It's fair to say that Maroon 5's best years were behind them.

I find 'Payphone' their weakest song. It's no 'This Love' or 'Sunday Morning'.

'Maps' is good though.

On the opposite side of the spectrum I was a fan of a lot of Maroon 5's output up to then but this is one of their weakest for me so not fussed with it gone early. I did like both of the follow up singles however ('One More Night' & 'Daylight').

James Arthur's career has been fairly consistently bad in terms of output. For a start his constipated-vocal style of singing really grates on me, I can't take anything he does seriously - some might call it over-emoting to the point of ridicule in a Michael Bolton fashion but at least he could hold a tune and restrain himself now and again. Impossible really got on my tits, but it's still the best thing he did as the original song isn't too bad. Peaked at 54 but a 3 week run for me, so I'm nominating it as my new worst-number-one of the year.

Maroon 5 can be brilliant (Moves Like Jagger) but they can also be bland and formulaic, and Payphone falls nicely between the two as a proper good pop single, top 5 chart-peak worthy and best track to go out so far, this would be much higher for me. Rent A Rapper not really needed, as per the norm in those days and beyond.

I liked Payphone myself, I do take the point about the whiny chorus vocal, but I thought the production and melody was strong and I found Wiz Khalifa's rap quite a nice laidback summery addition to it. But sure it works fine without it too.

Funnily enough Payphone is their biggest song on Spotify, above Moves Like Jagger (2.7bn streams to 2.2bn) so while that song opened the door, Payphone was certainly hugely popular in its own right and remains so. I don't really consider it a halo hit (for me those are songs that pop in at No.1 off the back of a bigger song and then quickly disappear), more that MLJ reopened a door which had very nearly closed for them to continue the success they were having previously. A bit like Kylie's singles that followed Spinning Around in that manner.

Edited 11 hours ago11 hr by gooddelta

James Arthur who had an career revival in 2016 after his homophobic comments with The Script rip-off.

31. Will.i.am feat. Eva Simons – This Is Love

1 week at #1 (entered 1st July) 01-03-03-04-09-14-11-23-29-35-40-52-60-72 (14 weeks)

Kept off #1: None

Sales: 102,320

EOY: #39 (403,000)

It almost feels wrong placing this directly next to Payphone, however there ended the section of the completely terrible records, we now begin a run of largely inoffensive but completely generic songs which sound very of the time when listening back 14 years later, that I didn't care for then and definitely don't now.

In between Maroon 5’s two weeks at the top, will.i.am. got to the summit, with Is This Love becoming his second #1 as a solo credit (he’d go on to have three more), and 7th overall following 5 with Black Eyed Peas. Most of these had come 2-3 years earlier, where the Peas were huge for a time and he featured on Usher’s OMG. Up until this point, most of his solo credits were appearing on other people’s songs, rather than his own, but that changed in 2012 and he’d have four solo top 3s, all with the helping hand of someone else. It kicked off with T.H.E (The Hardest Ever) in February with Mick Jagger and Jennifer Lopez, and continued in the summer with This Is Love, featuring Dutch vocalist Eva Simons, which entered at the top spot.

Produced alongside two-thirds of Swedish House Mafia, Steve Angello and Sebastian Ingrosso, you can tell their influence early on from the first instrumental drop and then the rest of the song – it sounds very SHM and that’s definitely the best part of the song, but even then they were capable of so much better. Will.i.am sounds quite poor which I often thought he had done in previous hits too, the lyrics are nothing to get excited about, generic descriptions of love and the song largely passes by without especially enjoying any of it but without hating it either, it is in effect the ultimate 2012 Capital FM fodder.

Eva Simons was the singer to provide additional vocals to this and delivers the chorus, and fair play to Will for reaching out to a relative unknown to be part of this, given he was a superstar at the time and would attract fellow worldwide stars to appear on many of his other singles, though she wasn’t the complete unknown to BuzzJack prior to this – her song Silly Boy had comfortably won an edition of BuzzJack Song Contest and become one of many posters top discoveries from the contest. Her part is fine, but is just typical of the song really – it could be absolutely anyone singing it, and whilst there’s nothing especially wrong with a dull and repetitive chorus, “can you feel the love” “this is love, this is love, this is love” doesn’t really add anything to the song.

This may not have appeared in the radio/video edits, but listening to the full version it should finish 30 seconds earlier – it sounds like it’s reached a natural ending but then begins again as Simons repeats “Can you feel the love” for the remainder and is completely unnecessary to be kind, but in reality rather annoying.

The rap is tedious but the chorus is great 👍

I'd also have 'Impossible' and 'Payphone' near the bottom. I'd tuned out from watching The X Factor every week by 2012, but did see the final and any star quality on show was lost on me - Shontelle's original 'Impossible' is decent but James Arthur just flattens it, and the slight 'edgy' turns on the production came across a hollow attempt to sustain relevance. I also thought some of Maroon 5's early hits were pretty decent, but they (or more specifically Adam Levine - I couldn't tell you any other members or how they contributed by the 2010s) really went trend-chasing by this point, and the whiny chorus isn't improved by the explicit version I've only had the misfortune of hearing many years later. It still came as a surprise that this warranted a copycat version going Top 10 though - I wonder how many people still have the Precision Tunes version in a format they can readily listen to

'This Is Love' is one I do slightly enjoy though so I'd have it a little higher - aside from the big EDM production, Eva's vocals on the first couple of choruses and the cheesy "hell yeah!" callbacks lift the song in a more memorable way than anything will.i.am sings or raps on it himself.

I find Will.i.am quite intriguing as a personality, he seems very quirky and appears to have pretty decent taste in things... difficult to believe that he typically made such generic sounding music, of which that one is a perfect example. Although it goes beyond generic to quite cringy in his own parts, especially when he's asking everyone to say hell yeah etc.

I had wiped that from my memory. Now I need to do it again 🤣

A very middling and forgettable No.1 for me but it was nice for Eva Simons to actually get a UK No.1 three years after many BuzzJack posters predicted she would with a song that never charted in the end. I far preferred the following will.i.am single, Scream & Shout, with another No.1 in the middle for him on Hall Of Fame to essentially give him a hat-trick.

'This Is Love' is fine but not a major essential or anything.

I did chart and really like 'Silly Boy' though. Completely oblivious to what BJSC was at the time!

I really like 'This Is Love', it feels completely forgotten now though and something that was localised to be UK.

I can't bear James Arthur's voice, give me the Shontelle original any day of any week. 'Payphone' is utter crap, a friend I went on holiday with at the time kept playing it constantly and it drove me mad.