27th July: SHOOTING STAR - Flip & Fill

 

Flip & Fill remix. Flip & Fill remix. Flip & Fill remix. For anyone buying pop and dance music during the early noughties, you'll be used to seeing those words a lot as these guys were absolutely bloody everywhere, seemingly at one point having their remixes on the CD single of almost every track in the top 40. Eventually I was absolutely sick of them and saw them as producing rather bland, watered-down trance music nowhere near of the calibre as the likes of Ferry Corsten were making a couple years earlier, but for their first few releases I've got to admit that they were pretty good indeed. Their first charting song was 'True Love Never Dies', originally barely cracking the top 40 in 2001 but a re-issue early in 2002 sent it up to number 7. Once you forget that it's based on one of the best trance instrumentals of all time (Rank 1's 'Airwave') it's a nice listen.

 

A similar story to this track which again isn't entirely original and a cover of a somewhat legendary happy hardcore song from the late 90s, a genre I'm a huge fan of and when I first heard this slowed-down version I was a little underwhelmed as it just didn't compare to the 300mph original. Huge credit, though, to singer Karen Parry who does a brilliant job with the vocals and booms them out with joy. I always found that the quality of a Flip & Fill track depended on the vocals - if it's a bit of a bland song or delivery it falls somewhat flat, while when it's Karen Parry screaming "LIKE A SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOTING STAR! ACROSS THE MIDNIGHT SKY!!!" it's aural heaven. It was great to see her live in early 2008, singing this and finally getting to put a face to the voice having never seen the video. To really enjoy it I have to forget about the happy hardcore original and just enjoy it as a fantastic bit of dance-pop for the time. Probably the best thing they did, even though it is a cover...

 

Oddly, Shooting Star was the b-side to True Love Never Dies, so it's strange that it was pushed as a single in its own right and became a bigger hit!

Lol I didn't know that, it's like the reverse example of follow-up hits including the previous hit as an extra track to get more sales!

 

3rd August: UNDERNEATH YOUR CLOTHES - Shakira

 

Whoever thought releasing Shakira's 'Whenever Wherever' here on the same week Will Young released his debut single is a very silly person, as poor Shakira was denied a #1 that almost any other week that year she'd have easily got. Here's her second English release, this time in the ballad territory and another worldwide hit. I've never been a huge fan, her songs are ok but few of them really elevate themselves into classic status for me, perhaps 'Hips Don't Lie' being the closest. This really doesn't do anything for me at all, nicely made and sung but after one listen I've simply forgotten it. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but to me it's just a bit of a non-event.

 

Edited June 17, 201312 yr by BillyH

10th August: BLACK SUITS COMIN' (NOD YA HEAD) - Will Smith feat. Tra-Knox

 

A movie tie-in that for once with something I actually saw at the time, Men in Black II, and the days when Will Smith would release a rap song in conjunction with half his films. The eponymous 'Men in Black' from 1997 is a classic of its time, achieving its job so effortlessly no one really needed to bother making a follow-up. So, really, what is the point? You just spend the whole song wanting to hear Men in Black instead, it's not too bad a song but just vastly overshadowed by its bigger brother. Notably did almost nothing chartwise in most countries except for the UK, and, weirdly, Norway. Those 'Fresh Prince' repeats on BBC2 after The Simpsons really were popular, I guess...

 

Edited June 17, 201312 yr by BillyH

17th August: LIKE A PRAYER - Mad'House

 

Just an introductory note - this is another song that seems to exist in a few different versions and I'm not entirely certain what the UK mix was, but I'm guessing its the version as heard in the video.

 

Does anyone know what precisely happened in 2002 for everyone to suddenly start covering Madonna songs for a few months? Did she almost die or something? We've got another to come, plus Madonna herself, but this is one of the first.

 

The 1989 Madonna original is, along with 'Vogue' one of the best thing she ever made, being released at my absolute favourite era for the long-running singer where almost everything she released was gold. On paper, an early-noughties dance version of the track could be brilliant...indeed there's a version of this called the 'Almighty Mix' which is really good and was included on the CD single. What appears to be the 'Main Mix' though is just some resung vocals over the top of the backing beat of Black Legend's 2000 #1 'The Trouble With Me', revealing the real origins of the track - it started out as an unofficial mashup someone else made, and these guys re-recorded it so it could actually be released. It really doesn't work and to be honest is a bit insulting to both songs, and listening to it makes me feel a bit sorry for both Madonna, Black Legend and whoever innocently made the original mashup, as 'MadHouse' don't really seem to have done anything except cash in on other people's talents. Singer Buse Unlu at least does an ok job of actually re-singing the thing. I think that's another reason why I like the Almighty Mix a lot better, in that the backing is completely new and feels like more time's been spent on creating a fresh version of the original song. Mad'House got another minor hit later that year with a cover of Holiday before the novelty wore off.

 

Not quite the same but a few months earlier, in one of the oddest Top of the Pops appearances I've ever seen, a woman called 'Mad Donna' (get it?) did a Ray of Light-esque cover version of, erm, 'The Wheels on the Bus', causing my 13 year old self to gaze slightly horrified at the screen and wonder if I was already getting too old for pop music. Maybe that's when the floodgates opened.

 

24th August: ROMEO DUNN - Romeo

 

One of the blokes from So Solid Crew enjoying a solo release. I think I remember watching TOTP the week he was on and being mystified as to who the hell he was and what was so special about him. He does at least have an amusingly low and gravelly voice, but the track's just utterly naff and essentially just consists of Romeo bigging himself up to the extreme. Includes a reference to The Weakest Link about a year and a half after it was cool, and the lines "Give me the number to your mobile phone so I can send you a mobile tone" and, worse, "You look hot like Jamaica, I'll strip off your underwear cus I'm the undertaker".

 

Follow-up 'It's All Gravy' was a little better, mostly because of the presence of Christina Milian.

 

31st August: ADDICTIVE - Truth Hurts feat. Rakim

 

I don't remember this at all!! Surreal but weirdly listenable R&B track using an old scratchy sample of a Hindi song as its basis. 'Truth Hurts' is in fact a woman called Shari Watson who is very much a one-hit wonder both here and in America, the song boosted by the presence of hip hop legend Rakim providing your obligatory rap break. Perhaps the reason it's not heard anymore is that said Hindi song hadn't actually had its rights cleared to be sampled, meaning the Indian copyright holders filed a $500 million lawsuit(!) and banned the track from ever being performed again.

 

It's ok for the occasional listen but doesn't quite have that extra kick to really stand out, and when you find that the best bit of the song is the sample you might as well just listen to the original.

 

17th August: LIKE A PRAYER - Mad'House

 

Just an introductory note - this is another song that seems to exist in a few different versions and I'm not entirely certain what the UK mix was, but I'm guessing its the version as heard in the video.

 

Yep, the video mix was the UK mix although there was a remix featured on Now 52 oddly. I actually love this cover, she had an entire album of Madonna covers called Absolutely Mad which I also own :lol:

Ok 2002's looking like getting completed by the end of today, here's four for now and our final three should be online in a few hours!

 

21st September: PAPA DON'T PREACH - Kelly Osbourne

 

Another Madonna cover! This time a somewhat different one, being the first release of Ozzy Osbourne's then 17-year-old daughter at a time when reality TV show 'The Osbournes' was massively popular. Unlike Madhouse's house remake of Like a Prayer, this takes the 1986 Madonna #1 and turns it into a distorted rock stormer. Very much critically panned at the time, everything about it I should hate, but weirdly I don't, it achieves its purpose better than Madhouse and is a fun novelty cover version showing an old classic in a new light. Kelly would later go on to release the really quite brilliant 'One Word' in 2005, a synthpop song heavily influenced by Visage's 'Fade To Grey' and about five years ahead of its time to be really big but did well to peak at #9.

 

28th September: WHAT I GO TO SCHOOL FOR - Busted

 

And it begins. If I could have named one of my least favourite acts around in my early teens I would have instantly said these guys. But then I was never really their target audience, was I? With the sound of the guitar slowly but surely taking over the sound of the cheesy synthesiser in the charts, it was just a matter of time until a guitar-playing boyband arrived heavily influenced by the recent nu-metal craze but much more poppified and Britified. Pre-teen and teenage girls, seemingly instantly, fell head over heels in love with them.

 

This was their first single and a month earlier had appeared on the front of Smash Hits magazine (still around then!) before they'd even released anything, which must be pretty rare. And compared to the kind of stuff they'd later go on to release it's fairly reserved, much more of an easy-going pop song than anything particularly rock-influenced save for a couple of guitars strumming quietly in the background. Written about a teenage crush on a teacher and with some really quite terrible lyrics (the one about dropping a pencil on the floor having already been mentioned earlier in this thread), maybe I'd have liked this a bit better in 1999 when everything in the chart was awesome, but by late 2002 this isn't for me and it's not doing much eleven years on either.

 

There is, admittedly, one Busted song I have always liked both at the time and now, and that's their #2 follow-up to this 'Year 3000' early next year. By the time of 'You Said No' though and hitting #1 with basically every release until their 2005 split, they definitely weren't my thing. There's a bit of a charm to some of their releases but not enough for me to really love them.

 

Unfortunately this isn't quite yet the type of song for people to genuinely try and upload high quality versions on youtube yet. The only version of the video is both low-res and completely out of sync with the audio. Even all the audio versions are pretty bad 240p quality lyric videos, this is one of the best sound-only versions I could find.

 

5th October: COMPLICATED - Avril Lavigne

 

Sometimes not only just a song, but a pop star him or herself can transport you back to a time when they were huge, as is the case with Avril here. Even just reading her name makes me remember the autumn of 2002 when both this and 'Sk8er Boy' (which only peaked at #8!!) were everywhere. Ok she's been back in the charts several times since and indeed had her highest ever charting hit with 'Girlfriend' in 2007, but for me this is her absolute golden era.

 

Looking back it's perhaps surprising that this did so much better than Sk8er Boy, which would appear to be the much more obvious hit although the latter did perhaps get a bit lost in the Christmas rush. This is a joy to hear again, Avril to my now 14 year old self was incredibly cool and as I moved further away from the simplistic synthpop I'd loved just a year or so earlier it was great to hear something seemingly more credible and 'adult' sounding like this. I haven't heard it in absolutely years but almost every line I'm remembering, fantastic to hear it again. Loved the video with them "at the mall" too and hoped that in a couple of years I'd be as cool as Avril and her pals...

 

26th October: NU FLOW - Big Brovaz

 

GUILTY PLEASURE ALERT. At a time when people were slowly but surely switching off, I gradually started to get back into Top of the Pops (and indeed CD:UK) during late 2002 into 2003. By the time of its ill-advised 'All New' revamp I'd stopped bothering, but for now a lot of the next year or so of hits I remember watching live on the show.

 

This now sounds a little humiliating, but after the first time I saw these guys on TOTP, I loved this track. Again, like Avril, I considered this 'cool' music and stuff like Busted and especially S Club Juniors highly 'uncool'. In retrospect this is in fact hilariously not as cool as I thought it was :P It's as cheesy a pop track as Steps, just with completely different instrumentation and rapping instead of singing, but it did incredibly well both here and much of the world(!!) and seems very well remembered to anyone particularly born around the turn of the 1990s, as well as late 80s babies like me. The gimmick of the "WHO'S THIS?" and the next member delivering their spiel is simple but works really nicely, it's one of my main memories of the TOTP performance with the whole crowd screaming with joy at the start of every new verse. It's an odd one as had it come out a year earlier I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I was too busy listening to HearSay, but a year later maybe not so much either as by then it was the likes of The Darkness all the way. Here in 2002, it started a brief but enjoyable Big Brovaz love for me, and even the much later follow-up group Booty Luv in 2006-7 I used to listen to lots as an 18 year old. A silly song but wow what a nostalgic gem!

 

Complicated is just one of those songs that makes me so nostalgic about my life as a kid :wub: I was 10 when that came out and I can hardly believe it was 11 years ago now, it honestly doesn't seem like that long ago. Also, love the part in the Here's To Never Growing Up video where she wears the outfit and is on the skateboard once again

...ok, so due to my somewhat ineptness I've just realised I've missed one of the #3s I should have covered a year ago. Oops :/ So before we finish 2002, let's go back a year...

 

24th November 2001: EMOTION - Destiny's Child

 

A couple of months earlier, I found myself at home on a boring Tuesday afternoon with little else to do except watch a episode of a dull ITV daytime soap opera called 'Crossroads'. The first part played as normal, but when it came to the ad-break, the show never returned. Instead we went to the ITV newsroom for the rest of the day as the news broke that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. By the end of that day I'd watched two towers fall, learnt what the word "terrorist" meant and felt sorry for that new President Bush guy in charge. For the rest of that year the aftermath of the September 11th attacks was unescapable, not since Princess Diana's death in 1997 could I remember a story remaining headline news for so long.

 

Why I'm mentioning this here is for the reason that, apparently, this song was played a substantial amount on US radio in its build-up to release and became a sort of tribute song for the family of the victims who's lives had been lost. A cover of a song the Bee Gees wrote and performed with Australian singer Samantha Sang (an #11 hit here in 1978), the brothers Gibb have always been songwriting geniuses in my book and it's fair to say the girls sing this beautifully, perhaps losing some of the dreamy disco float of the original for a more contemporary 2001 pop sound but still perhaps one of Destiny Child's best ever releases. Would also be their last release here until 'Lose My Breath' returned them to #2 during a brief comeback in 2004.

 

And now back to late 2002 for the three final #3s of the year:

 

2nd November 2002: ONE LOVE - Blue

 

Blue belong to somewhat of a second generation 'silver age' for manufactured pop, not quite fitting in with the Steps/S Club late 90s generation (their first hit was in 2001) but instead belonging to the slightly more mature-sounding early 2000s that also brought us the likes of Liberty X and the Mutya-era Sugababes. So while by now the majority of 1999's pop scene had either disbanded or were about to, Blue carried on fairly successfully until the end of 2004, if perhaps never quite reaching the early huge fame they had for their first two years - in 2001-2 they went top 6 with every one of their releases, but from 2003 onwards they only went top 3 once.

 

This is one of their most remembered songs although surprisingly not a #1, even Wikipedia's discography page erronously claiming it reached the top here until I corrected it the other day. For ages I kept getting this confused with 'All Rise', which due to its identical letter count I kept imagining bizarre fusions such as "All rise, for the mothers pride, all rise, for the times we cried...I will survive!" before realising I was mistaken. It's also probably my favourite Blue song and I did somewhat enjoy their songs right to the end, this just nudging itself above All Rise for me despite AR's brilliant opening instrumental hook.

 

A rare example of a #3 that certainly isn't forgotten today and sums up the sound of pop at the time very nicely indeed. Currently reformed and touring the UK for nostalgic 20-somethings to see!

 

9th November: DIE ANOTHER DAY - Madonna

 

Finally, after two questionable-sounding covers and a reminiscing of a comedy Wheels on the Bus cover comes the lady herself, providing the soundtrack of the then-latest James Bond film and the last to star Pierce Brosnan in the role. We're a few years away from Daniel Craig providing a back-to-basics reboot of the series that's led to last year's 'Skyfall' being one of the most popular Bond films ever made, so it's quite surprising to look back to 2002 and remember that Die Another Day had in comparison had a bit of a mixed reaction. At this point in the series' lifetime it was less about back-to-basics and more WE'RE REALLY MODERN AND COOL AND LOOK AT OUR TECHNOLOGY, and constant scenes of Mr Bond messing with gadgets and driving invisible cars was a bit too much for some people, that and its huge amount of dazzling CGI special effects footage.

 

This theme song, which is about as different as Adele's as you can possibly get, is similarly very much about sounding new and modern instead of looking back to its past, indeed it's probably one of the oddest sounding Bond themes ever with its weird stuttery electro rhythms and voice samples. At the time it seemed a bit dull in comparison to Garbage's much stronger 'The World Is Not Enough' and Tina Turner's 'Goldeneye' which were both excellent Brosnan Bond themes, today it's an ok listen but just a bit too different to really work as a Bond song, despite the efforts to put some strings over the top so it sounds at least a little cinematic. Maybe a 6 out of 10, just about squeezing into the 'good' corner but nothing brilliant.

 

30th November: JENNY FROM THE BLOCK - Jennifer Lopez

 

Not content with already winning the most-#3s-of-the-early-noughties prize, she's back again for the final #3 of 2002 and still we have more to come from her during this lookback. This consists of little except for the words "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got, I'm still I'm still Jenny from the block", which I used to think was some bizarre reference to her breasts but I think it's actually referring to jewellery, and a video seemingly obsessed with getting as many shots of her posterior as possible.

 

Although vocal-wise the chorus hook is pretty catchy, the actual song itself is just a weird mess, trying to sound like an early hip-hop track but instead coming across as both bland and annoying. I can't quite believe this is the same J-Lo who before 2002 just kept storming every release she did, her sound's really taken a downward turn and although I haven't heard everything she's ever released, I can't think of anything until 2011's anthem 'On the Floor' until she released something I loved again.

 

Both J-Lo and her then-boyfriend Ben Affleck (who features heavily) now hate this video, J-Lo wanting to block it and Affleck claiming it almost ruined his career. Enjoy!

 

2002 is complete! 2003 begins tomorrow. Even by now the 1990s felt like a long way away and barely anything released now sounds like it could have come out as recently as 1999 anymore. One of the few exceptions was the very much deliberately cheesy 'Cheeky Song' by the Cheeky Girls, a huge novelty seller over that Christmas, and, erm, massively popular with my age contemporaries to the point where most of my early 2003 memories involve ironically singing it with them everywhere.

 

Looking at the #3s we'll see over the next twelve months, we've got:

 

* One of the last great dance hits of the decade before we fell into looped-house blandness

 

* One of my favourite pop songs of the whole decade

 

* Two of the most annoyingly overplayed songs of the whole decade

 

* And not one, but two(!) tracks from a pair of comedy Romanians who had much longer a hit career than anyone possibly imagined!

WHAT a selection! :wub: "What I Go to School For" isn't Busted's best, but it's a great introductory single, and the music video is one of my early childhood memories of music channels. "Complicated" is also far from Avril's best, but still very nostalgic. "Nu Flow" is AMAZING, as were all of the singles released from the parent album! :wub: A shame their attempted comeback with the release of Scooby Doo 2 epically failed. "One Love" is one of the best Blue songs, although most of their early singles were fab. "Die Another Day" is a bit odd for both a Madonna and Bond song, but it's not terrible. I still absolutely love "Jenny from the Block" though, it's so much better than her songs in this thread so far (although maybe not "Play", not that that's much of her anyway).

Ok here's the first five from 2003, and what a selection!

 

1st February 2003: THE OPERA SONG (BRAVE NEW WORLD) - Jurgen Vries feat. CMC :wub:

 

The year indie took a step closer to chart domination and the last great year for dance music. The first half of the year saw just as many dance classics as pretty much every year since the birth of house music in 1987, with Layo & Bushwacka's 'Love Story vs Finally', Divine Inspiration's 'The Way', XTM's 'Fly On The Wings of Love' which I adored at the time and Plummet's 'Damaged' all massively standing out, as indeed did this. By the end of the year we still had a few doing well - it was the age of Kontakt's 'Show Me A Sign', for example - but the sound was moving on, in particular the trance boom was running out of legs and the mid-noughties would instead bring electro and looped 80s house music.

 

Perhaps it was inevitable. A genre can't last forever before a new sound is needed, but boy did I miss slices of heaven like this. 'Jurgen' was in fact the less exotically-named Darren Tate, who'd had a host of trance hits under various pseudonyms, most notably responsible for Angelic's 'It's My Turn' and 'Can't Keep Me Silent' in 2000-01. 'CMC'? Look at the initials - Charlotte Maria Church, then just sixteen years old and already looking to move away from the classical and operatic music that had made her famous at the end of the 1990s as a twelve year old. Apparently credited under just her initials on request of the record label to avoid embarrassment in case the song flopped(!), the "is it or isn't it" hype took this powerful trance track right up to the top 3 early in the New Year and oh my word is it glorious. Listening to it is not only a beautiful experience, but also makes you wonder - why the hell did she never do anything like this ever again?! When her pop career finally started, it was with naff nonsense like 'Crazy Chick' instead of stuff like this, which I've always found was a huge shame. Although we've got a lot of pop and especially huge indie classics to come as we make our way through 2003 and 2004, dance-wise nothing comes close to this from now on. There's a merely good-but-not-spectacular dance track coming up in October 2004, and we'll just miss out on 'Galvanize' by the Chemical Brothers in January 2005, otherwise, that's it. Our last mindblowing dance number 3 of the first half of the decade.

 

Happily, dance music would eventually have a bit of a recovery starting from about 2010, with the likes of Nero, Swedish House Mafia and Disclosure releasing some of the best tracks in years. For the noughties, though, sit back and listen to the end of an era...