February 17, 20232 yr Author 2003 6/24: Delta Goodrem - Born To Try (4 non-consecutive weeks at No.1) qTBOJ71ypRw As I mentioned earlier, 2003 was not a vintage year for me at the time. But there was one big saviour of the year for me. Delivering not just my favourite album of the year, but my favourite album EVER, teen singer-songwriter Delta Goodrem emerged from Australian soap Neighbours and it's fair to say I became obsessed, and have been ever since. I watched Neighbours at the time, and Delta's singing career was part of a storyline for her character Nina Tucker, who was trying to get into the industry herself. This gave Delta a chance to air some of her material through Neighbours storylines, including the beautiful debut single Born To Try. Neighbours still had quite a big pull for potential popstars in the UK at this point, with Holly Valance scoring a few hits a year earlier. It was not at the level of its 80s heyday by a long stretch, but enough to get Delta some good promo slots and buzz UK TV pre-release, and the track, which had got to No.1 in Australia in late 2002, debuted at No.3 in the UK and spent a few weeks in the top ten - even dipping out and then returning for another couple of weeks. In my chart, the classic ballad, complete with that brilliant powerful note on the key change, earned a rare debut at No.1 and spent four non-consecutive weeks at the top.
February 17, 20232 yr Author 2003 7/24: Puretone - Stuck In A Groove (2 weeks at No.1) psIMWRH-Qb8 Sticking with Australia, for some reason it took Puretone over a year to follow up Addicted To Bass and, sadly, the hype had gone. Stuck In A Groove is more of a pop record than the bass driven dance of its predecessor, and I absolutely loved it. Amiel sounds fantastic on it, it has a fantastic bridge melody and a catchy chorus, and the video features another lively car chase. The track had good airplay too from what I recall, and I was so disappointed when it debuted and peaked at No.26, it deserved so much more but I guess they just left it too late...
February 17, 20232 yr Oops had fallen a bit behind but all caught up and it's great to see Girls Aloud appearing now with what must be the best talent show coronation single ever :wub: intrigued to see how their later singles will have done for you!
February 17, 20232 yr Author 2003 8/24: Shakira - Antologia (1 week at No.1) eZGIoE8A8L4 Shakira had enjoyed a couple of big No.1s in my chart in 2002 and I was still obsessed with her, but of course pre-YouTube it wasn't exactly easy to delve through the music of an artist's back catalogue, short of ordering an album on import which I didn't have the money to do. However, in early 2003, an independent record shop in Brighton was stocking her Grandes Exitos album, released in November 2002, that collected together her biggest Spanish language hits. I quickly snapped it up and it was a fantastic delve for me into the prior few years of her career, pre blonde hair and hip shaking - a young Colombian superstar unknown in English speaking countries but with a string of beautiful ballads and eccentric anthems to her name already. Clearly in reflective mood as I was nearing the end of high school and revising for my GCSEs, I fell hardest for the gorgeous ballad Antologia, which has a whopping 234 million streams on Spotify alone at present.
February 17, 20232 yr Great to see some more Aussie representation. Amiel released a solo album in 2003, have you heard any of the singles from that?
February 17, 20232 yr Author 2003 9/24: Kelly Llorenna - Reaching Out (1 week at No.1) 0C85AqhqWi0 Kelly Llorenna compiled all of her hits and lots of new songs onto All Clubbed Up, an album she released at the end of 2002. It only reached the lower end of the charts but I was happy with it, I'm just glad that she actually got an album out on release, and All Around The World didn't know how to properly market albums back then anyway (they finally came good in 2008 with smash albums by Scooter, Darren Styles, Cascada and others). Lots of Kelly's album tracks charted for me over the following months, but my favourite of the non-singles was the euphoric reaching out, which sounds a bit like M People doing a Eurodance song. Kelly co-wrote this one, and it deserved a single push.
February 17, 20232 yr Author 2003 10/24: Love Inc - Broken Bones (2 weeks at No.1) 0s6vnfPu16I Love Inc were not a one hit wonder, although not that many people remember No.8 hit Broken Bones, especially as the UK hit version, the Pez Tellet mix, isn't available to stream. The Canadian outfit returned in May 2003 with another song that sounded lifted from the Sash 1998 back catalogue - Broken Bones sounds like a sonic successor to Move Mania - and again I thought it was brilliant. The video with this mix doesn't seem to be online but some kind soul has uploaded it from Hits 56, which it featured on.
February 17, 20232 yr Author 2003 11/24: Boomkat - The Wreckoning (1 week at No.1) V_GuIDnZPHs A very cool early 00s pop song now, from American brother/sister duo Boomkat. The act got quite a bit of pre-release hype due to its singer Taryn Manning, who was a fairly high profile actress who played Janeane in 8 Mile and Mimi in Crossroads, among other roles. Sadly, the song was a complete flop, and peaked at No.37 in the UK, its biggest successes being top 20 in Australia and New Zealand, but it got a token week at the top for me.
February 17, 20232 yr Author Oops had fallen a bit behind but all caught up and it's great to see Girls Aloud appearing now with what must be the best talent show coronation single ever :wub: intrigued to see how their later singles will have done for you! Have to agree with that, it remade the template for talent show coronation singles and then Simon Cowell disregarded that anyway and quickly returned to the clichéd ballads. They had quite a lot of No.1s for me, but not always with the songs you might expect...! Great to see some more Aussie representation. Amiel released a solo album in 2003, have you heard any of the singles from that? I'm not sure I did, I only know her song Green Eyed World, as it was on the soundtrack to Hating Alison Ashley. I'll check out that album.
February 17, 20232 yr Lovesong & Obsession were the first two singles and the only ones that troubled the top 20 here. Bomkat! I actually started listening to this earlier in the week. I was going to enter it in the forgotten hits thread but not sure it qualified.
February 20, 20232 yr Author Lovesong & Obsession were the first two singles and the only ones that troubled the top 20 here. Bomkat! I actually started listening to this earlier in the week. I was going to enter it in the forgotten hits thread but not sure it qualified. I'll check those out thanks. I noticed it was a bigger hit in Australia when googling! Definitely forgotten here although I'm not sure it was ever particularly known either :cry:
February 20, 20232 yr I don’t know some of the latest ones but absolutely looooove Broken Bones! Very sad and powerful lyrics. Amazing that it’s originally from 1998 and they somehow managed to break through here years later. Certainly remember hearing it a lot in clubs while I was at uni.
February 20, 20232 yr Author I don’t know some of the latest ones but absolutely looooove Broken Bones! Very sad and powerful lyrics. Amazing that it’s originally from 1998 and they somehow managed to break through here years later. Certainly remember hearing it a lot in clubs while I was at uni. Yeah I should have mentioned the lyrics, in fact I really appreciated Love Inc's album, which I also bought, for being a cut above the usual chart dance in terms of subjects covered. I guess we were already chomping at the bit for 90s retro stuff by 2003. Certainly hits by Ultrabeat, Angel City and Divine Inspiration sounded very 90s too.
February 20, 20232 yr Author 2003 12/24: Lynn - To Dream Again (1 week at No.1) gJRXn1rW0H8 Next are a series of songs that take me right back to doing my GCSEs, and the end of high school. May 2003 and it was time again for Eurovision. I wasn't really mad on any of the top three that year, Sertab Erener from Turkey, Urban Trad from Belgium or the pretty poorly performed song from Russia's tATu (who at the time had the biggest seller of the year in the UK with All The Things She Said, so their nul from us might have come as a shock - even a handful of points from us would have handed them victory). Anyway, one of my early favourites was another sunny pop song from Malta - Lynn's To Dream Again. There's no apparent reason this should have finished 2nd to last, but that it did, just ahead of the UK whose Jemini famously got nul points, and just behind Latvia, the host country. Meaning that the previous year's top three was - in the same order again - the following year's bottom three. Anyway, I still really like this catchy pop song which has only finally been added to streaming platforms in the last few weeks.
February 20, 20232 yr Author 2003 13/24: Birgitta - Open Your Heart (2 non-consecutive weeks at No.1) E_yMjkN6zY0 My favourite entry of 2003, though, was some fine schlager that would finish 8th for Iceland. Birgitta Haukdal opened the show in fine style and - for me - nothing bettered it for the whole evening, even Sweden's own schlager from Fame, the winner of Melodifestivalen, which peaked at No.2 for me. A warm voice, a belting sugary chorus, a key change; when pop like this is done in Eurovision, for me it rarely fails, and with a much later running order Birgitta could well have been in the top five. It spent two weeks at the top of my chart, rudely interrupted by another song related to the contest... Edited February 20, 20232 yr by gooddelta
February 20, 20232 yr Author 2003 14/24: XTM & DJ Chucky feat Annia - Fly On The Wings Of Love (1 week at No.1) x4bxUOxY2M0 Back in 2000 in Stockholm, Eurovision was won by two middle-aged Danish men, The Olsen Brothers, who defied convention to beat their younger competitors with a highly unfancied song in the odds (I remember it being 100/1 in the run up to the show). Fly On The Wings Of Love was - basically - a brilliant, instant classic of a song. But their performance is slightly awkward on record, with the slower pace and the bizarre use of vocoder (this was just after Cher and Eiffel 65, so of course the vocoder was going to make an appearance at Eurovision 2000 somehow). I liked the song itself but never really loved their version of it. But Spanish dance act XTM stepped up in 2003 to turn the song into the Eurodance anthem it was probably always destined to become, and it became the biggest Eurovision related hit in the UK for many years - not that most people in the UK would have remembered it was a cover of a recent winner of course. The CD single was the first thing I bought with my first ever pay cheque from work after I started at Asda in late May 2003 at the age of 16 (it was genuinely a cheque too as they didn't have my bank details at the time), so it was of great significance to me that this was the first thing I'd ever 'earned' the right to buy. I have to mention the iconic UK chart run too, of course. This is one that lasted throughout the summer - as was often the way with songs that were propped up mainly by TV music channel exposure (thanks, I'm sure, to its very watchable animated video) rather than airplay in any great quantity, the song never exploded at a peak but sauntered along in and around the top ten for three months - 9-8-12-9-8-9-11-10-8-10-12 - a pretty normal run by today's standards but quite bizarre 20 years ago.
February 20, 20232 yr Author 2003 15/24: Delta Goodrem - Lost Without You (1 week at No.1) YMYUYtsUGgg My Delta obsession wasn't in full swing yet. She'd topped my chart with Born To Try, at that time my current YTD No.1, and I was eagerly anticipating what was next, but one song does not an obsession make. Lost Without You was a much slower burner for me. It didn't enter at the top, and I never loved it anywhere near as much, but it's definitely her signature song in the UK - you could not escape it on the radio here in 2003. It didn't peak as high as Born To Try, losing a midweek No.2 position to end up at No.4 officially, but it did clearly help to drive sales of the Innocent Eyes album - more on that later. A 00s pop anthem, it is a pretty irresistible classic, regardless of where I have it in my personal Delta ranking. But it was just seven days at the top for me. Edited February 20, 20232 yr by gooddelta
February 20, 20232 yr Author 2003 16/24: Karen Parry - Flashdance (1 week at No.1) dYeUqWMj-Fg 80s Eurodance covers were still all the rage in 2003 - Soda Club's version of Heaven Is A Place On Earth was quite a substantial No.2 hit for me earlier in the year - and nestled away on Clubland 3 was Karen Parry's cover of Irene Cara's iconic Flashdance. Karen was the singer on Flip & Fill's 2002 UK top three hit Shooting Star. Her cover of I Think We're Alone Now had charted a few months earlier in the UK as well and went to No.2 for me. Not a huge amount more to say about this one, it is what it is and it's still enjoyable for what it is. Edited February 20, 20232 yr by gooddelta
February 20, 20232 yr Author 2003 17/24: ATB - I Don’t Wanna Stop (2 weeks at No.1) GnGX8GPxIgQ Also a No.1 thanks to Clubland 3, I hadn't massively kept up with ATB's career after his second album Two Worlds, which I loved. But hearing this on the Clubland compilation reminded me why I had always loved him. This doesn't have the bendy synths of his earlier hits but this is still trademark ATB, and for me this was one of his best ever singles. Thumping production, soulful vocals, a great chord progression - it was a fortnight at No.1 for this but would be his last until he returned to the top in 2012 with Never Give Up.
February 20, 20232 yr Both of the Delta songs are fab and the album was great too which my dad happened to have at the time. 'Fly On The Wings Of Love' is much better than the original form so no surprise it rocketed up to become a smash here. Very euphoric dance make and one I have been playing round my mates quite a bit too recently lol.
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