Chicane's "No Ordinary Morning" Is the National Anthem of Love That the UK Deserves

Every so often, we like to let a writer let loose. Really let loose. Sometimes a song, or an album, or a mix, or a video, or a record sleeve, becomes an indelible part of one's interior life. It lives with you, lives inside you, takes on meaning far beyond what it literally is. In the following article John Calvert waxes lyrical about a record he likes to think of as a new national anthem — an anthem, he calls it, for love. It's a meditation on love and loss and identity and self-reproach and regret and chillout music.

To me the best love songs sound how love feels, or rather how I've always imagined love, which to this day eludes me: all that wonder, the blinding motion of it all, the colours, the pain. Amongst this select group of my favourite love songs it is Chicane's staggeringly romantic "No Ordinary Morning" that triumphs. Not bad for an act whose main contribution to dance music was conflating monkey-basic pop trance and ethereal folk-rock.

The last kiss, the long goodbye, Nicholas Bracegirdle's elegiac post-rave torch song is, if you will, an anthem for love. A love anthem. And if there's one thing this island needs in this day and age of growing nationalism, religious paranoia and secret class war, is more love on the streets. Less Albanian-supplied, 85% powdered sheep-wool, more love.

I mean, not to be all like "War is, like, so bad" and "You know what I hate? Racism…", but seriously, for once in our nasty short and brutish lives us Brits need to put aside our dearly held withering irony and stylish nihilism and and be a bit more American about this. Like, I hate The Beatles as much as any card carrying post-punk addict, but seriously, when he wasn't beating the shit out his girlfriend, Lennon did have a point: Love really is all you need. It certainly is where I'm concerned, but as I'll explain, I'll probably have to make do with the anthem of love rather than the real thing.

My fondest 'No Ordinary Morning' memory involves my ex-girlfriend and a pissed, post-breakup kiss we shared one summer in Belfast.

As Chicane's ballad cast its all-enveloping spell — perfect flinty coke melting in my heart's chambers, honey through warm bread — I sat and I cradled her, she the infant Jesus and I the barbarian vision of sculpted heroism, on the beige carpet of my flat just as, you guessed it, the sun was coming up, shooting wild off Antrim's glens and across Belfast Lough, to flush orange-pink the skies overhead. A sunrise, perhaps, just like you'd see in the Balearics.

And it was so much like how I'd always imagined love to look, this moment. This, well, no ordinary morning. I mean Sam was drunk as a rum-squirrel, drooling a bit and for some reason fully clothed yet naked from the waist down, and essentially unconscious. But still.

Unfortunately, when a little while later we were consequently an item again I, of course, immediately recoiled at the first hint of anti-climax, along with the renewed intensity of Sam's affections, and duly finished it with her. Again. And that was the end of the whole sorry affair. If only.

So began the on-off Beta-male ego horror-cycle of begging and disposal. A month later i'm welling up on a nature trail on the grounds of Stormont estate, talking shit about fragile little animals and the hope I gave her and "crushing innocence itself" to my back-patting, slightly spooked big sister. Sam takes me back. Two months later i'm on the phone telling her I'd be a bad father anyway and taking her stuff back to her apartment when I know she's at work, then singing all the way home to, like, Arcade Fire, like a complete twat. Cut to August and I'm losing it again. I've developed an obsession for cancer blogs and YouTube street fights and am plotting the artistic connection between the news of Sam's new boyfriend and the Utoya Island massacre. I write Iliad-sized emails and win her back. By Christmas I am again 'not so sure', by January it's over. In March we're in love again after this one great night and I promise to never again leave her side and then I move to London.

I believe in love. And badly want it to for myself. Unfortunately, it just so happens i'm also a bit of a complete dickbag cuntface — a flaky, incurably shallow, emotional wank-clown who, consciously or not, uses women as bandaids for teen image trauma, just because 20 years ago the fit girls at school didn't fancy him, and who can't actually feel love.

Beware the guy with the honest face but a Pez-dispenser for a heart — he'll fuck you up faster than all the so-called 'bad boys' put together. You'll come out the other side with no answers, zero self-esteem, but compelled to blame yourself for everything in your rush to sanctify a sociopathic strawman who totally HATES himself for hurting you. Who clean HATES himself for being so complicated and damaged…and so damned interesting. He'll cry about stuff because he's sensitive, he'll be great with kids. He'll tell you you're beautiful every day and stroke your face with dandelion delicateness, kissing you like Bailey from Party Of Five. He'll be a great cook and he'll teach you indie music, and say interesting things, like "Did you know that Buddy Holly's "True Love Waits" is the greatest love song ever written?', because he's sensitive. He'll make you laugh in bed after sex in the soft light of endless Sunday mornings, and be into artsy music, like The Maccabees, but also play five-a-side football with his mates and be well good at talking to bouncers, outside smoking his Marlboro menthol. And then after he inevitably dumps your ass there'll you'll be defending him in the pub, some nothing Saturday afternoon, as your friends pretend they didn't think he was a total cock anyway. Such a free spirit, you'll tell them: he can't help what he is.

But here's the truth: whatever he thinks he is experiencing is not love but rather the high of some brief respite from those unrelenting feelings of inadequacy. Then he wonders why he gets bored with woman so quickly, but crumbles if they work that one out for themselves and leave. He tells you repeatedly he isn't good enough for you, and believe me he isn't. Because what you're looking at is only the imitation of a man.

Basically I'm Drake with an accent and a slightly stronger chin. Sam's time with me more or less resembles the plight of the Russian people circa 1917 through '45: a timeline of broken promises, creeping fear, paranoia, systematic dehumanisation and backbreaking attrition, only with more Beach House and some disappointing love-making. She's coming to stay with me in London next week. So once again I'll feed. The boy vampire too terrible for loneliness.

This is why I need an national anthem of love probably more than most, because what else do you do when, like skin cancer or car crashes, love is just something that happens to other people but get by with secondhand-smoking the fumes of love's fantasies, as lived and then relived by musicians. And of these there are none so forgiving, so momentarily, mercifully erasing, of my emotional deficiencies, of the sore shameful reality of my faint core, as Chicane's "No Ordinary Morning". I get to hide in the synths' deep, efflorescent tenderness, which is the very sound of love as you remember it after the fact — nostalgically sweet, incorruptible like a perfect memory, mythical, grand but in the end illusory and horribly sad — and pretend that I am capable of any of these things without the aid of a time machine and a shitload of cutting edge therapy.

Everything makes sense, becomes solid and clear, symmetrical, and one under the light of the songs pure heart, dissolving the cords of my stuck head. The narrator has fallen foul of Pez-dispenser boy, left wondering what the hell changed as he slips inevitably from her grasp — that terrible moment when you realise he is bored of you. "Leaving the thought of us behind / Is there no light in your heart for me? she asks "You've closed your eyes, you don't longer see" For the duration of the song it's like she forgives me for what Sam should not.

Please don't think that my choice of "No Ordinary Morning" is some kind of absurdist semi-ironic jape; a bit like when madcap Twitter dadaists campaigning for, like, Dyewitness' "If Only If I Had One More" or The Specials "Free Nelson Mandela" to be Christmas number one. I'm serious here. Co-written by Bracegirdle, publisher supremo Ray "Madman" Hedges (Take That, Dizzee Rascal, Boy George, Ronan Keating) and hotshot songwriter/vocalist Tracy Ackerman (Will Young, Celine Dion, Kylie, S Club 7), amongst others, "No Ordinary Morning" actually does possess all the sonic characteristics of an anthem, albeit a semi-danceable, totally gorgeous one originally designed to anaesthetise stricken ravers on San Antonio beach.

Seriously. Think about it. For starters, consider the fact that with some slight adjustments in wording, Ackerman's vocals wouldn't look out of place in any churchy anthem. How the measured, matter of fact delivery merely telling it like it is in plain terms, without one iota of resentment or histrionics is as dignified the strangely ordered, almost staccato flow of her words — not so much sung as recited. Add to that the very anthem-like inspirational imagery she uses of changing tides and the skies over paradise.

There's the almost bass-region synths: an anthem's swelling brass section, keening strings, booming church organ and choir all in the shape of one lushly harmonic, monolithic, utterly beautiful synth preset. Yet more stirring emotional gravitas is provided by the songs prayerful, soaring chord progressions — not unlike the progressions of say a "Highland Cathedral" or an "Eternal Father, Strong To Save." Then as for military drums, how about the strident march of slowed down, titanically reverb-ed breakbeats, which in my mind on "No Ordinary Morning" convey as much stoic defiance, moral authority and sense of solidarity as any 50-piece Celtic pipe band.

The only difference in "No Ordinary Morning" is that rather than nationhood, allegiance or honour, it is instead love we go to war for. Tracy is beaten — he is gone forever and yet still she can't forget the something or other in his eyes that leaves her "helpless and paralysed". But I always hear a subtext to her remorse; an avowal to fight again another day, for love, because if there's anything worth fighting for, worth believing in, it's that. Corny stuff, you say? Yeah well fuck off. Remember the words of Miles Davis: "Don't be so hip, man" as Davis' once told the avant jazz set who criticised his love of be-bop.

But there's another reason why I think "No Ordinary Morning" should be our new national anthem, and that reason is rave. "No Ordinary Morning" is a semi-distant descendent of the beats'n'bliss balladry of post-rave Britain that totally overlooked strain of rave-influenced pop, often multicultural-British in content and personnel, which emerged in the early 90s, yielding some completely unique pop-moments; tracks like The Beloved's "Sweet Harmony", and Adamski's "Killer". But in "No Ordinary Moment" beats'n'bliss met turn of the century Balearic chillout — a genre which, despite the derision it faced within the dance community for being well…undanceable, served as a fitting and natural conclusion to the British rave narrative (the first wave from '88-2000). The warmly elegiac lullabies of Belareic chill-out were the sun bringing to an end rave's night of nights, as dance music 1.0. passed into history, ending where it began on the shores of the white isle. Chill-out was what remains of rave music after all the dancing is done. In a word, love.

Put these two factors together and "No Ordinary Morning" begins to sound to me like a farewell to not only Tracy's beloved, but our collective beloved - rave itself. Specifically rave-era Britain, which along with rave the phenomenon was the UK at its most lovely. Lovely is understating it - it was Britain at it's most beautiful, positive, outright good, in the good versus evil sense of the word. If anthems are a way of reasserting, of venerating, a nation's set of principles, of sentimentalising a time in a country's history when it was at it's most glorious, then in a perfect world it'd be the rave principle that we venerate, and the rave era we sentimentalise. A Britain where for seven or so years it was the kids who were in charge, who for a time owned the country atop a something good and great, a cultural energy flash as Simon Reynolds called it, a mighty bang that shook the country and shot fires up the hierarchies, so futuristic and unprecedented that the rock and roll generation, the ravers parents, just could not understand, left playing catch up with a youth quake that whooped their fraudulent hippy movement so bad for gender equality, egalitarianism, altruism, bonhomie, iconoclasm, optimism, leftist purity, and anti-commercialism it was almost embarrassing, until confusion in the establishment turned to fear and fear to moral hysteria and a bamboozled class resorted to extreme measures in 1994 with the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. A Britain where the left fought the right wing backlash with love and dancing; when, just as Thatcher's no-society society was in full and terrible flight all the while unbeknownst to the establishment, togetherness and community flourished among the under 25s. The real summer of love, just when love was what was needed and almost radical - in the 80s. A classless, colourblind Britain, north and south united, where the drug and the house beat taught the thugs to dance and the pleasant to feel, from jungle London to acid Manchester, where for a time our grey skies were painted day-go, when we were all of us children, back when Britain still had some innocence to spare, and our heroes were each other, not the rock stars, nor the royals, nor statesmen. Where the British underground dispensed with the existential and started existing. This is the Britain I'd stand up for at footy matches, as much as for my own personal salvation as this country's: the big earnest pretty one free of all irony and hatred. I await that no ordinary morning when love returns to the shores of this churning island.

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