Pure

With an intoxicating melody and intimate lyrics about shooting stars around your heart, you might hear this as a "pure" love song, but that's not the case. Chief Lightning Seed Ian Broudie explained to The Guardian May 1, 2009 that Lightning Seeds records have often blurred melancholy and euphoria. For instance, this apparently cheerful song was actually saying: "These moments can't last." He added: "It's the opposite of 'Live Forever.' I can't be described as a happy person, but I'm certainly not morose."

Ian Broudie started out doing production work for the likes of Echo & The Bunnymen (the albums Porcupine in 1983 and Ocean Rain in 1984) and The Fall (I Am Kurious Oranj in 1988) before making music on his own in his home studio. "Pure" was the first song he finished on his own and his first single, but at first he tried to bury it. In a Songfacts interview with Broudie, he explained how before he tracked his vocal, he wrote out the lyric and decided it had way too many words. He cut some out and recorded the song, but he still thought it was far too wordy and needed more work. His engineer saved the recording on a Digital Audio Tape (DAT) for reference, but that recording ended up on a demo Broudie sent to an industry type, a "kind of a '60s, cigar-smoking music biz guy." This guy called Broudie back, very excited about the song "Pure," which Ian didn't want him to hear because he didn't think it was finished. "I thought, Oh no, It's not on the album. I haven't finished that!," Broudie said. "I said, 'No, no' and he said, 'Yes, yes.' He said, 'That's the track. Let's put it out.'" Broudie agreed to release the song, but there was another obstacle: he didn't have a record deal. His new industry friend had a solution: They would press 500 copies of the song and release it on the indie label Rough Trade. They'd also send promotional copies to radio stations to try to get it some airplay. Once the song was out there in the summer of 1989, it quickly picked up speed and they had to keep pressing more copies. The influential BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel started playing it, and other stations followed suit. Peel's American counterpart, Rodney Biggenheimer of the Los Angeles radio station KROQ, got a hold of an imported copy and started playing it, and the song found its way to college radio stations throughout California. The Lightning Seeds earned an album deal and released Cloudcuckooland in January 1990, with "Pure" on the tracklist and other songs Broudie recorded at his home studio. Lightning Seeds released four more albums in the '90s, scoring a #1 UK hit in 1996 with "Three Lions," and ode to England's national soccer team.

"Pure" reached it's UK chart peak in August 1989 when it went to #16. In America, it was a slower climb because the song wasn't released there until 1990. It landed at #31 in July 1990, and ended up being The Lightning Seeds' only Top 40 hit in the US.