and later played him, with his guitar, an incomplete version of his song. Heffernan said in 2010: “I had the first verse, some of the chorus and some of the second verse.”
Reworking the song and chorus together with his songwriting partner Guy Chambers in just 25 minutes involved Williams thinking about his aunt and uncle, and the singer’s fascination with the paranormal and his belief that loved ones who have passed on come back and take care of you. By his account, he and Chambers were sitting outside a cafe watching a fountain, which inspired them to write the chorus. In 2016, Williams said: “It was the first of our songs that we wrote together. We could tell and hoped and prayed that we got something incredibly special.” It’s a heart-on-sleeve singalong with an ‘everyman’ chorus about salvation that chimed with the public mood and a sound that tapped into the post-Oasis need for festival anthems.
Chambers explained in a Tik Tok video that the backing vocals played a crucial role in shaping its sound: “They give it this choir-like, Beatle-like, Elton John-like glow. There’s also a bit of the Beach Boys”.
In his opinion what really turns ‘Angels’ into a big-scale, widescreen production, though, is Chambers’ orchestral arrangement. He says, once this was put together with the rest of the instrumental parts and Williams’ vocal take (“He really did give it everything – it was very moving hearing him sing like that”), it was enough to bring everyone in the studio to tears.
@guy_chambers How I made Angels with #robbiewilliams in 1997. #behindthesong #behindthemusic #angels #songwriter #producer ♬ original sound – Guy Chambers
Loved and hated probably in equal measure – some will be moved, others find it cheesy – it becomes as prevelent as ‘Wonderwall’ by the end of the decade. It’s a song that can be attempted by anyone who has had a few pints and decides to sing themselves home, or any bloke with an acoustic guitar. The Guardian wrote in 2022 that ‘Angels‘ was “so ubiquitous for so long that it is almost impossible for anyone of a certain age to listen to it objectively: throughout the late 90s and 00s, it wasn’t so much a song as an unavoidable fact of daily life. Most pop songwriters would kill to come up with something with such impact and longevity.”
In many ways, Robbie assumed the “Britpop” mantle with his singalong ballads, and cheeky charisma-filled performances, making him the everyman lad with a personality who could deliver pop tunes to the masses. But on the other hand, he also faced criticism for his smugness, ego, inconsistent catalogue and sometimes the lack of depth in his lyrics. With a song like ‘Millennium’ released in September 1998, from his second studio album, I’ve Been Expecting You, he took the string sound to another level. With Robbie playing James Bond in the video, it’s a cheeky post-modern earworm following in the slipstream of John Barry soundtracks, laced with tongue-in-cheek vocals – a new confidence for entering the new century.
Madonna‘s Ray of Light album with its moody lead track ‘Frozen’ perhaps used strings most prodigiously in January of 1998. Producer William Orbit splicing elements of electronica and ambient music and framing them in swelling orchestral widescreen strings arranged by Craig Armstrong, a Scottish composer most known at the time for his score for the Baz Luhrmann film Romeo and Juliet
Madonna also drew inspiration from texts like Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1990 British-Italian drama film, The Sheltering Sky, which dealt with a couple trying to save their marriage during a trip to Africa. She wanted to have the “whole Moroccan/orchestral/super-romantic/man-carrying-the-woman-he-loves-across-the-desert vibe” for the track.”
Draped in austere, classical strings, in the song’s dramatic opening, Madonna’s vocal reflects the cold and haunting atmosphere, a mantra that swells into an almost operatic swoop like a shrill wind to a dramatic crescendo that shivers with rhythmic and ambient ripples, underpinned by dub beats that eventually envelop the listener.
Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Freya Jarman-Ivens, authors from Madonna’s Drowned Worlds, commented that the song is “strongly inspired by different forms of classical music, notably contemporary classical music such as neoromanticism, as well as Italian opera composers and pieces such as Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida. Madonna’s vocals have drawn comparisons to medieval music.”
Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger described Orbit’s drum and electronic programming as “extraordinarily abstract for a global smash – a kind of cold, bassless dub approach, where the gaps, echoes and drop-outs matter as much as the beats, which spread sharply, like sudden cracks on a frozen surface. “
Armstrong’s string arrangements lend it an even grander backdrop in the second part sweeping in and filing in the cracks, like waves of a dark ocean. Ewing calls them “a dark, Arctic sea of swells and crests – need the beats to sound more perilous than comforting.” It’s an extraordinary cinematic pop song for its intricate layers, a brew of eastern and ambient textures and dramatic vocals, and one of Madonna’s best in her latter period.
Arriving like a rolling plume of continental air, ‘Sexy Boy’ by French music duo Air came out in February 1998, refreshing in an environment of earnest balladry. It’s one of the best records of that year. Inventively piecing together elements of luxurious lounge pop and vocals fed through a vocoder that some compared to ELO or Serge Gainsbourg, it’s a seductive, sensitive and enveloping song with an androgynous, cooing melody that whispers in your ear and a pulsing blend of beats, rolling bass lines, flutes, garnished with vintage Moog strings. It pays homage to the French musical history of Gainsbourg and his contemporaries, yet sounds fresh and very much in its orbit. It leaves you intrigued and intoxicated. Kevin Courtney from Irish Times named ‘Sexy Boy’ Single of the Week, writing, “How can you not be seduced by that title? The new single from the cool-as French duo is a swooping, moog-driven slice of fromage, filled with polyester passion and gender-bending vocals.”
“Drugs were endemic and some bands got caught up in that to such an extent that making records was almost impossible,” says Sleeper‘s Louise Werner, whose memoir Just for One Day: Adventures In Brit-Pop offers an insider’s account of the scene’s hedonism and narcissism. “I think drugs were also a huge part of why the music became such a downer. It stopped being a very pop, celebratory movement and became much more serious because lots of people had fallen foul of addiction. But there was also a sense in which some Britpop bands became a bit ashamed of themselves. They’d become so pop and vibrant and knees-up-Mother-Brownish that they felt they had to take a step back.”
Three years after the success of Different Class and with tensions in the band leading to the departure of Russell Senior, Jarvis Cocker retreated to New York to demo new songs. With This Is Hardcore released in March 1998, Pulp delivered one last final minor key note to the string-led sound that had once ridden high in the charts on their Scott Walker-influenced fourth record. Only This is Hardcore was much more downbeat, a record steeped in midlife crisis, a shying away from the fame game and a retreat into the dark corners of the mind. The party was over and Jarvis was in a bad head space. Fame had been disappointing, he had been the subject of tabloid fodder for wafting an imaginary fart in the direction of Michael Jackson‘s pompous messianic-like performance at the Brits in 1996.
This is Hardcore… is a melancholic, seedy yet luxurious suite of songs, inconsistent, but shining briefly as Pulp could finally play out their Scott Walker, David Bowie and Serge Gainsbourg fantasies with a budget. Teaming up again once again with arranger Anne Dudley, and sampling ‘Bolero on the Moon Rocks’ written by Peter Thomas and recorded by The Peter Thomas Sound the title track is built upon big Walker Brothers’ drums and ominously creeping piano daubs that juxtapose the shadowy corners of comedown and vivid imagery of pornography against a sweeping backdrop; one can hear the velvet curtains being pulled back on the downsides of fame, delivered with a slumping melancholic full stop. Elsewhere ‘Help The Aged’ struck a slightly awkward note, whilst the ominous brilliance of ‘The Fear’ grasped at paranoia and rising anxiety attacks.
Matthew Horton wrote in NME that “in its sense of surrender, regret and flashes of panic, it captured the time to a tee.” In an article entitled, “How Pulp’s This Is Hardcore Brought Britpop To A Halt“, Horton maintained that it was “a sloughing-off of fame’s skin, a rejection of the Britpop monster”. He concluded, “It’s an end, a hard-wrought epitaph to a band’s jaunt in the limelight and a suitable jump-off point for what had been a rare old few years – for us, at least.”
Compared by sections of the press to Pulp and Blur perhaps for their dress sense and long fringes as much as their sound, Rialto were a critically acclaimed band whose rise with a string of singles in 1997 and ’98 including memorable cuts like ‘Monday Morning 5:19’ which appeared on their debut album, which juxtaposed a big orchestrated sound with a more doleful understated delivery. It’s a song about doomed love delivered from the bedsit.
In a tale that typified the 90s record industry of the time, singer Louis Eliot told me how they got dropped just as their debut album was released in 1998. “It was quite a shock. We were so shocked. We didn’t have a moment to be angry or bitter about it, we just thought, oh, we’ll find another deal, which we did. But it did take quite a long time, you know, these things, and, you know, obviously had some effect on our momentum. “ He remembers “So it took another six months or so to get a new label. Then the label that we signed to China was then bought by Warners who we’d been dropped by, so we were back on the label that had dropped us. There were quite a few things that happened then. But I think our particular version of that story was was more even more ludicrous than some of the others. So we ended up back there and it ended up they dropped us again. So we had a good reason to get the violins out.”
Rialto
“We had quite a basic setup, rather than sort of rehearsing songs up in a room with a loud live band, we were demoing them on an eight-track to start with Johnny, my partner in the band, my role was the song writing and his was the production,” he told me, recalling why they started to experiment with synth strings. “To have that little setup gave us the opportunity to really broaden our sound and have a much bigger palette to create with and in the demo stages, that included sampling Phil Spector tunes and stuff.” He was more influenced by his father’s soul record collections and artists like The Ronettes, Barry White and the Walker brothers
“Then, and then when we finally got to make the record, the limitations of the eight-track were quite good, because it meant when we were demoing all these tunes, we had to know that every component within the song was useful and served a purpose. “
“We only used the string section, once, and that was for re-recording a new or a different version of Monday Morning: 5:19″ He adds surprisingly “which was funded by the new record label that we signed to. It was an absolute thrill to go into the massive studio with, Anne Dudley. Then we went to the studio, and there was this massive orchestra playing our song, and it was incredible.”
“But actually, I don’t think it was as good as the original thing, which was two fingers on a keyboard. I have never been taught how to arrange strings, so often, we’d be writing string lines, and I still do sometimes write string lines as a single line, and then find some harmonic support for it, a harmony or some sympathetic notes or maybe another melody that weaves in and out of the first one. I think that’s how we approached it we didn’t approach it by writing a song and then getting somebody to arrange an amazing orchestral part on the top.”
“If you’ve got a full orchestra, it kind of takes over because it’s so massive then it’s got connotations of other things that perhaps you didn’t want in the first place, like Disney.” He explains “The song had kind of grandeur to it. But it also had some kitchen sink about it and I think that that partly was the production. Yeah, partly the production mixed with with the lyric. I think it was also the grand gesture. You know? Monday Morning 5.19 isn’t a three chord trick. “
“I was certainly aware at the time that I didn’t want sound like a rock band at all. “ Eliot explains,. citing the influence of the understated conversational style of Terry Hall’s solo work, alongside Squeeze‘s ‘Up the Junction’ mixed with Charles Aznavour‘s ‘She’, on his vocal style. “I was drawn to melodrama, dramatic narratives or scenarios, delivered in a way, where I was attempting not to over emote and not to use rockisms, I was just trying to get it across in the words.”
In April of 1998, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Drugstore‘s Isabel Monteiro united to produce the glorious ‘Kill The President’ , a reworking of the track that appeared on their album dedicated to former Chilean president Salvador Allende who was ousted in a 1973 coup d’état (in which General Pinochet played a key role), their two voices excellently entwine and simmer with the attack of the cello line.
‘The Boy Is Mine’ was a brilliant single released in June of 1998. A hit song by Brandy and Monica written with producers Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, his brother Fred Jerkins III, Japhe Tejeda, and LaShawn Daniels. Brandy came up with the concept while watching an episode of The Jerry Springer Show tabloid talk show, where love triangles was the theme.
It opens with a twinkling yet stormy synthesized harp line, produced through the harp setting of a keyboard. The lyrics depict the first meeting of two rivals for a boy’s affection. Superbly produced, it echoes Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson‘s ‘The Girl Is Mine’ with Jerkins allowing spaces for each vocal artist. Perfectly melding pop and R&B into something futuristic, the track adds a bouncing rubbery beat and an addictive call-and-response melody giving each singer two bars, it’s essentially about choosing friendship over drama.
Folk artist Vashti Bunyan picked out the song as one of her favourites in the Quietus: “That first ‘harp’ phrase – trying to catch how it is done, how it was put together. And then the countermelody of the strings, I just never get bored with it. The interplay between the two singers – the phrasing that each manages so masterfully – also has me fixated.”
Ironically. the vocal sparring reflected the stormy relationship between Brandy and Monica themselves with Jerkins later claiming that both singers “didn’t get along” during production and that he and Dexter Simmons remixed the track seven times to keep everything even. In a 2012 interview with WZMX, Monica spoke about their relationship:
“We were young. We could barely stay in the room with each other. By no means was it jealousy or envy. She and I are polar opposites and instead of embracing that, we used our differences as reasons not to be amongst each other.”
The Delgados formed in Glasgow in 1994, naming themselves after the Spanish cyclist Pedro Delgado, when childhood friends Alun Woodward (vocals/guitar), Stewart Henderson (bass), and Paul Savage (drums) joined Emma Pollock (vocals, guitar). The band were also known as founders of the influential label Chemikal Underground, home to amongst others Bis and Arab Strap. With a warmly drawn homespun sound of soaring strings, Pollock’s plaintive vocals and waltz time percussion, their first album Domestiques received critical praise.
The band’s second record 1998’s Peloton was released in June. Its second single ‘Pull the Wires From the Wall’, is woven through with Pollock’s haunting vocals charting introspective and sedentary moments with a poetic clarity. The song’s use of stripped-back instrumentals offers a much more pared-back and earthy sound compared to some of their contemporaries. Replete with yearning folksy violins, the chorus bounces along pleasingly with a bittersweet majesty aided by Woodward’s helping hand backings, it later earned the number one spot on John Peel’s annual “Festive Fifty” countdown.
Following her big success with the Fugees, Lauryn Hill made her solo debut with her excellent lead single ‘Doo Wop that Thing’ in August 1998, lifted from her first solo studio album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. It’s a refreshing track, lending heavily from doo-wop and soul sounds and retooling them for the ensuing millennium. It’s a breezy mixture of sepia grooves, Hill’s melodic vocal dexterity with layers of her voice mixed like backing vocals, and blasts of bluesy horns and plinky plonky pianos, it reaches back to elements of Motown or Northern Soul yet lends them a fresh, hip hop edge where you can’t see the joins.
A tuneful warning from Lauryn Hill to men and women caught in “the struggle”. Both the women who “[try to] be a hard rock when they really are a gem”, and the men who are “more concerned with his rims, and his Timbs, than his women” who warns them not to allow “that thing” to ruin their lives. With the strutting chorus promoting egalitarianism between the sexes and the lavish, swaying strings joining in at the end, its a superb track, one of the best of 1998.
Released in August of 1998, The Divine Comedy returned with the album Fin de Siècle. French for “end of the century“, it’s a chamber pop camp turned up to 11 and was their most lavish record yet, replete with a huge string orchestra sound supplied by The Brunel Ensemble and the vocals of the Crouch End Festival Chorus that calls to mind Broadway musicals or epic soundtracks. Time Out called it a concept album that “pick[s] at the scabs of twentieth-century existence”. Hannon said it deals with “other people’s angst really, and it’s more about the end of the century being a good excuse to have a look around and observe”
The final single released at the start of 1999, ‘National Express’ is a bouncy, extravagant and lavish romp through a trip on the budget coach. Effortlessly catchy, Hannon’s observant tongue-in-cheek lyrics are delivered with a wit and raised eyebrow buoyed by a brassy, gigantic string section and choral backings that burst into a joyous crescendo; slightly comedic, it’s not taking itself quite so seriously which helps its air of fun. Sections of the music press criticised Hannon for “sneering” at the working classes on the track. In the NME, critic Steven Wells wrote “What a filthy, disgusting, revolting, nauseating little record … This is mock-pop. This is the work of an ‘artist’ who thinks himself superior to his art form and despises his audience.” Hannon responded: “‘National Express’ … is pure observation, nothing made up – I’m on this bus, this is what I see. ‘The family man/manhandling the pram/with paternal pride’ is me having a dig at my brother for having a kid and being Nineties Man, you know, and he’s not exactly working class.”
Another paean that reflected the resigned air of the end of the decade was released at the end of August 1998, the Manic Street Preachers returned with the elegiac ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ (also the longest song title to land at number one). It was inspired by Orwell’s book about the Spanish Civil War, and the idealism of Welsh volunteers who joined the left-wing International Brigades fighting for the Spanish Republic against Francisco Franco’s military rebels. It’s a warning to not give in to Fascism and extremism but it sounds beautiful too. It is wonderfully produced, balancing a lushness with an earthy folk-pop strum, the ray gun guitars of the intro, Sean’s rolling drums, and James Dean Bradfield‘s vocals are fantastic, sailing to the upper register it’s like his eyes are closed as he delivers a dystopic warning mirrored by the video, but also an impassioned cry. The final outro uses strings most prodigiously with the sighing choral “aahhs” complemented by sweeping strings.
Neil Collins, author of ‘International Velvet: How Wales Conquered the 90s Charts’ calls it a “quintessentially Welsh single on their most quintessentially Welsh album…” . The Manics would leave the twentieth century with a huge show at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium on New Year’s eve 1999, supported by the likes of Shack and The Super Furry Animals.
Released in late September 1998, Mercury Rev‘s Deserters Songs is a tour de force, like entering a haunting moonlit fairy-tale land with a soundtrack that slips between fantasy and reality, with echoes of the work of Danny Elfman on the soundtracks for Tim Burton, or the ethereal David Lynch movie soundtracks of composer Angelo Badalamenti. Following poor reception to their previous album and in the depths of depression, band member Jonathan Donahue rediscovered the wonder and joy of some of his favourite childhood records, including Tale Spinners for Children, a collection of spoken-word fairy tales set to classical music.
“It’s a record born out of a certain amount of pain,” Donahue told Q, “because, after the last tour, we basically fell apart. Grasshopper checked himself into a monastery, the drummer quit, and I suffered two nervous breakdowns. I lost my girlfriend and hurt a lot of the people I love. It was a pretty horrible time; something I can never wholly rectify.”
After laying down the basic tracks the band then spent two months at Tarbox Road studio, recording string arrangements and mixing the album with former band member Dave Fridmann. They expanded their sound with strings, horns, and woodwind which were used instead of just guitars. Mastered to 35mm magnetic film for fidelity purposes, Fridmann explained that this unique process gave the music a warmer, cinematic palette, as they crafted a bricolage, a “wall of sound” that makes some traditional instruments almost unrecognisable. It lends grandeur and wistfulness to songs like the outstanding opener ‘Holes’ which possess a touching and heart-swelling melody that glows with bittersweet couplets, unfurling from delicate and isolated into swelling instrumentation of lavish woodwind, spinning Wurlitzers and mournful horns and strings, it sounds like someone stuck at the bottom of a well looking for a hand up to escape. Or the exquisite melodrama of ‘Opus 40’ and ‘Goddess on a Highway.’ “We want it to be very similar from song to song so that each song kills you — but it’s too boring for us to do it the same way every time,” explained Fridmann in Sound On Sound. Deserters Songs would famously be dubbed the album of the year by the NME, perhaps the last time many of us can remember discovering and falling in love with an album that topped their chart.
“Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips, at least since I’ve been working with both groups, have always had sampled orchestral elements — there are French horn, string, trumpet and timpani samples on the first Mercury Rev record, and there’s all those things on the first Flaming Lips record I worked on too, back in 1989.” Fridmann told Sound on Sound “But we used them very sparingly, I think, frankly out of fear — you know, these were rock bands, and to walk around with your violin case instead of your Marshall stack, it doesn’t work. But now I think more than ever both the groups are being true to what they want to do, and to the textures and sounds that they want to do. There used to be very literally an element of fear about doing things like that. That element is now completely gone. And I’m sure there are people who would say ‘Hey, can we put the genie back in the bottle? Can we have a little more rock and roll here once in a while, instead of all this soft rock?’ But that’s probably not going to happen.”
Travis were another band set to play into the sombre national mood with a song that hit big from their album The Man Who released in 1999, which featured the decent previous singles ‘Driftwood‘ and ‘Writing to Reach You’ that had its own nod to Oasis with “what’s a Wonderwall anyway?“. But it was ‘Why Does It Always Rain On Me?’ that really took them into the public consciousness, following a performance at Glastonbury by the Scottish group in 1999 when coincidentally it started raining throughout their set. This wistful “woe is me” strum, paired with mournful strings and a dull sigh of a chorus, was written while singer Fran Healy was seeking out some winter sun on a holiday to Israel. However, it rained all week and he returned home. It summed up the rather beige and earnest sound of the period with Coldplay finding success and a preponderance of singer-songwriters such as David Gray and, slightly later, James Blunt clogging up the charts. This weary, one-note song about writer’s block and introspection struck gold partly through circumstance.
Released in March of 1999 the lushly lilting ‘Dead From The Waist Down’ was taken from Catatonia‘s third studio album, Equally Cursed and Blessed. International Velvet author Neil Collins noted “The majestic lead single, ‘Dead from the Waist Down’, also topped the midweek charts before eventually settling at No. 7. Placed as the album’s opening track, the lushness of its Bacharach-like orchestral sweep was aided by a great video. Despite demoing the album while touring the States, Catatonia weren’t in Kansas anymore (more like a west London studio). Yet that didn’t stop Cerys hamming it up as a less innocent Dorothy in homage to The Wizard of Oz. It had more serious notes too: at a time of the Kosovo conflict, its chorus line of ‘make hay, not war’ resonated more than ever.”
Written by Mark Roberts with Catatonia and produced by the band and producer Tommy D, it’s “about being on tour in LA, and reflecting on the people there and also certain members of the band’s entourage, who weren’t enjoying themselves,” remembers Roberts in Sound on Sound. “People moaning, when they should have been having a laugh. It’s all about being in California, and in the sun — being slightly Catatonic, I suppose! I wanted to really pull that out, and emphasise the song’s very dreamy feel.”
“We managed to work out something that we were pretty happy with, with a real Glen Campbell feel! It couldn’t sound scratchy — it would have wrecked the mood. And it had to be real strings, as well. Strangely, some people have now asked whether the final strings were programmed, which I think is quite ironic really, because I don’t think you could get that feel from synthetic strings. I hate using them, unless it’s just for basic pads. If you want all the swoops and slides, like we did, it’s got to be the real thing! And it’s not as expensive as people think, either.” Remembers the producer Tommy D in Sound on Sound, He booked a 24‑piece string section to flesh out the song, with Matt Dunkley, an orchestral arranger was picked for the job. Tommy explained that Dunkley “with some lines of his own, and arranged it properly for a 24‑piece string section. He’s got Logic Audio as well, so I just gave him the file and backing track I had, and then he just wrote his arrangement to that.”
Others weren’t so keen on the results. NME scribe Mark Beaumont slammed the string led sound of the time, that he claimed watered down the sound of bands. “Orchestras are the Ebola of pop. They creep in almost unnoticed, turn your internal talent to mush and have you spouting liquefied slush from every orifice within days. We’ve lost the Manics, Oasis and Travis to this evil plague already, and Cerys Matthews has been on the danger list ever since she looked so comfortable singing ‘My Selfish Gene’ on telly, accompanied by Jools Holland. With ‘Equally Cursed And Blessed’ comes the first sign of haemorrhage…..” he continued “The last thing we need is for her to get dumbed down, softened up, bleached blank by the Michael Nyman brigade. Cerys Matthews was never meant to go girlie. Yet here she comes, togged up like Pam Ayers and singing “Make hay not waah-ho-hooor” on ‘Dead From The Waist Down’, backed, it seems, by the Disneyland house band.”
Toploader produced a very omnipresent and grating version of ‘Dancing In The Moonlight’ which became a hit in 2000. It was the third single lifted from their debut studio album, Onka’s Big Moka (1999), a reworking of an old King Harvest song possessed of a cringe-worthy enforced jollity, with those Hammond organ notes and unremittingly smug, grating delivery that conjures up the idea of going for a BBQ around Jamie Oliver’s house in the 1990s. It’s such an irritatingly repugnant record that says if you aren’t having fun then you aren’t “cool.” Listening to this instantly ceases the “fun”; one of the worst examples of the period. Their ballad ‘Achilles Heel’ , drenched in strings, was another example of the worst kind.
Hip hop, dance, electronic music and dance music production was mostly shifting into using sampling, digital textures, enabled by the advances in digital technology in studios. Thus the use of costly string orchestras started to wane as we entered the end of the 90s and into the early 00s. Sound system samplers Basement Jaxx took the multicultural influence of Britain to dancefloors and the charts. Released in 1999, ‘Red Alert’ written by Felix Buxton and Simon Radcliffe, dashes, zippy funk influenced by Parliament and elastic bhangra tinged beats with soulful exclamations, and stitches them together with string stings, for a refreshingly, exultant and colourful single. Larry Flick of Billboard noted, “space-age lasers, bloopy bounce rhythms, an unexpected dollop of cello, and a beat meant to ignite the airwaves into a froth of summertime glory.”
1999’s Mint Royale‘s bouncy ‘Don’t Falter’ features Lauren Laverne and a tapestry of samples it lends a refreshing summery loved up giddiness to big beat pop. With sweeping strings and horns it’s a grin-inducing and joyous update on elements of Motown and 60s girl groups.
The Flaming Lips released The Soft Bulletin, their ninth studio album, in May of 1999. Following their previous album Zaireeka a quadruple album of experimental sounds, it saw the band take on a new line and distil a new direction . Thus traditional pop melodies are layered into grand songs created in with producer David Fridmann, that saw many to call it the “Pet Sounds of the 90s”. Nowhere was it more evident than on the sweeping first track, soaring lead single ‘Race For The Prize’ released in June of 1999, which kicks off with possibly the loudest, most distorted drum sound ever committed to CD. “So that actually has a bunch of microphones on it and stuff. I think the main thing on that was overloading one of the console inputs,” notes Fridmann in a Sound on Sound article.
Singer Wayne Coyne narrates a tale of scientists striving to save the world at their own risk: “Two scientists are racing for the good of all mankind/Both of them side by side, so determined/locked in heated battle for the cure that is the prize/But it’s so dangerous/But they’re determined.” His tender recounting of this tale is ripe with wide-eyed wonder and vulnerability. Leading to a breakdown and wistful strings, a telephone vocal effect underscores the huge sacrifice made by our noble scientists in a repeated refrain: “Theirs is to win/If it kills them/They’re just human/With wives and children,” before soaring into a life-affirming chorus ridden by wonderfully uplifting synth strings. Infusing this tale of compelling altruism with intimacy, bombast and heart, it’s a gorgeous heart swelling alt pop song. Coyne noted later “If someone were to ask me what instrument do I play, I would say, ‘the recording studio.’
Ágætis byrjun (Icelandic: [ˈaːucaitɪs ˈpɪrjʏn], A good Beginning the second album from Sigur Ros recorded between 1998 and the spring of 1999 with producer Ken Thomas, was released in their homeland of Iceland in 1999 to little fanfare. But with message board hype and radio exposure, it would receive eventually get a 2000 release in the United Kingdom. A departure from their debut album Von, its ethereal textures and cinematic landscape were riven with details and melodies that were impossible to ignore. It features Jónsi Birgisson‘s cello-bowed guitar work and orchestration prodvided by string quartet Amiina. The ten-minute epic ‘Svenfn-g-engerlar’ was one of the central songs; one critic would exclaim that Sigur Ros sounded like “like God weeping tears of gold in heaven.”
Another ‘Starálfur‘ (which translates as Starling) was one of the standouts, with the ambient peaks and valleys of a classical piece, yet breathed into life by the ethereal and soaring falsetto of Jónsi. Whilst he was often singing in a hybrid, made-up language he called Vonlenksa; translating as Hopelandish or Hopelandic. On Starálfur‘ the lyrics are completely Icelandic and a reflection on the power of nature and the human connection to it. Capturing an angelic purity of hope through struggle, it’s also riven with the rise and fall of epic sighing cellos and orchestration; the string parts are palindromic, meaning they are the same forwards and backwards. Ascending pianos twinkle their way like they’re lighting the path of a hiker reaching a peak. It swells into crescendos bathed in wonder, and with spots on adverts and the BBC Blue Planet series it would become ubiquitous in the early 2000s, perhaps watering down its initial impact.
Released in March of 2000, Moloko‘s ‘The Time Is Now‘ from their Things to Make and Do album took the production of dance music and then took it apart to craft a disco anthem for the new millennium, piecing it together in a stripped back rush of crystalized melody, acoustic bass, brushing instruments and Irish singer Roisin Murphy‘s invigorating delivery. “Moloko were such an original band, they came out of club culture in Sheffield so you had Mark Bryden who was a fantastic songwriter and then you had Roisin Murphy who was a whirling dervish of ideas, lyrics and ideas,” remembers composer Audrey Riley. “The arrangement was all Mark’s. I was piecing it together. There was a fantastic moment in the studio where Roisin wanted something to land where it could pause and be felt, and how it landed in the demo version. I said to Roisin why don’t you just conduct us through the glass on this bit? And she did, she loved it!”
As we examined in part one, with the shift from synth strings to full orchestration, the progress of music and its sound always mirrors the progression in technology. By the end of the decade and the early 2000s strings had started to be recorded digitised which changed their character again, something that composter and cellist Audrey Riley noticed shifted the sound “I noticed something which I hadn’t noticed before because when something’s been developing slowly, you don’t notice the changes.”
“Back then, in the early and mid-90s, the sound we would go for in the studio wasn’t airy. It was still beautiful. But it was interesting. It was characterful. I think that suddenly occurred to me, particularly when using the samples for arrangements now, it’s more that the samples themselves are so characterless, that you have to be careful that there’s no meaning in the arrangement.”
“So I can remember a distinct moment when, (and there’s a paper in this actually) there was a moment, in the early 2000s, and it was after the digitization of everything. So we were working with computers, possibly sample orchestras, and we’ve swapped to digital, everything’s digital, now,” she notes.
“So you notice the change of sound in the mic even. It’s like the change from using film to take a photograph using a camera, to digital photographs. In that environment then, people are starting to use samples to write more. I remember when bands were going for that sound and trying to recreate the sound of the samples in the studio. I would say to the string section, we need to use a really fast, tight intense vibrato and a really slow bow. I think it was maybe one session where they were saying, do you know what? I prefer the sound of the midi strings. Then you realised we’d become attached to the demo, or rather that it had become part of the evolution of the recorded track and that sound had to stay.”
We will finish with one example of a record that symbolised that shift. Released at the tail end of 2000 in the UK on XL Recordings and Modular worldwide, Melbourne production outfit the Avalanches‘ debut album Since I Left You, produced by group members Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann, was crafted from an estimated 3,500 samples from various genres. According to Chater they “were really unorganised and were just sampling on the fly as tracks progressed … We had no idea the record would get such a wide-scale release so we saw no need to keep track of what we were using – we were definitely guilty of harbouring a ‘No-one’s going to listen to it anyway’ sort of attitude.”
Sampling artists as disparate as Françoise Hardy, Blowfly, Sérgio Mendes, Raekwon, Wayne and Shuster, and Madonna, often picking out the leftover bits to fit the pattern and flow of each song, Seltmann felt that “the more rejected and unwanted the record that a sample comes from, the more appealing it is, I guess it’s almost a reaction to rare record finding.”
‘Since I Left You‘s glowing carousel of sonics tantalises and uplifts the senses, transporting you to distant lands of escape; this sun-infused pop sways like giant sunflowers in fields, a bricolage of samples of flutes, organs and strings anchored by the longing soulful refrain (lifted from the Main Attractions‘ 1968 release ‘Everyday’) the meaning of which they manipulated into an imperious break-up jam. The ‘Everyday‘ sample was the final element to be added by Chater and Seltmann, and was the thread that tied the song together, Chater telling Pitchfork later that it was the moment when they “really succeeded in writing a pop song.”
‘Since I Left You’ is possessed of a joyous reverie that rustles with elements of 50s soundtracks, the doo-wop of The Duprees, show tunes, the plucked jazz guitars of Tony Mottola, 60s soul, interspersed with fragments of modernist beats. At times it feels like a seaside spin across the pier that’s about to collapse, but somehow it works brilliantly. It sounds like no specific era because it’s a jigsaw puzzle of every era. Scaling the charts around the world at the turn of the millennium, it offered a meticulous tapestry of sound that juxtaposed itself against the big beats of the era.
As we have charted evolutions in technology, the political and social environment and how music is consumed all impact on how music in the mainstream sounds. Perhaps, nowhere was that more distilled than in the late 90s than the shift from the CD era to the file-sharing and MP3 era of the early 2000s which meant that beyond a few exceptions labels didn’t have the funds to justify paying for orchestras or big studios as they did in the early to mid-90s. Also, with the democratising factor of technology upon recording, it was easier to use digital samples or recording software to recreate the sound of strings or any sound you wanted, even in your bedroom. This influenced how sounds and genres were diversifying in the early 2000s, along with the fragmentation of music media, the preponderance of choice offered by the internet, which meant you had less and less communal moments in music, and more personal playlists.
All of which means we aren’t likely to see such a wave of acts in the charts using full orchestras again, but in the ’90s for a brief period this sound soared in a way many of us will never forget. Still, the use of strings to augment songs is a classical strand in pop and music generally, last year Paul McCartney recovered a lost Beatles song ‘Now and Then’ using a full string orchestra as well as AI to try and recapture the classic George Martin sound. It still exists to this day too, with everyone from Michael Kiwanuka, SAULT, Lana Del Rey to Billie Eilish using string sections or string sounds to elevate certain songs. This year two of my favourite records the gorgeous Cool Hand from Georgia Ruth and Here in the Pitch by Jessica Pratt both use orchestration to broaden and deepen their palettes, so the orchestrated sound will endure in one form or another, however it’s crafted.
