One Great Summer
Celebrating the gloriously sunny sounds of 2003.
If you're particularly into music, then you'll probably be particularly into whatever music was hot when you were a teenager.
I was 16 in 2003, which by many accounts, appears to have been one great summer. The NME thought so, anyway. They described it as "the third summer of love", and even tried to define all of these sunny, slightly psychedelic sounds as a whole new genre, which they called shroomadelica.
Further research suggests that the NME’s shroomadelic third summer of love may actually have taken place in 2004. But hey ho, you can’t trust music hacks who exploit legal loopholes to enjoy “shroomy Tuesdays” in the office to remember their dates correctly.
In any case, there must have been something in the air in these early years of the 21st century. For even now, most of the music I've retained from 2003 appears to radiate a highly pleasant warmth. The songs, the production, the artwork - it all comes together to form something bright, friendly, and comforting.
That's nostalgia, yep. This is the effect of listening to the past through rose-tinted headphones. But I bet you feel the same way about whatever music you were listening to in the summer you turned 16.
Here are a number of songs which I think have that delightful 2003 sound - a sound which, I hope, will always make me feel like the world is bright and full of possibility.
Alfie - The Indoor League
We saw Alfie twice in 2003-2004 - once supporting Athlete, and once at their own show. Both times they decorated the stage like a cosy living room, with a bunch of antique lamps in a range of sizes that glowed and strobed in time with their music.
Their 2003 album, Do You Imagine Things, is a lost masterpiece. It's full of unexpected left turns, and has multiple moments where songs tumble into different styles - or even different genres - as if they've just fallen down a trapdoor. It has odd time signatures and gnarly guitar sounds that might surprise many who only knew of Alfie as stalwarts of the NME's "new acoustic" scene. It even features a heartfelt tribute to ELO!
The Indoor League is the outstanding song. It's about a pair of magic shoes that take you on a mystical journey on a sunny day, and it reaches some truly incredible heights. The chorus sounds like a different song from the verse - a gentle trumpet fanfare gives way to booming trip hop drums - yet implausibly, impossibly, it all hangs together.
That video above, showing a little wind-up robot South Pole Explorer slinking down a sunny Mancunian street, is the very video the band projected on the screen behind them when they played live. Watching it now makes me feel happy in the saddest possible way.
Athlete - You Got The Style
Athlete got so good at writing music for a cry and a pint that one might forget just how bright and breezy their debut album was.
You Got The Style appears to be about the moment one loses their cool in the middle of a heatwave. Easily done.
"We should be laughing about it! Making the most of the true British climate."
That would be a BBQ in the pouring rain, then. Or a cool pint in a hot beer garden, with friends.
Hand on heart, I love every song on Vehicles and Animals. The two albums that followed it hold up, too. Athlete's final album, Black Swan, is less memorable. And lead singer/songwriter Joel Pott has seriously stained his copybook in recent years through penning unbearable dirges for the likes of George Ezra. But we'll always have those first three Athlete albums, Joel.
We saw Athlete in Liverpool, with support from Alfie. As the crowd filed out of the room, they played One Horse Town by The Thrills over the PA.
This short yet thrilling anecdote is intended to act as a link to the next entry.
The Thrills - Big Sur
The Thrills: A great bunch of lads from Ireland who really wish they were a swell bunch of guys from California. And why not? How many Americans cling to their Irish roots and claim they're Irish? A lot.
In 1999, the lads - sorry, the guys - spent four months living in San Diego, and they loved that Californian warmth so much that much of their debut album reads like a love letter to the Golden State.
Some of the songs on So Much For The City are so slow, they're almost static. The best songs have a kick and a swing to them, as if they were written to soundtrack a drive along the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible, with the wind in your hair.
I like Big Sur best, with its jaunty banjo intro and its nod to The Monkees. Like most songs on the album it's warming sunshine in a bottle. So why do the lyrics seem so pained and regretful?
"Just don't go back to Big Sur. Baby, baby, please don’t go."
It's because, though they recorded the song in LA, they're envisioning themselves in their native Dublin, and anticipating the admonishments of their friends and family back home. It's nostalgia for a blessed experience that's still taking place.
Even at the time, it seems that people knew that something this good couldn't possibly last.
Turin Brakes - Painkiller
We went to a "pop-up" gig, sponsored by Orange, in a big old hump of a grain silo in Liverpool, in the middle of the docklands. With the light streaming through the dingy windows at one end of the silo, dimly illuminating a pile of grain nobody had bothered to clear away, it felt like the perfect setting for an apocalyptic rave. For some serious underground nosebleed techno, ja.
But instead, Orange assembled a lineup including Athlete (yep, another Athlete gig!) and Shack, with Turin Brakes headlining. The Cuban Brothers acted as comperes, and did some odd rollerblade routines between the bands.
I remember that Turin Brakes didn't go down too well. Or maybe it was just an empty vessel making the loudest sound: The boorish drunk stood next to us who heckled the group between each song and repeatedly demanded for Shack to return to the stage.
Yet I think even this tedious fellow perked up when Turin Brakes played Painkiller. Because who could possibly resist a song that so cheerfully advises you to "leave all your misery behind"?
Yo La Tengo - Don't Have To Be So Sad
Yo La Tengo called their 2003 album Summer Sun. It's as if they knew which way the wind would be blowing that year. It's one of their more serene and low-key albums. There's no Cherry Chapstick blowout here. Every song is a hymn for the warmest and slowest days of the year.
Don't Have To Be So Sad pairs shuffling percussion with distant, muted guitars and piano, a sound that appears to shimmer like a heat haze on the horizon. Ira Kaplan's vocals, which often remind me of a gentler Lou Reed, are hushed like the whisper of grass in a calm ocean breeze.
It's the sound for the laziest part of the day, as the shadows start to get longer and you start to feel crispy in your summer skin.
The Bandits - Take It And Run
In 2003, you LITERALLY couldn't MOVE for summery songs from Liverpool bands with titles in the imperative mood. There was The Coral's Pass It On, which is another 2003 summer slammer, and countless other examples far too numerous to list.
Now there certainly was a golden period when, any time you went anywhere in Liverpool where bands would play, you'd be certain to see a bunch of 60s-obsessed psych obsessives with Frodo Baggins hair playing 60s-influenced music, obsessively. They were continuing the mission started by the likes of The La's and The Stairs. And hopefully there are still bands in that blessed city who continue to carry that slightly-stoned and permanently sozzled torch to this day. As long as there are strange sounds coming from the Mersey, all will be OK.
Some of those bands would break out from that scene, if it can be described as such (I seem to remember NME using the term "scousedelica" once or twice) - The Coral, The Stands, The Zutons. Others would perhaps release an album or two, but would not appear to make much of an impact beyond the city limits. Tramp Attack. The Hokum Clones. The Morning Stars. And The Bandits.
I saw The Bandits twice in 2003 - 2004. They supported Easyworld when they played Liverpool, and we liked them so much we went to their headline show some months later. All I can really recall from the shows is a bright green translucent drum kit. And the songs, of course. The songs are glorious.
Alas, they are not on Spotify or any other streaming platforms. There are a few songs on YouTube, but the audio and video quality may vary. I'm afraid that, if you want to hear The Bandits' fabulous 2003 album And They Walked Away, you will have to order a second hand CD. I know. I know.
It's worth it, though. Listen to songs like Standing Under and Numbers and you'll swear you're hearing unreleased Coral songs. Wake Them at Sunrise is a better Zutons song than The Zutons ever managed to record. Listen to Once Upon The Time and you'll insist it's a forgotten La's demo. Yeah.
And my chosen track for this feature, Take It and Run, is an effortlessly uplifting jangly open road shanty that could help keep the spirits up even in the midst of a distressing yet delicious Donner Party situation.
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - Pretty As a Bee
As its title suggests, Gorky's 2001 album How I Long To Feel That Summer In My Heart was made for the warmer months. In 2000, they released a bucolic mini album, The Blue Trees, which features such pastoral delights as This Summer's Been Good From The Start and Face Like Summer. And of course, we all remember 1997's Patio Song, which opens with a cheerful "Well isn't it a lovely day."
So Gorky's already had this season covered. But when we saw them in 2004, on a co-headline tour with Yo La Tengo, they were playing songs from the previous year's Sleep/Holiday. Alas, it would prove to be their final album, but they went out with a sparkle and a shimmer.
Pretty As A Bee was the highpoint of their set, and it's the hottest part of the album too. It's nearly 10 minutes long, and for the majority of its runtime the song hovers in place, content just to be. A lone organ buzzes and floats like the titular pollinator. Bass notes ponder, guitar notes bend, cymbals hiss, and the vocals seem hesitant and half-asleep. Yet eventually the song broadens and brightens as if the Sun has appeared from behind a cloud to illuminate the meadows, and we finally see that the world is humming with life.
Super Furry Animals - Liberty Belle
For me, no album sums up that great summer of intensely warming music better than Super Furry Animals' Phantom Power. Right at the start there's a friendly invitation for sunshine to "come into my life" (in a song that features a rare use of the term "minger"), and every subsequent track has a hazy, pinkish, purplish, orangey glow to it, like a sunset that paints the whole sky above a futuristic utopian cityscape.
Liberty Belle is especially miraculous. After hundreds and hundreds of listens, I still have no idea just what exactly it's about. It seems to concern a global journey that takes in Galilei, Anglesey, Tallahassee, Abu Dhabi, and New York City - a careful voyage, you'll notice, to destinations that rhyme with each other. En route, we pause to consider the smoking habits of New Jersey youths, the mortality of birds, and holes deep enough to reach hell.
But what does it all mean? The thing is, by the time you get to that chorus, with its call and response "woo-woo!" vocals, you won't really care. You can still enjoy the journey, even if you don’t quite grasp the secrets of the universe.
When will these animals hear our cries for a new tour in which they play Rings Around The World and Phantom Power back-to-back, in full?
Grandaddy - Now It's On
When Grandaddy songs aren't about depressed alcoholic robots, they tend to be about depressed alcoholic miners and lumberjacks.
But Now It's On is different. It's an unashamedly positive ode to the importance of going outside, and seeing people. Because solipsism can be quite alienating, after all: "One you're outside you won't want to hide anymore."
And beyond the intentionally off-putting intro - an anxious symphony for kazoo and broken machinery - this one's musically exuberant, with chugging guitars, orchestral stabs, and even a rootin’ tootin’ yelp of "woo-hoo!"
Fonda 500 - Bumble A Bumble B Bumble C Bumble D
Hull's Fonda 500 had a knack for creating fuzzy aural sunshine out of cheap synths, close harmonies, and 8-track home recording systems. Their third album, No 1 Hifi Hair, was released on Truck Records, and the band would play at many subsequent Truck Festivals until their retirement in 2023.
No 1 Hifi Hair is such a bright and radiant album that you might consider lining your ear canals with factor 50 before each listen. Songs like The Magic Sunshine Butterfly and The Colours and the Birdsong Are One And The Same are just as fun as their titles suggest. Yet in Bumble A Bumble B Bumble C Bumble D, I feel Fonda 500 perfectly captured the sound of the English countryside at its thriving, bumbling best.
It's a rather straightforward arrangement for acoustic guitar, xylophone, and keyboard, with what sounds like a primary school recorder class playing the lead melody. And it's one of those melodies that's so simple, yet so catchy, that it feels like it's existed forever.
An innocent, purely delightful song for a wholesome occasion such as a hedgehog's wedding, or a sunflower's birthday party.
Elbow - Fallen Angel
Elbow's 2001 debut Asleep In The Back evoked drizzly nocturnal streets illuminated in sickly yellow by the sodium vapour lights. It was the soundtrack to a dark night of the soul, and to the hungover morning after the terrible night before. It's ace.
But too much gloominess can get you down. Which might be why, on the very first track on their 2003 follow-up, Guy Garvey proclaimed his intention to "pull my ribs apart and let the sun inside."
Cast of Thousands is an overall happier, more upbeat album. And Fallen Angel is the happiest, most upbeat song from the set. It opens with a cry of joy before the pounding drums and crunchy guitars fill the room with so much light you can watch the motes dancing in the rays. For this is a song about dancing yourself happy: "Choose your favourite shoes and keep your blues on cruise control!" Yeah!
Relive The Gloriously Summery Sounds of 2003, Today!
I have made a playlist of around 60 songs that I think have that lovely, warm, inviting, summery 2003 sound.
Originally I thought about including songs that were "2003 adjacent". For example, R.E.M.'s Imitation of Life feels like a 2003 song, even though it came out in 2001. And any song from The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots would feel right at home here, even though that album was released the previous year.
But no, I've been strict. It had to have been released in 2003. But even then, this seam was significantly richer than I could possibly have imagined: