‘Love U More’s a track with quite the tale to tell, and one as underdog-compelling as any of its era. Its path to the anthem status it finally enjoyed was – to say the least – uphill, and with enough challenging circumstances to sink any track today.
Released three decades ago, and straight into the headwind of the UK’s rave scene, ‘Love U More’ was proto-trance in instinct, housey in remix-realisation and six short months ahead of its time. That was just enough to see it miss its zeitgeist moment but was only the start of the hurdles it had to clear. The subject of a quiet boycott by radio stations (due to the environmentally leaning lyrics (“let the redwoods die, as the wells run dry”, and others), audience awareness was staggered. To add to its woes, it was then quickly eclipsed by the flash success of the band’s follow up, ‘Perfect Motion’.
That really should have been that for ‘Love U More’, however thanks to one fortuitous and highly prominent TV spot, it still reached Top 40s on both sides of the Atlantic. To some then (and Solarstone being very much one of them), ‘Love U More’ was embedded as the first and the finest of Sunscreem’s canon. Three decades on, he still cites it as one of his all-time-top-5 tracks and (until the summer of 2021 anyway) it rode high on his remix bucket-list.
As has been the case for Solarstone and ‘Love U More’, it can sometimes take a generation for track & remixer to align. Richard finally managed to obtain the necessary nods to work on it, aided in no small part by his previous connection with lead singer Lucia Holm (who sang on the ‘Touchstone’ LP’s ‘The Last Defeat’). What he has ultimately arrived with though is something less a traditional remix and more a rephrasing of the song’s meaning.
With his Pure Mix, he’s upped the tempo and energy, drawing out (and adding extra spotlight to) the halcyon vocals in the break. With rare access to Sunscreem’s original stems, through intricate studio layering, he’s managed to subtly shift Lucia’s points of lyrical emphasis. Levelling out the lament and upping – just a touch – the optimism of its chorus, the result is a song you know, but topically refreshed in the most hopeful of fashions.