I’d never seen or heard this until I saw it on MTV 2 (which I’d recently seen for the first time on a new Sky Digickal box) at about 2:30am on Sunday February 25th, 2001. I was fucking hypnotised by it and I still am.
Orbital - Halcyon
I immediately pressed record on a blank VHS video cassette, which I had bought specifically to record music off MTV 2 late at night and got about nine minutes of the total eleven recorded (9/11). I thought to myself "it sounds like that song “It’s Going To Be A Fine Night Tonight, It’s Going To Be A Fine Day Tomorrow”.
Immediately afterwards they played “It’s A Fine Day” by Opus III, which is that song. This was quite logical as these tracks had the same singer, Kirsty Hawkshaw, the daughter of TV theme composing legend Alan Hawkshaw (he did the Channel 4 News theme), singing essentially the same tune in each, and Kirsty features in both videos, though she looks very different in each of them. I could never remember whether it was Opus III or Opus II, because the first girl I ever fell in love with liked that song and used to joke about whether there was an Opus II as well as an Opus III.
There’s a music shop on High Street in Galway called Opus II which opened in 2001 and I recently (about eight months ago) bought a guitar case there.