Yes here we are again with Part 3 of my review series.

 

We've lived through the 80s 80S No 2's and the 90s90S No 2's (well at least I did) and we find ourselves on Millennium morning in a new decade, and century.

 

I celebrated with a fireworks display on Brighton Beach and a very nasty hangover following a mysterious Karaoke competiton in a pub which I'm still not sure how I got involved with.

 

Anyway here's my thoughts and ramblings on the No 2's of the decade which you are free to add your thoughts on as we go along. I'll post when as and when I have time so we could be some time, but I'll try and do something every week at the very least, and looking through the list it actually looks just as ecclectic as the previous decades, and no-one will judge you for loving/ hating on these songs (privately I will but don't let that put you off :D )

 

Anyway here we go......

8TH JANUARY- YOU'RE MY NUMBER ONE/ TWO IN A MILLION- S Club 7 (1 wk)

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f1/TwoInAMillion(SClub).jpg

 

Well what a cheery way to start a decade! January was, and remains, a slow month when the record business generally has a long holiday, and the charts throw up anomolies. January 2000 was no exception, this song had been around for 3 weeks (an eternity by the turn around rates of 1999/2000) and had been the band's attempt at the Christmas No 1 for 99, a cheeky double A-Side and with Westlife at No 1 it was one of the few instances where the top 2 were both double A-Sides, anyway let's take them in turn.

 

"You're My Number One"- a serious attempt at apeing Motown going on here, chirpy, upbeat, full of teenage stomach churning sentimentality, you can almost see the acne erupting on their faces. It's very 1999 and has therefore aged much more than the flipside, I actually preferred this at the time probably due to the fact it was more club friendly.

 

"Two In A Million"- Actually not bad at all, a far more sophisticated piece of work than anything they had thus far produced. Naturally it has the winter warmth feeling tradionally associated with big Xmas hits, but without the cloyingly irritating over emoting that they became guilty of on later hits such as "Have You Ever" or Never Had A Dream Come True". It actually rather showcases Jo O'Meara's voice which can be like nails down a blackboard on occasion but here is rather more endearing. All in all much better than what was to come....oh yes!

 

 

22ND JANUARY- U KNOW WHAT'S UP- Donnell Jones (2 weeks)

 

http://ring.cdandlp.com/williams-records/photo_grande/115024430.jpg

 

There's always something far more authentic about US R N B isn't there? From the bump N Grinding of R Kelly compared to Mark Morrison and Craig David to Donnell Jones, you just know what the real deal is. I'm not an enormous fan of the genre but this is like silk, a vocal delivery that seems to glide over the percussion, OK there's nothing new here thematically, adn we shouldn't have too high hopes for a January release but I recall this was like a breath of fresh air in amongst those old hits hanging around with the stench of 1999 wafting off them.

 

Then again I recall it's always easirer to kinder to one hit wonders, he isn't but let's be honest can you name any of his other tracks?, as they never stick around to build apathy or hatred, but looking back I find this an innocent record, just a few years later it would be all ho's and beatches etc, and whilst this was certainly around in the 90s mainstream success for that kind of rap was still lacking in the charts, so this is perhaps a snapshot of rap's childhood but it became that ugly teenager?!

 

12TH FEBRUARY- ADELANTE- Sash! (1 wk)

 

http://991.com/gallery_180x180/Sash-Adelante-293226-991.jpg

 

Now the traditional way to view Sash is to say that the early work 1997 was fantastic then it was a clear progression downhill. I have to tend to disagree, I was never a fan of his 1997 work as you know with "Mysterious Times" shining out from his 90s ouput for me, THIS however I have a great love for. In a bizarre way it seems like a far more substantial piece of work from him, whether it's that deep growling spanish voiceover, or the chord progression which all seem to be rather dark and harrowing. Obviously it's not Wuthering Heights or anything but to look for that in a trance track is perhaps asking too much, but as with Alive Deejay in 1999 there is more going here than first meets the ear.

 

A glorious return to Tina Cousins was on the horizon for Sash next time out (another great track "Just Around The Hill") then it went rather tits up, but if asked back in 1997 whether or not he'd be making top 10 hits in 2000 I doubt many would have said yes, it's Feb already and I'm quite enjoying 2000 so far- there's a dark cloud on the horizon though, VERY dark indeed.

 

4TH MARCH- MOVIN TOO FAST- Artful Dodger Featuring Romina Johnson (1 wk)

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/81/MovinTooFast.jpg

 

I can't ever claim to have gotten garage/ dubstep/ 2 step or that kind of thing, and I've never to been to a club night where they play this kinda thing. Having said that I vastly preferred this back in 2000 to "Rewind" probably it's a much more straightforward pop song that the latter trick without the gimmicks and trendy pretensions that record had either. On reflection I have to confess this rather bores me. The vocals seem kinda pasted over the track and it plods along without ever really exploding, it also seems entirely like chart justice that it was beaten to No 1 by the william Orbit laced magic of "Pure Shores".

 

There seems little doubt that this sold, and is in this thread, as a result of the former single which had sold over half a million by this point, and as Craig David worked away in that studio on his debut album it seemed as though it would be the Artful Dodger who were destined to be the bigger stars, but after 7 top 20 hits the original pairing split in 2002.

 

25TH MARCH- ALL THE SMALL THINGS- Blink 182 (1 wk)

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/29/Blink-182_-_All_the_Small_Things_cover.jpg

 

Proving that a funny video will sometimes help considerably in the chart game, "All The Small Things" was undoubtedly the big breakthrough the band had sought since that first album back in 1994. Parodying some of the biggest teen acts around including Backstreet Boys, Five, Britney, Christina & Ricky Martin, it was clearly a sideswip at the bubblegum pop that had come to dominate the charts and the airwaves over the previous two years all bundles up into a three minute pop song.

 

For sentiment it's hard to be churlish about it, but for all that sophisticated mockery in the video, at heart, this is just a love song, and a pretty plain one at that, the lines "Late night, come home/ Work sucks, I know/ She left me roses by the stairs

/ Surprises let me know she cares" encapsulates the feeling nicely, this isn't that grand flush of feeling of either young or new love, but the comfyness of a long term relationship, and for all of the posturing (and even the medium of punkish rock they deal in) it a small tale of something very special indeed.

 

1ST APRIL- THE TIME IS NOW- Moloko (1 wk)

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1f/Moloko-the-time-is-now.jpg

 

As the Foo Fighters sang "I got another confession to make", this kinda passed me by at the time, but over the years I have come to LOVE this song. Sublime, sophisticated piece of pop, full of longing and latent desire with a lush piece of orchestration bubbling beneath the surface which erupts at regular intervals, serving only to re-inforce its lyrical theme. The overplayed "Sing It Back" from 1999 was probably a victim of timing, I recall it being played for a good 2 months before it bacame available and had it been released a month earlier I'm convinced it would probably gone to No 1, but not to worry I get to review this song instead.

 

Murphy's vocals are touch helium- esque on this but it's all so beautifully delivered we can glaze over that, in fact it reflects the songs emotional core to a tee, fragile, filled with thrill and excitement. Themes of carpe diem, emotional exhaustion, and obsession abound, it's a song that attempts to leap through the boundaries of ordinary everyday life and almost describe something ethereal, the emotional static that exists before the declaration of love before all is known. Now that all sounds rather grand I grant you but this is really a very rich song in meaning as well as in production, I recommend it without hesitation.

 

The Time Is Now is probably up there with the greatest #2's ever imo - a rare instance of the GBP having taste! ( I bought it the week it was released).

15TH APRIL- FLOWERS- Sweet Female Attitude (1 wk)

 

http://www.chartstats.com/images/artwork/17713.jpg

 

From such dizzy heights we come down with a bump with this. The only top 40 hit for this female garage duo. It isn't the worst song recorded but it gets very annoying, very quickly, and in the charts of 2000 which were full of this kind of thing it proved popular but as with all things so typical of a zeitgeist it has aged badly.

 

Full of vocal gimmickery it struggles to rise above the melee whcih is 2000 really and but for nostalgia I can honestly say I haven't listened to this since it was in the charts, listen if you will but I can promise you it won't be worth you're while.

 

Flowers was part of a 7 strong new entries in the top 10 iirc. Kept off by Craaaaaaaaaaaig David?

Flowers was part of a 7 strong new entries in the top 10 iirc. Kept off by Craaaaaaaaaaaig David?

Yes indeed, "all over ya" :o

3RD JUNE- REACH- S Club 7 (3 Wks)

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d6/Reach(SClub7).jpg

 

EVERYTHING about this record should make me love it, and I can't. "Reach" to me seems rather a shallow creation, hammy, and cheap in places with rather flat vocals, and I know lots of people love it, hey it hung around at No 2 for three weeks in the summer of 2000 (no mean feat given the high turnover) and was a big hit on both radio and a million gay clubs (approx figure) but it still leaves me cold.

 

Prior efforts like "Bring It All Back" were supurb and dazzling bits of pop (albeit manufactured) but here they sound like they are singing and smiling through the almost unbareable pain of the song. Maybe that's it- I just don't believe that they believe in the song, it's a catchy song no doubt, and smoothly produced it's like all the technical angles of the pop single are there and the marketing is excellent, but the product is just unloved by the band. I've always felt this way about the song and it does actually make me quite sad, even the fair hand of Cathy Dennis can't save it and normally she could do no wrong certainly in the early 00s....hey ho.

 

 

8TH JULY- GOTTA TELL YOU- Samantha Mumba (1 wk)

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/39/Samanthamumba-gotta.jpg

 

Now I loved this back in the day (yes I bought it), I recall my excitement when I discovered thanks to teletext that it was midweek No 1, and my surprise when the charts were announced on Sunday that it had failed. Sad times.

 

There's nothing that remarkable about the song, girl declairing her love for a guy, but it's quite an innocent pop song, one that you suspect just 12 years later would be out of place and almost niave in today's climate and that's the charm.

 

Sometimes pop tries to be too clever for it's own good and to produce a good solid piece of pop lasts longer than most of the "trendier" hits of the day- a few of which we'll see later on in the thread- hats off to Mumba, god bless her!

 

Barring Moloko, this is a pretty depressing read and brings back terrible memories of my final months at high school and exams. Sweet Female Attitude (or Sweet FA as I used to call them) were basically a pair of chavvy girls from Stockport (say no more...) and lived literally up the road from where I lived (barring Sarah Harding, it's the nearest the sad town will ever get to top the charts!). "Flowers" was fine for about a week and, like you said, got annoying VERY quickly. I think the 2-step UK garage sound of 2000 has aged very badly.

Edited February 23, 201213 yr by ScottyEm

The Time is Now was my single of 2000 I played it and played it and played it. I never thought I could kill it. I did. :(

2000 is def my favorite year, really liked all the #2s so far, especially Adelante, Flowers and Gotta Tell You.

5TH AUGUST- FREESTYLER- Bomfunk MC's (1 wk)

 

http://www.12inch.de/l/18297.jpg

 

Believe it or not, Finland had been a country not represented on a top 10 hit before 2000! It wasn't actually Bomfunk Mc's who broke that record but Darude some weeks before, but here we are with the first Finnish No 2 hit ever! Most chart followers would struggle to recall anything by this lot other than "Freestyler" which seems to be much more fondly recalled now that it ever was for a long time after its release, yet I suppose its easier to be kinder about acts that never outstayed their welcome. In a summer of Craig David (who held this off No 1) 2000 proved to be a golden year for dance and urban music, or at least it seems like it now, this song however I never classed as a favourite and personally nothing takes me back to 2k better than Spiller or Fragma for my sins.

 

Yes I was a skint student who literally down to the last £15 of my overdraft when I landed my first full time job (I worked before but always in the knowledge I'd return to studentdom sooner or later) and with earnt money I pretty much spent at least 3 or 4 nights a week out boozing in Brighton (one of the best places to be in the summer I can assure you), anyway I know I'm rambling but the point is that the hits of 2000 always take me back to a great time in my life even if I wasn't that big a fan of them, so I can't be too harsh of Bomfunk Mc's- they got lucky with timing!

 

26TH AUGUST- OUT OF YOUR MIND- Truesteppers and Dane Bowers Featuring Victoria Beckham (1 wk)

 

http://991.com/newGallery/Victoria-Beckham-Out-Of-Your-Mind-164108.jpg

 

Where to start with this one? Well she's only credited as a featured artist but let's be honest this is only in this thread as it featured Beckham. With a blaze of publicity not seen since the launch of Halliwell's solo career Beckham literally appeared everywhere in the weeks preceeding the release of this song, including a high profile performance with a clip-on lip ring and mimed track at the Radio One roadshow the week this song came out. All in all you can't fault her for trying, stories even circulated that she and David were snapping up copies themselves. True or not the track sold over 180k in its first 6 days comfortably the biggest sale of any No 2 hit that year outside of the Christmas weeks. Though leading all the way right up until Saturday it failed to pip Spiller to No 1, she was even announced as No 1 on "CD:UK" the most famous instance of the programme being wrong on that front.

 

What undid Beckham was the love-hate relationship she had with the press, whilst fascinated by the couple the coverage had been reported in such a way as to infere an air of desperation about the whole affair, Posh sitting at home constantly thinking of ways to get herself exposure to get a chart topping single, it was all quite, well, not British! Only by 2000 (chartwise) that's exactly what it had become about, top 10 hits were seen as failures and record companies seemed to be in cahoots about release schedules so that they could effectively "manage" the No 1 single between them, perhaps that's why, as the week wore on, more and more of us seemed to go to "team Spiller".

 

Anyway the record isn't the worst ever made and neither is it the best, it wouldn't have looked out of place in the pantheon of chart toppers for that year fusing dance and garage together at the hands of the Trusteppers who had scored their first top 10 hit earlier that year with Dane Bowers (again) who was fresh from Another Level, but as we've said they aren't the star here.

 

Take the fact that this IS Victoria Beckham out of the occasion and it's a reasonable low top 10 hit probably which would be largely forgotten by now, so perhaps fame (or notoriety) really is enough to get yourself remembered, well this is the decade of "Heat" after all.

 

16TH SEPTEMBER- SKY- Sonique (1 wk)

 

http://www.avatune.com/pics/0121583381.jpg

 

Sometimes you have to go abroad before the homeland finally gives you some recognition, that's the story here. "It Feels So Good" had barely scraped the top 40 back in 1998 when it was released and barely registered on the public consciousness for the former S Express member, but US success was around the corner as the track emerged from the clubs to make No 8 in early 2000. That was enough to prompt to a re-release and the single became the 3rd best seller of the year, and this is naturally the follow up.

 

With some penmanship from Rick Nowels ("Heaven Is A Place On Earth", "White Flag", "Life Is A Rollercoaster") she seems hell bent on that second chart topper and basically rehashed her previous hit into this one. It isn't bad but I suspect the great majority of the UK public would struggle to hum the tune to this and it plummeted quite quickly out of the charts. It's interesting however that whilst the tally of No 1's in 2000 was famously the highest ever (42) this is only the 12th No 2 of the year and we're in September already, explained obviously by the amount fo records that were falling to the position.

 

23RD SEPTEMBER- ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS- Kylie Minogue (1 wk)

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/33_on_a_night_like_this.jpg

 

Part of being the kind of popstar that Minogue is is to look constantly on trend, to always be NOW. She'd been slipping for most of the late 90s, as she went indie in the wake of Britpop, teh charts went pure pop, by rights her natural stomping ground. She should have been back in this thread by 98/99 at the latest but the discovery of some gold lame hotpants had turned her career around and in the camp disco of "Spinning Around" she finally gave the public what the public wanted from a Kylie Minogue record. Whether she was returning to the fold or accepting the puublic limitations on what they wanted from her is kind of irrelevant now but I recall how nice it was to have Minogue back in 2000 as the Kylie we loved.

 

"On A Night Like This" is a cover of a Pandora record from 1999 that never troubled the charts here but was turned into some sophisticated dance music and was geared at relaunching Kylie as not only a relevant popstar but one that was once again soemthing both exclusive and accessable, the innocent aussie who found herself in a Versace dress driving through Monte Carlo and apeing Sharon Stone's role in "Casino" which the video losely takes as its inspiration. Good as the record is (within the confines of pop circa 2000) the main draw here is the appearance of "Your Disco Needs You" on the CD which was played TO DEATH in the clubs at the time, Minogue ramping up the camp-o-meter to a 10 and delivering a kind of thank you to the gay audience who kept her in sustinance through the lean years.

 

Her relaunch was however was therefore aimed at the teen market/ FHM audience who had either forgotten about her or were too young to remember 10 years ago, this is SEXY Kylie, backless dresses and a touch of nudity, when people talk about successful comebacks they often forget Minogue circa 2000, what's truly remarkable is that she returned with more or less exactly the same thing as she was doing 10 years before. Putting production techniques to one side this could be a track from 1991 sitting nicely with "What Do I Have To Do" or "Shocked"- oh yes it was like she'd never been gone.