gooddelta

I adore this track, it would be top five for me. It's very minimal and subtle but the hypnotic groove and melody always worms its way around my head. I love Nelly Furtado's verse and the chorus is decent for me, and has become used in various club hits in the past few years. It topped my personal chart for three weeks.

Congrats blacksquare, Dan and Cody, a formidable trio. Either of the top two deserved to come out on top, in different ways (that Brer covered there) both were on such impressive form this year.

Jade's quadruple 18 masked the fact that Skall gave me over 100 points this year - thank you Harve, and Jade for that unprecedented support. And Mack, who is always very generous to us!

Not me bagging a default top five due to a deduction ages ago

I peeped the tally when I hosted 180 and think I was fifth. Either way, amazing result this year and I’m still obsessed with Korku and Inziva, the Turkish rock swerve. Although Luukered was a great winner for me.

Doing It Too and Stranded is two of my 18s back to back <3 This should have won.

Finally managed to get on to listen - great presentation Rob! I did peek the top 15 when hosting 180 and saw that poor Jade had dropped to 11, deserved top ten! But Aeroche can’t be denied - still never missing the top ten of the year!

Ah yes, that's the original version, so I suppose the UK mix was only pushed here and perhaps also in Ireland.

I think Too Much Of Heaven appeared on the release list for a bit then disappeared, shame really as I loved this with its rap verses and all, although I doubt they had much more chart life left in them, although ATB did manage a third top five hit with that (pointless) cover of Killer.

It's been removed from Spotify unfortunately (apart from a Jacksons sampling remix that doesn't feature Mya).

Thank you for all your comments and sharing your own thoughts throughout too Jade, a great top 10 there from you too. Sunscreen is just wonderful, and it's good to see we share three of the same top five.

Thank you so much for commenting throughout, I'm aware of a lot of his earlier stuff with Sequential One, I believe they produced the UK mix of 9PM too. That's cool that he came from your hometown, like me with Fatboy Slim.

That's it! Thanks all for commenting and following this thread, and also my threads for 1998 and 2000, which kicked this whole No.1 ranks series off back in the summer, it's been great to see it turn into such a cool and extended community project and I look forward to seeing other members ranking years later into the 21st cenutry and no doubt further back past 1995. Here's my full rank for 1999: ATB - 9PM (Till I Come) Eiffel 65 - Blue (Da Ba Dee) Britney Spears - ...Baby One More Time Baz Luhrmann - Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) Christina Aguilera - Genie In A Bottle Steps - Heartbeat/Tragedy Backstreet Boys - I Want It That Way Blondie - Maria Five - Keep On Movin' Armand Van Helden feat. Duane Harden - You Don't Know Me S Club 7 - Bring It All Back The Offspring - Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) Vengaboys - Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!! Shanks & Bigfoot - Sweet Like Chocolate Ricky Martin - Livin' La Vida Loca Lou Bega - Mambo No.5 (A Little Bit Of) Fatboy Slim - Praise You B*Witched - Blame It On The Weatherman Westlife - Flying Without Wings Robbie Williams - She's The One / It's Only Us Lenny Kravitz - Fly Away Vengaboys - We're Going To Ibiza Geri Halliwell - Mi Chico Latino Wamdue Project - King Of My Castle Mr Oizo - Flat Beat Ronan Keating - When You Say Nothing At All Martine McCutcheon - Perfect Moment Westlife - If I Let You Go Boyzone - When The Going Gets Tough Westlife - Swear It Again Geri Halliwell - Lift Me Up Westlife - I Have A Dream / Seasons In The Sun 911 - A Little Bit More Boyzone - You Needed Me Cliff Richard - The Millennium Prayer

ATB - 9PM (Till I Come) Rank: 10/10 Reason: Just like Sweet Like Chocolate earlier the thread, which became the first garage No.1 in the UK, we had got all the way to 1999 without having a pure trance No.1, despite the genre arguably being the biggest dance subgenre of the year and producing almost weekly multiple top 40 hits, many of which are considered classics now. Fast forward to July and German producer André Tanneberger and uncredited singer Yolanda Rivera unleashed one of the very finest trance songs ever recorded, which instantly amassed huge sales to debut at No.1 and also finished in the top five of the year. 9PM (Till I Come) was originally released in Germany a year earlier in a version that in my opinion sounds like trance that was also influenced by the Berlin techno scene of the time (it would have sounded great on the soundtrack to Run Lola Run/Lola Rennt, which was released that year). The song was a moderate No.14 hit in that version in Germany, and I'm sure would have been big here if unchanged for this market, but I really think the UK radio edit was a work of magic, trimming the fat off the track (it comes in quite short for 1999 at 2:42) and making it a more dynamic production, with a tighter and faster bassline more suited to 1999 trends, but leaving that iconic and unique pitch bending hook fully in tact, while Yolanda's repeated, breathy but effective single lyric 'change it and say, till I come' is peppered across the track in all the right places to make it really special. I credit 9PM (Till I Come) as the reason I truly came to love dance music. I remember the week I bought it, on release week (I somehow had never heard it before then) I walked into Virgin in Brighton with £3 and had gone in to buy either Jewel's Down So Long or S Club 7's Bring It All Back. But while I was there I heard this while checking new singles on the listening post and was absolutely blown away by it. Almost hypnotised, I took it straight to the till and for more than a brief moment forgot that those other two songs I'd gone in for even existed. I quickly tracked down ATB's album on import in HMV and paid £15 for it, which was no small sum for a 12-year-old, but I wasn't disappointed at all. Movin' Melodies remains one of my favourite dance albums of all-time and is another I would love to see on vinyl - Don't Stop and My Dream from the album also topped my chart (the former also later getting a dynamic remix for the UK market) while I was also besotted with Sunburn and especially the atmospheric Too Much Rain, which was removed from the later UK release of the album and also isn't on Spotify here, so I'm glad I imported it. Despite being viewed as a trance classic, the UK and Ireland are the only countries 9PM (Till I Come) topped the chart in – here it stayed at No.1 for two weeks, although it also went top 10 in various European countries and Australia, although I'm not quite sure if that was in this UK mix or in its original form. ATB and this song returned to the top 10 in 2021 alongside Topic and A7S in a new vocal remix called Your Love (9PM), this time taking 9PM into the German top ten for the first time where it peaked at No.6.

Eiffel 65 - Blue (Da Ba Dee) Rank: 10/10 Reason: 1998 had four 10/10 No.1s, but for me 1999 has two, mainly because a lot of my favourite songs of the year all stalled at No.2. But let that take nothing away from these two songs that I dearly love and by artists who I was obsessed with. In second place, where it also finished in the UK end of year chart for 1999, is Italian Europop/dance trio Eiffel 65. Singer Jeffrey Jey, keyboard player Maurizio Lobina and producer and DJ Gabry Ponte formed Eiffel 65 in 1997 and had their global breakthrough smash with a song that would go on to influence pop and dance music for years to come. In a year full of European mainland hits, Blue (Da Ba Dee) was by far the biggest, taking its inspiration from Italo Disco, pop, 90s dance and more. The song is built around a gorgeous piano line devised by Maurizio, lyrics with more than a tinge of sadness to them if you listen properly (yet bizarre and catchy enough that the song essentially served as a novelty hit at the same time), and really great production from Maurizio, and Gabry, who is still a huge name in European dance and this year represented San Marino at Eurovision with the song Tutta L'Italia. Complete with a CGI/real world crossover style music video with blue aliens, I found Blue (Da Ba Dee) so instantly hypnotic that the moment I heard it I rushed out to buy it on import from HMV, a good couple of months before official release, and I was in love with the various remixes on the maxi single, including the instrumental version. I later became obssessed with the album preview included as a b-side on the follow-up single Move Your Body and quickly obtained the parent album, which I still dearly love to this day and would love to get it on vinyl. They were just a two-hit wonder here, but Too Much Of Heaven and Living In A Bubble from the album joined Blue (Da Ba Dee) in topping my personal chart, while they also aided another major European smash and another of my all-tiime favourites, All I Really Want by Kim Lukas, which for all intents and purposes is turned into an Eiffel 65 song with their hit remix. During this purple patch of popularity they also remixed songs like S Club 7's Reach and The Bloodhound Gang's The Bad Touch, each time making them sound like their own with the Cher style vocoder effects, piano lines and robotic synthesised sound effects and swishes they were so fond of. Blue (Da Ba Dee) was played over and over on the radio at the end of summer/start of autumn 1999 and it was absolutely no surprise when it became a huge No.1 for the trio in September, having previously joined Lou Bega in reaching the top 40 on import sales alone a few weeks earlier. The song spent three weeks at the top here and, like Britney, topped the charts more or less everywhere it was released aside from a few countries including, curiously, their homeland of Italy while in the US it peaked at No.6, although for a Eurodance song this was highly impressive. But its legacy has been even larger, with the song sampled and covered by acts ranging from Flo Rida to David Guetta, the latter taking I'm Good (Blue) to No.1 in 2022 with Bebe Rexha on vocals. Eiffel 65 called their debut album Europop, and this is a masterclass in the genre that few songs have ever bettered.

The funny thing is I bought the Gary The Penguin biscuit about a month ago and it was easily the worst gingerbread man I've ever had, I looked at the ingredients after managing to eat only half the biscuit and couldn't understand why white pepper (and a very overpowering lemon flavour) was in the ingredients. I didn't get round to trying the other team's biscuit as assumed it was going to be the same recipe (as didn't realise they were part of an Apprentice task) so now I know they are different I bought it today as Asda had a few left. Not got round to eating it yet but it can't be any worse than that.

Such a classic year for music, not an easy one to put together but @awardinary has done a stellar job.

I remember we did a music quiz at the time at school in Drama class and the clue was 'No.1 single, six words in the title, starts Hit Me...' and I answered 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick', which everyone laughed at as they all obviously answered Britney but I protested there was no 'Hit Me' in Britney's title, although they stood firm that Britney was the answer they wanted (but I took the moral victory) 😂

Britney Spears - ...Baby One More Time Rank: 9.5/10 Reason: Onto one of the most impactful debut singles of all-time, as I mentioned at the start of the thread 1999 was interesting in that it threw up the debut hits for a lot of artists that would go on to define the 00s, like Britney, Christina, Eminem and even Enrique. Britney was first out the gate with probably Cheiron's most famous and iconic song, ...Baby One More Time. As many big pop singles are, it was floated around various artists including Five, Backstreet Boys and TLC and in any of their hands it clearly still would have been a big hit but probably not quite as famous, as it wasn't only the song itself that is the big draw here, but also Britney's vocal delivery, performance, and the famous music video. The track was released in late 1998 in the US and eventually reached No.1 there in January, the UK release coming in February and seeing the song sell an unexpectedly high number of copies to debut at the top (Gezza will reveal the total in his 1999 TOTP thread in the coming weeks) way ahead of runner-up Runaway (Tin Tin Out Remix) by The Corrs at No.2 (what an unfortunate week for my favourite group to release my favourite song by them in, bah!). Although it was a very clear No.1 hit, its gigantic sale caught me off guard for sure, but it marked the arrival of a new pop superstar and for months on end in 1999 you couldn't move without hearing the name Britney Spears everywhere. Sonically the song starts with that iconic three note piano motif before the beat kicks in that is very similar to what Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Five and Robyn were pushing from Cheiron at the time. You could even argue that the latter (along with some of the material by UK girlband Solid Harmonie and Swede Jessica Folcker) was kind of a prototype for Britney, but I can see why US audiences needed an all American girl with wholesome Disney (Mickey Mouse club) roots to latch onto to take this sound to bigger fame than Swedish teenager Robyn, who you could tell was a Scandinavian act with her vocal and look. Britney also had a very immediate style that stood out with a distinctive vocal and various Britney-isms that would come up again and again in her early music in particular (e.g. her pronounciation of 'baby' in the verses; 'bye-beh, bye-beh'). The piano motif continues throughout the song and takes the bridge through to the mega chorus, one of the most famous ever in pop music. And then, as is common in much Cheiron music, the song slows right down to a ballad temporarily in the middle eight, ready to ramp back up to my favourite part of the song 'I must conFESS, that my loneliNESS...'. We then get a cold ending with that iconic hook line repeated one final time (although Hit Me was not actually part of the title, an ellipsis was used instead), which suits the track much better than a fade out would have done. It's an absolutely genius pop song and Britney was completely the right artist to sell it. So many things about this song, and Britney, immediately became part of popular culture for years to come, particuarly the title, while Darius memorably covered the track for his Popstars audition, and schoolgirl fancy dress in the Britney style with the pigtails and knotted shirt was very popular for a long-time. The track hit No.1 in the majority of countries it was released in, and ended the year as the biggest selling single here in the UK, quickly becoming a million seller, while Britney scored further hits Sometimes, (You Drive Me) Crazy and Born To Make You Happy from the same debut album, the latter becoming her second No.1 in early 2000. Her incredible debut single remains one of her signature hits though, along with 2004 No.1 Toxic.

Eva/Katie was such an unexpected No.1 indeed, especially due to its Tesco exclusivity, which didn't work for poor Nadine in 2010. I actually like it, it made my end of year top 100 and I'd place it around the same area. I've got no time for that McFly single sadly, I don't like either side. I think I'd have Leona and Kanye higher than that.

Eminem.

Mwah!

Omarion

Sugababes again

I remember buying it for my sister in WH Smith even later than that, when it was on its way out of the top 10 (possibly even its final week there), as she realised the dance routine to Tragedy was printed inside the inlay of the CD. A true slow burner hit.