This is Pop Essays, our weekly dive back into the hidden gems of our music library that gives lesser starred bangers their rightful chance to shine. This week, we head back to this very week ten years ago, to when a long time favourite of ours was launching a brand new album…
- Artist: Olly Murs
- Song: You Don’t Know Love
- Released: 08/07/2016
- Writers / Producers: Olly Murs / Camille Purcell / Wayne Hector / Steve Robson
- Highest UK Chart Position: #15
- Chart Run: 23 – 34 – 30 – 32 – 35 – 19 – 31 – 27 – 15 – 18 – 18 – 26 – 30 – 35 – 39 – 48 – 83 – 91 – 62 – 70 – 91 – 95
Back when Olly Murs released his most recent album, Knees Up, in November last year, even I, having reviewed the album on these very pages, was quite unprepared for the scale of the visceral and caustic online reaction it was to be met with, a situation that was entirely at odds with the album itself. Said hostility was largely driven by TikTok trolls out for a cheap shot, and online gossip sites turning their bile into an article for click bait, to such an extent that I was even getting hateful direct messages from said trolls, one of which proclaimed me to be a “biased, horrendous journalist”.
I have been called many things worse than that in the past two decades I’ve been writing and talking about pop music online (indeed, I’m flattered that I was even referred to as a journalist). But the tone with which said vitriol was delivered as a drive-by shooting into my DMs did seem to underline one thing, especially in the worrying “rage content” landscape of the Internet as it is today.
Namely, that once anyone in the public eye, but particularly in music, is targeted as the tall poppy to cut down to size, everything else – their previous achievements, their accolades, nay, their whole reputation – seems to be cast aside and the narrative is established that they are fair game to be turned into a figure of wrath, pillory and ridicule, no matter what they say or do to the contrary.
That’s not to say that no artist should be above constructive criticism or rightful taking to task, say, when they release music that’s not on par with their best, or when they behave in certain unacceptable ways. Indeed, in some cases, it is warranted to a degree. It is why, for example, certain now disgraced hip hop stars that we won’t name, who had a former multi-week presence at number one in the late 90s and early 00s, now results in whole months of TOTP reruns being skipped over on Friday nights on BBC Four, and why the Sabrina Carpenters of today could likely be the Katy Perrys of tomorrow. But as with everything connected to today’s interminably online world, it is far too often delivered at such disproportionate extremes to artists that it becomes hard for nuance to be heard.
And, as we’ve seen in certain instances in recent times – such as that of Liam Payne – said actions can sometimes have a contributory factor in ending in tragic consequences, where there is little to no recourse for those who played a part in such heightened bad feeling prevailing around the artist in question, brushed under an artificial carpet of insincere platitudes and preaching of kindness that was never forthcoming from the ring leaders of such opprobrium in the first place.
Fortunately, for Olly, now happily married and as a dad to two kids, he has a solid family base and support around him, which does offer a degree of grounding, and other successful career avenues he has pursued such as being a coach for several successful seasons on The Voice, or presenting with Mark Wright on Heart Radio on Saturday mornings, not to mention that his 15 Years of Hits anniversary tour of arenas last year was yet another nationwide sellout, firmly underlining that he still has a loyal following. But it does beg the question regardless of how it has got to a stage where suddenly, for some, his music career of late has become the thing to knock him over the head with continually, which has played even a small factor in him releasing his least commercially successful album to date, and which is now certain to be the only one not to be extensively toured or promoted as his others have.
For this, we have to set the wayback machine to eleven years prior. In the spring of 2015, Olly was still one of the UK’s most successful male solo artists of that moment, not just at home but also in Europe, Australia and Asia. His fourth album, Never Been Better, had been another platinum selling chart topper, he was still getting top 10 hits with regularity, and the accompanying UK and European arena tour for the album was another sellout success. And overall, he was still largely well thought of, not just by his audience but by the media too.
Then came an invite for him to return, along with his TV wife Caroline Flack, to The X Factor, where they had previously hosted its irreverent spin off show, The Xtra Factor, for two well received years between 2011 and 2012. On paper, this was a dream team reunion, not least of all because it was the show that had launched him six years previously. Except this time, they would be hosting the main show, following Dermot O’Leary’s then departure (albeit temporarily, as it turned out) from the series.
Alongside a revived judging panel, consisting of Simon Cowell, Cheryl, Rita Ora and then BBC Radio 1 DJ and presenter Nick Grimshaw, trailers for the show proclaimed that the revived format was, in its twelfth series, “The New Generation”. Except that what was meant to be on paper turned out to be anything but in practice.
Admittedly, The X Factor in 2015 was a different beast to its golden years prior, as it was, by now, well into the throes of its downward trajectory of shedding viewers annually and losing cultural and ultimately commercial relevance with its audience. And it also had much bigger problems contributing to its downfall that needed addressing (the never ending focus on so-called controversial ‘twists’, such as the truly cruel Six Chair Challenge, for one, being a thing. Whoever signed that idea off needed their head examined). But even with a revived lineup of presenters and judges, the show and anyone connected to it just couldn’t catch a break.
And Olly and Caroline – arguably more so the latter, as we all tragically saw with her passing by suicide in 2020 – took the very brunt of viewers and critics’ bile, culminating in one of the result shows where Olly accidentally announced that one contestant was being voted off in deadlock when it was actually another contestant. The resulting social media and press pile on calling for both him and Caroline to be sacked was as inevitable as it was disproportionate.
It was no surprise therefore when it was quietly – almost tersely – announced the following February 2016 that neither were returning to host the next year’s series. At the same time he had been hosting that series of The X Factor, Olly’s music was still very much active, with a repacked edition of the Never Been Better album being released in time for Christmas that year, complete with a live DVD and four brand new songs.
One of them was its main single, and that was “Kiss Me“. Co-written by Taio Cruz, it was a slinky, 80s soul inspired groover, very different from anything he’d released before as a single. It had fallen short of the top 10, eventually settling at its peak of #11 following the repacked album’s release, which helped return it to the top 10 of the album chart in the run up to the festive season. But it was also a single that tentatively informed the route his next album would go in, and a progression to a more mature sound and style.
Of course, it is fanciful at best to draw any real correlations between one single missing the top 10 and a panned stint presenting what was still one of the country’s biggest primetime shiny floor TV shows; he had had singles miss the top 10 or in some cases top 20 altogether before but these were by and large third or fourth singles off an album which still performed respectably enough sales wise if not in chart position. But there was little disputing that the resulting backlash from his time hosting The X Factor was the first real blot on Olly’s copybook, and one which needed swift damage limitation in order to not jeopardise his future success.
Hence much of the earlier half of 2016 was intentionally spent out of the public eye, as a means to letting the whole storm in a teacup of the previous autumn die down. All the while, he set to work in both the UK and America working on what would become his fifth studio album, 24 HRS. And when he launched it in July, it made a definitive statement that he was back – and fighting.
“You Don’t Know Love”, the first single, took “Kiss Me” as its sonic reference point and ran with it further. Co-written by Olly with two of his long time collaborators Steve Robson and Wayne Hector, as well as the then fledgling singer-songwriter Kamille, who had recently delivered number one hits for both The Saturdays (“What About Us”) and Little Mix (“Black Magic”, “Shout Out To My Ex”), it was one of those songs that could only ever have been the first single off the album.
It wasn’t another uptempo, cheeky floorfiller like “Dance With Me Tonight”, “Troublemaker” or “Wrapped Up”. It instead marked a firm change in direction and was a slick, cool and brooding slice of electropop with a slight feel of R&B. Written, as much of the 24 HRS album was, following a well publicised breakup with his then girlfriend, “You Don’t Know Love” doesn’t pull any punches lyrically: “I don’t wanna be your lover / I don’t wanna be your fool / Pick me up whenever you want it / Throw me down when you’re through / Cause I’ve learned more from what’s missing / It’s about me and not about you / I know I made some bad decisions / But my last one was you”.
It’s composed in such a way that as the synths get more menomic and glacial sounding, so too does it lift from the bridge onto the chorus: “Thanks to you I know lies, lies, lies / How it feels when love dies, dies, dies / And you told me goodbye, bye, bye / Hard to know when it’s over, when it’s over / You don’t know love till it / Tears up your heart and cuts in it / Leaves you with scars you’re still feeling / You don’t know love, you don’t know love”.
It’s quite a graphic and exposing lyric, but one that captures the pain and helplessly morbid feeling of heartbreak and spurned love so well that oftentimes is more difficult to capture in pop music than any other emotion. Such an intense and moody sounding song required an equally suitable video, which it got in the form of Charles Mehling’s promo for it that is by some distance one of Olly’s best.
Filmed entirely in black and white in Las Vegas, it follows a dejected, heartbroken Olly waking up alone in a cheap motel room, leaving via the casino wearing only his clothes from the night before, pawning in his watch and valuables for cash, and setting off down the desert highway in a classic convertible that then breaks down at the roadside, and is intercut with a dream sequence of him plunging into the sea and swimming to a shoreline embracing the mystery woman and erstwhile love interest referred to in the song.
It is a visual homage to the memorable promo for Chris Isaak’s 1989 classic “Wicked Game”, but is shot in a way that it feels less of a wholesale lift of that video and more of a respectful nod to the work of that video’s director, renowned fashion photographer Herb Ritts, in terms of how it is shot and lit and the more sensual, intense yet cinematic feel as a result.
In terms of airplay, both single and video were top of both radio and video charts for much of that mid-late summer, with Olly spending three weeks at the top of the radio airplay rankings. As for its commercial performance, this was a little trickier to quantify. This was the same summer when the Official Charts Company’s introduction of streaming into chart data from services such as Spotify and Apple Music two years prior was starting to have more of a pronounced effect.
The most obvious beneficiary of a more streaming weighted chart was Canadian rapper Drake, whose positioning on the services’ generic “Today’s Top Hits” type playlists meant he a spent near chart-buggering 15 weeks at number one (most of those weeks by default) with “One Dance”, failing by just one week to match the record set by Bryan Adams in 1991 with “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” (but which will likely be matched if not usurped in the next week or two, at time of writing, by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean with “Rein Me In”).
This was also the first proper album campaign of Olly’s since the new global release day of Friday was bought in and which has remained industry standard ever since, where singles will now get released at the same time they get their first ever airplay, which thus upended the previous promo structure of first radio play some six or seven weeks before the single’s official release.
What this meant was an initial chart entry of #23, followed by a good seven – eight weeks of yo-yoing around the top 30, before a discount on iTunes to 59p timed with a performance on the launch show of that year’s series of Strictly Come Dancing saw it settle at its peak of #15 on its ninth week in the chart. Whilst his pure sales were still strong (it would have been top 10 without streaming), his apparent rejection by the Spotify crowd was dragging his chart positions lower down. If the commercial performance of “Kiss Me” had caused a furrowed eyebrow, then for Sony Music, his label since his debut, this was where panic probably set in. Despite its eventual sales reaching 600k, putting it amongst his top 10 biggest selling singles, this was the first time a lead single off a new album from Olly had missed the top 10 altogether.
Their response was to immediately – and foolishly – backtrack on the new, more mature sound Olly had established, and bring out “Grow Up” as the second single, a song which, even with a more light-hearted video featuring a cast of kids, sounded like the sort of track he could have released in his sleep on the first or second album, and which saw an even lower peak of #25 that October.
The actual planned second single, “Years and Years”, was instead pushed back to December as the third single, but only got as high as #83, and the fourth single, a remixed version of “Unpredictable” featuring Louisa Johnson, winner of that ill-fated series of The X Factor that Olly had hosted, scraped in at #32 in June 2017.
And whilst 24 HRS did still charge in to the top of the album chart that November – it was his fourth consecutive album to reach number one – and got him on another sold out arena tour, it sold much less than the albums prior, and was on the album chart for less than half a year, exiting the top 100 in April 2017 after 22 weeks.
The net effect of this was that outlets such as Radio 1 subsequently dropped airplay support for him on the next album, 2018’s hybrid studio album / greatest hits package You Know I Know, and which saw him part ways with Sony after its release and peak of #2. At time of writing in July 2026, he has now gone 9 years without a top 40 hit, and even longer without a single reaching the top 10, let alone number one.
True, no artist goes on being at the top of their game with new material commercially and popularity wise forever; tastes change and times move on. But when one considers that most of the time these days, it is hard to find any mention of Olly anywhere online without general derision or focus on tabloid or social media induced scuffles, is it any wonder that his music and contribution to British pop in the last 15 years hasn’t been given its long overdue respect and recognition? Because, biased and horrendous we may be for saying it, he deserves it – and “You Don’t Know Love” is but one case in point as to why.
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The Niche Reference 