Love Grace Kelly, loved it then and it’s still worth a listen. I was never really taken with much else Mika did though. Love Today in particular felt a bit crap as a follow up.

Absolute genius record, 'Grace Kelly', I heard it loads at the time, played it semi-regularly ever since, and it's never gotten boring. Such a good progression and as you note, all its drama and satire built into the vocals, I think that plays really well with what he was aiming for.

I am a fan, I've kept up with him at times as he became a bit more niche, and there were a few songs that came close to this, but it really is such a perfect combination of factors, a radio dominating track, that's well-performed, and has some interesting and open to interpretation lyrical content. Fantastic #1.

Slight shame he stopped FOB getting a #1 but Grace Kelly is so good I've never really considered it an option.

Grace Kelly would definitely be towards the top for me, it's just so camp and OTT fun that it's really difficult not to like it. I got bored of Mika very quickly and at one point would have said I disliked everything he'd done, but I remember this coming on at a house party a few years after it was out and thinking just how joyous it is and actually not at all irritating as a stand alone track. Rather like Queen who so obviously influenced it, I can only manage listening to such flamboyance in small doses but this track is just the right amount.

"Grace Kelly" is great and would be in my Top 3, eventhough it denied "Starz In Their Eyes" a well-deserved #1. "Starz In Their Eyes" is among my 3 favourite songs of 2007.

2 hours ago, T Boy said:

Love Grace Kelly, loved it then and it’s still worth a listen. I was never really taken with much else Mika did though. Love Today in particular felt a bit crap as a follow up.

'Love Today' is truly hideous 🤢

Grace Kelly was a unique-sounding biggie, loved it at the time, it's still fun, and I found myself liking his run of hits, and loving some of the flops even more. Mika is in my current charts as I speak and he has a Radio 2 playlisting, not to mention his Eurovision sparkling moment in Italy the other year, so lasting 2 decades is rather longer than it might have seemed at the time!

Shine was my No.1 of 2007! I loved it from the moment I got Beautiful World at the end of 2006, love Mark taking the lead and thought this was such a wonderful ELO style single. I think that, Rule The World and The Flood are my Take That top three, all 10/10 songs.

Grace Kelly also got the year off to a similarly theatrical and flamboyant start, absolutely brilliant track and I've followed his career closely since too, he's great. The parent album was brilliant but I didn't like all of the single choices - how did My Interpretation not get a shot!? Also Relax, Take It Easy deserved an earlier full push than it got, as the follow up to Grace Kelly would have been good. The little girl at the start of the video to Grace Kelly is a young Mae Muller.

I remember the first time I heard 'Grace Kelly' while listening to Hit40UK at the time (switched to radio 1 a few months later) and it was chosen as the DJ's song to look out for. An fantastic debut but a massive misstep with the follow up. Agreed on that being rubbish.

5 hours ago, gooddelta said:

The little girl at the start of the video to Grace Kelly is a young Mae Muller.

This makes me feel old but OMG!! Would never have guessed.

'Grace Kelly' was a great quirky stomper as the first new #1 in the era when any download could chart. Now 66 was the last NOW album I bought and this was certainly one of the attractions, being the disc 1 opener. I'm not too keen on either of the songs before it here though. In the original mix of 'Beautiful Liar', I feel like the song and backing don't always go, as if they're on two different chords - and whereas the Freemasons remix irons that out, it loses the atmosphere from it, so I don't get much out of either version. 'Shine' was a good choice of follow-up to 'Patience' to showcase a different side to the newly reformed band, but I'm afraid it grates a little for me, both in the verse lyrics (well-meaning but just a little clunky) and the vocals on the title itself - the Morrisons ads didn't help with that. I like everything that remains in the top 3, but have a clear order of preference, intrigued to see if yours is the same!

Sorry for the slight pause guys been a busy week, I will reveal #3 tomorrow and hopefully conclude this over the weekend.

3 Robyn with Kleerup With Every Heartbeat

#2s kept off #1: none

 

Swedish artist Robyn first rose to international fame in the late 90s after the release of her well-received debut Robyn Is Here. Though the album itself was a modest success worldwide, only reaching the top 10 in her native country, it managed to spawn two US top 10 hits in Do You Know (What It Takes) and Show Me Love – the latter also reaching the top 10 in Canada and the UK.

After a mini break due to exhaustion, Robyn returned with her sophomore album, 1999’s My Truth, which outperformed her debut in Sweden, as well as generating positive reviews from critics. Robyn wasn’t happy with her label though, more specifically the lack of artistic control, and decided to leave BMG for a worldwide deal with Jive in 2001. Unfortunately for Robyn, 2002 would see BMG acquire her new label, meaning she would be right back to square one. And things didn’t get better. Later that year, Robyn released her third album Don’t Stop The Music: a top 2 smash in Sweden, but a project she felt very disillusioned with. Feeling the album was a massive compromise, and not aligning with her artistic vision, she decided to leave home at a major and launch her own label: Konichiwa Records.

Robyn’s self-titled fourth album, and first via Konichiwa, saw the Swede reach new heights, both critically and commercially. Achieving her first native #1 upon original release in 2005, Robyn geared up to launch the album internationally during the following two years. Though Be Mine! was the album’s original lead single in Sweden, the UK would release the electropop ballad With Every Heartbeat, a then-brand new track from Robyn’s international edition.

The song became Robyn’s biggest hit across multiple European countries, particularly in the UK, where it climbed from 5-1 in its second week after a tight race against Timbaland & Keri Hilson: on the Monday midweek flash, The Way I Are was 400 copies ahead of Robyn at #2, then by Wednesday Robyn was leading the race by just 72 copies! The song ended the year as the UK’s 24^th biggest-seller and still proves popular today, amassing 92 million streams on Spotify and currently ranking as her 5^th most popular song on the platform.

This is another song I've completely reevaluated. Not to say I actually evaluated it first time round: more dismissed it for being too understated and unconventional for my pop tastes. I liked it but just never sought it out. Thankfully, it clicked at some point. The production is just so meticulous. From that sombre string opening, backed with that pulsating club beat that builds and builds, to Robyn’s delicate vocals as she sings about the heartbreak of moving on from love, the finished product is a wonderful mix of melancholy and euphoria. It’s lack of chorus most likely irked me at the time but I’ve come to love its unusual structure, with Robyn’s almost static delivery against a backdrop of constantly evolving sounds: the understated intro leading into that superb string section and then the synth elements bursting in the final part. Robyn clearly excels at sad-disco music and this song is her at her very best* imo.

*- Her very best is Call Your Girlfriend and Dancing On My Own but this is up there!

A trip down Buzzjack memory lane:

Sunday chart predictions:

I would put "With Every Heartbeat" as my personal number 1 of 2007.

This song is beautiful and uplifting. I listened to this repeatedly back in the day.

Robyn is an underrated artist in my opinion.

That MIKA song grates on me. I hate it. 😖

Edited Saturday at 14:195 days by montyj

'With Every Heartbeat' is my favourite #1 of 2007 so I'm glad it ended up growing on you more over time! I adore its haunting blend of emotive vocals, strings and of course - that pulsing synth production, which builds masterfully.

I was always fascinated by the colourful building block video as a kid too, especially the stop motion parts.

'Grace Kelly' would be my runner-up! Like others, I wasn't the biggest MIKA fan in general, but found this song pretty infectious - a flamboyant ray of sunshine, without doing too much. The aforementioned Mae Muller tidbit was also a fun bit of lore to add to the experience in later years after she mentioned it a few times during her Eurovision promo trail.

Epic track, such a deserved #1 moment for her.

'With Every Heartbeat' is my favourite #1 of the whole decade such a unique sound for a chart topper with the towering synths, strings and intakes of breath building the atmosphere around the sad but hopeful lyrics. The coda section where the synths go trebly and. she. sings. the. title. are. fabulous.

My favourite #1 of the decade also (unsurprisingly) and the longest running #1 on my chart at 11 weeks, the first of many for her.

I was so invested in the song at the time as I’d been a fan of it for a while before the Uk release, I can remember getting emotional when it was announced as #1 as it had been so close all week. In fact I rarely cry at anything really yet Robyn making #1 did it 😂

(If anyone is interested the other rare times I cried, two were at Babe successfully herding the sheep and the the team carrying the bobsleigh at the end of Cool Runnings(!)

With Every Heartbeat is my favourite number 1 of 2007 by a mile.

With Every Heartbeat definitely my number 1 of the year too, it was quite remarkable seeing a song like that get to number 1, I didn't really know who she was at the time and the song came out of nowhere, but I do remember it getting a lot of plays on the music channels and the memorable video really stuck with me. Over time, I've definitely grown to appreciate the raw emotion, vulnerability and heartbreak she conveys and the shimmering production throughout culminating with strings and then the heartbeat like synth outro, it's wonderfully structured. She'd do this again with Dancing On My Own a few years later, but it's an excellent example of dance pop with real emotion.

Mika definitely felt like a name that was everywhere at the time (when Sound Of... actually meant something and didn't just use previous chart success as a deciding factor), I did get a bit sick of his other songs, but Grace Kelly still really works, conveys his very quirky style well and the chorus is a hell of an earworm.

Had a re-listen of all #1's of 2007 today. These are my rankings of the songs revealed so far:

1.      XXX

2.     Kaiser Chiefs - Ruby

3.     MIKA - Grace Kelly

4.     Timbaland; Keri Hilson; D.O.E. - The Way I Are

5.     Beyoncé; Shakira - Beautiful Liar

6.     Timbaland; Justin Timberlake; Nelly Furtado - Give It To Me

7.     Robyn; Kleerup - With Every Heartbeat

8.    Take That - Shine

9.    Kanye West - Stronger

10.  XXX

11.  Sugababes - About You Now

12.  Leona Lewis - A Moment Like This

13.  Katie Melua; Eva Cassidy - What a Wonderful World

14.  Sugababes; Girls Aloud - Walk This Way

15.  McFly - Baby's Coming Back

16.  Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls

17.  The Proclaimers; Andy Pipkin; Brian Potter - I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)

18.  Leon Jackson - When You Believe

The bottom songs are really bad - particularly the last two among the worst #1's of all time. Leon's voice is really a pain. I agree with one of your top two songs, but the second one I don't see that big. Particularly, the Timbaland songs are ranked higher for me. I found "Ruby" really underrated - one of the best indie rock songs of all time and always a crowd pleaser. Robyn on the other hand is OK - but not as big for me.