Songfacts®:

• With an intoxicating melody and intimate lyrics about shooting stars around your heart, you might hear this as a "pure" love song, but that's not the case. Chief Lightning Seed Ian Broudie explained to The Guardian May 1, 2009 that Lightning Seeds records have often blurred melancholy and euphoria. For instance, this apparently cheerful song was actually saying: "These moments can't last." He added: "It's the opposite of 'Live Forever.' I can't be described as a happy person, but I'm certainly not morose."
• Ian Broudie started out doing production work for the likes of Echo & The Bunnymen (the albums Porcupine in 1983 and Ocean Rain in 1984) and The Fall (I Am Kurious Oranj in 1988) before making music on his own in his home studio. "Pure" was the first song he finished on his own and his first single, but at first he tried to bury it. In a Songfacts interview with Broudie, he explained how before he tracked his vocal, he wrote out the lyric and decided it had way too many words. He cut some out and recorded the song, but he still thought it was far too wordy and needed more work. His engineer saved the recording on a Digital Audio Tape (DAT) for reference, but that recording ended up on a demo Broudie sent to an industry type, a "kind of a '60s, cigar-smoking music biz guy."
  
  This guy called Broudie back, very excited about the song "Pure," which Ian didn't want him to hear because he didn't think it was finished.
  
  "I thought, Oh no, It's not on the album. I haven't finished that!," Broudie said. "I said, 'No, no' and he said, 'Yes, yes.' He said, 'That's the track. Let's put it out.'"
  
  Broudie agreed to release the song, but there was another obstacle: he didn't have a record deal. His new industry friend had a solution: They would press 500 copies of the song and release it on the indie label Rough Trade. They'd also send promotional copies to radio stations to try to get it some airplay.
  
  Once the song was out there in the summer of 1989, it quickly picked up speed and they had to keep pressing more copies. The influential BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel started playing it, and other stations followed suit. Peel's American counterpart, Rodney Biggenheimer of the Los Angeles radio station KROQ, got a hold of an imported copy and started playing it, and the song found its way to college radio stations throughout California.
  
  The Lightning Seeds earned an album deal and released Cloudcuckooland in January 1990, with "Pure" on the tracklist and other songs Broudie recorded at his home studio. Lightning Seeds released four more albums in the '90s, scoring a #1 UK hit in 1996 with "Three Lions," and ode to England's national soccer team.
• "Pure" reached it's UK chart peak in August 1989 when it went to #16. In America, it was a slower climb because the song wasn't released there until 1990. It landed at #31 in July 1990, and ended up being The Lightning Seeds' only Top 40 hit in the US.
• Broudie told Mojo magazine June 2009 that he sees this as "a psychedelic, hazy song, somewhere between "See Emily Play" and "Windmills Of Your Mind."
• Ian Broudie learned a lot from this song. "'Pure' was like a magical thing that changed my life," he told Songfacts. "It was a lesson to me. I hadn't finished it and I was so unconfident with that. So what I gained from that is, if you've got a good idea, however badly you do it, it will always be a good idea. If you haven't got a good idea, no matter how well you sing it, and whatever you do, it will never be a good idea. And that's been my mantra all the way through songwriting and my whole career."
  
  "I can sing now, but at the time, I honestly couldn't sing," he added. "But if you do it with good intentions and an idea, something might happen. So, that was my attitude."
• When Ian Broudie released this song, he did so using a band name because he anticipated putting a full band together at some point, figuring he'd need one for live appearances. He never really did: The Lightning Seeds (named for a line Broudie misheard in the Prince song "Raspberry Beret") remained a solo project, with Broudie filling in any gaps with various collaborators and session players.
• Regarding the album title, Cloudcuckooland, the phrase "to live in cloud-cuckoo land" means to have impractical ideas. The expression comes from the name Nephelokokkygia, suggested for the capital city of the birds in the air in The Birds by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes (d c380 BC).
  
  Broudie Tweeted that to him it means "an eccentric view which recognises endless possibilities with no boundaries."