Song 95: This Feeling

I heard this song again recently and I thought it juxtapozes pretty well with 'She's a Jar' by Wilco, the last song I wrote about, which came out in 1999. 'This Feeling' by Puressence was a single from mid-98. They were a Manchester band, and this was their most successful single, peaking at Number 33 in the UK charts. It had some, though not a vast amount of, airplay.

This Feeling

I remember hearing it on the radio a few times and I suspect maybe a flatmate owned the single, though I never did. The album received ok reviews but, back when money was scarcer and decisions on music were more weighted, not enough to tempt me to buy it.

I didn't hear the song again, I don't think, for close to decade but then, as often happened, in the age of downloads, you could suddenly go, oh yeah, I liked that song, that'll do for 79p. And I've listened to it now and then since then.

It's one of my favourite post-Britpop singles. I read a little interview with James Walsh, the lead singer of the much-maligned Starsailor, recently, and he good-naturedly pointed out that journalists now like to make out that it was all such a wasteland in those few years and everyone was just waiting around for the Strokes, but it wasn't like that at all. Whatever the legacy of the indie music of that time, a lot of it did do well and people were genuinely excited by it.

For my own part, though I see the likes of 'Deserter's Songs' and 'Summerteeth' (from 98 and 99) as major and lasting shifts in my music taste from Britpop to Americana, it's not like I wasn't listening to Ooberman, Ultrasound, Idlewild and whatever else.

Defining next-big-thing thinking in British music at that time, I reckon there was a sense of mashing together Oasis and Jeff Buckley. There were lots of attempts at epic ballads, there were big emotions. Travis and David Gray were the first things, then the apotheosis came with Coldplay, and the reckoning came with the aforementioned Starsailor.

And, in all of that, I reckon Puressence's 'This Feeling' was a very superior shot. It's formulaic, but it shakes and soars in all the right places. The voice is very good. It's a choirboy voice like Tom Chaplin from Keane but with far more oomph. In fact, it strikes me that I can imagine this being a Keane song - which I imagine is rightly offputting to most, but, still, in a way, is true.

I realise I haven't really sold this song, but it really defines an era for me, a messy student era when there was more going on than the history books tell us.