Air: Moon Safari

When the social history of the brief British affair with café-bars is written, I think it will be found to be coterminous with the popularity of Moon Safari.

I can't remember when I was last in a café-bar. I meet friends in proper pubs again now. But there was a period — roughly 1999-2004 — when spending time in café-bars seemed unavoidable. And when you were in one, Moon Safari was equally unavoidable. It rapidly became a cliché, but continued nevertheless. As late as 2004 it seemed to be on continuous loop in the Showroom café-bar. I had words with the management about the need to move on, but to no effect.

In hindsight the embrace of continental drinking spaces and continental lushpop was, paradoxically, a symptom of the Cool Britannia times — confident enough of our own cultural identity to borrow from Europeans (still a term that referred to them, not us), while keeping our traditional pissy lager and overroasted espresso.

Air were one of the two acts I discovered in the office. While Gill introduced me to David Holmes, Jon was the first to play Moon Safari on the office CD-radio boombox.

Nowadays its ubiquity has made it as familiar as an old friend, sitting alongside Zero 7 and Lemon Jelly. But it's better, and more original, than that. On the that first listening, I was charmed, bemused and a little disconcerted by the range of references. Like, haven't those string sections been arranged and produced au ELO? Did they really like all those retro styles, or whether they were — as they say in France — just 'aving a larf?

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Comments

[Fred Stagg]

How come you changed this entry?

[David]

Sorry for the confusion, but actually I didn't change it. What happened was that I published two posts within a minute of each other, and the second one (which was supposed to be published today, Thursday, and is now published today) overwrote this one. That's because this blog template only really works with a maximum of one post per day.

So, nothing has been tampered with, everything is now properly arranged, and as it should be. But sorry again for the confusion caused by my inept configuration of one post.