The Big Success of ‘Big Calm’.
Morcheeba’s first studio album was the Trippy sounding, ‘Who Can You Trust’ in 1996. It did not fair particularly well in the charts but it certainly brought them a much larger following. Several of the tracks got quite a bit of airplay and Skye Edwards was noted by critics for her dreamy voice. However, their finest moment came in 1997 when they followed up their debut with ‘Big Calm’.
This time Morcheeba went into the studio with far more experience. ‘Who Can You Trust’ had been very good but it had sounded a little too plain in parts. With this second record they changed all that.
Compared to its predecessor, ‘Big Calm’ was a lot more mainstream; but that was okay because it still wasn’t too mainstream. Several of the tracks on this album were very catchy and they were often used as background music on television. One song in particular, ‘By the Sea’ really seemed to hit a nerve with many people and it still crops up on holiday programmes even now.
Each of the album’s 11 songs is really cleverly recorded and the production is lovely and crisp. With the track, ‘Over and Over’ Skye Edwards showed us all what a perfectly pitched voice she had for singing Jazz. The final song, ‘Big Calm’ is an amazingly good piece of music with the vocals of Rapper Nosaj the Great, some superb record scratching and a really meaty bass line.
For me, the great shame of it all is that Morcheeba went on to change their style rather dramatically. They turned their backs on their Trip-Hop roots and went storming towards the Pop scene. This resulted in them turning into a modern day ‘M People’ and losing a large amount of their fans in this ‘Part of the Process’…
On a rather unrelated note, I need to tell you about the most amazing day that I have just had at work. Those people at the top decided to have a team building day to do some Soft skills training. We all just broke off into teams and played a whole bunch of Impro games, you should have seen it, we even managed to break Ellen out of her shell!