BillyH

Oh, I didn't know that was actually a deadmau5 sample on Happiness - I always thought it was someone copying his style but more commercialised. It's a great track with some fond memories of that (bloody cold) winter. I don't even know what Wrapped Up sounds like :/ This thread is really showing me how depressingly low my musical knowledge got from about 2013! Drawing a blank at most hits from that year on...somehow I even completely missed Can't Hold Us at the time, which judging by its sales I'm wondering how the hell that was even possible. Thrift Shop on the other hand I remember easily. Going back a few pages but to think that as recently as 2010 a CD single still worked wonders for a chart performance - 'All The Lovers' is the last time I can remember that happening, they were almost extinct in HMVs even then.

...so I'm the *only* one who thinks Shiny Disco Balls is absolutely ace?! Absolutely hooked me when I first heard it, yeah it's got a novelty vocal hook but that backing track is brilliant, properly hypnotic, starting quite minimal and building into a huge distorted frenzy throughout the song. One of my faves of the late '02 era and one of the few really big hits of the time that wasn't (increasingly underwhelming) trancepop. Worth noting that the video posted is what sounds like the 12" mix (6:45!!), the much shorter 3:12 radio edit can be found on Now 53. Heaven I loved at the time, then went off it for a bit as it got overplayed, but today it's sounding great - I can see how serious dance fans would despise this, but at a friend's 21st birthday about two years ago this got a HUGE reaction on the dancefloor, it's a massive trancepop anthem that might be as commercial as ITV but has far more power than a lot of the others mentioned on this page. Agreed that the covers got a bit too much around this time, it's reminding me of when commercial 'rave' degenerated into comedy Tetris/Super Mario songs for kids around the end of 1992. Huge shout out to the happy hardcore brilliance that is Nakatomi's Children of the Night - first charting at a lowly #149 back in 1996, finally reaching the top 40 a whopping six years later in October 2002 when it charted at #31!! One of the oddest re-entries I can think of, particularly in the pre-download era, but I remember someone mentioning here that it was a huge club favourite for years so a proper re-release was perhaps inevitable. O64vSP-Zj6U Speaking of songs that took years to 'hit', I think there's one more to come before 2002 is out - was worried The Cheeky Song would be included (as much as it conjures up good memories of being 14) but its omission paves the way for an anthem of the era!

That's the problem with Scooter, UK radio hates them. I remember being seriously pissed off at the Radio 1 chart show when their album reached #1 - I think they only played a short clip of Jumping All Over The World and then sort of faded it out and went "Ok, that's enough of that" and sneered at it for a bit before moving on, which felt hugely disrespectful to all the thousands who'd bought it that week. Like it's not "real music" unless it's a load of blokes with guitars.

Two Months Off and The Theme are INCREDIBLE jams, hugely different but absolute classics in their respective genres. I saw Underworld a couple times in the late noughties and Two Months Off sounded immense live on the loudspeakers, it's best as its full-length album version though as the radio edit cuts all the build out which is half of the track's magic. Underworld in general is just a brilliant group with way, way more jams other than (the also awesome) Born Slippy which everyone knows. 1997's 'Moaner' almost gave me a heart attack when I first heard it blasted out at a festival, one of the most intense dance tracks I'd ever heard and I don't think I've ever raved so hard in my life to any tune since. Only reached #79 but to be honest you can't imagine daytime radio circa twenty years ago going anywhere near it. HlvzBzLH65w Shake Ya Shimmy's been a fave of mine for about a decade, it's on the three-disc Clubland Classix CD which is an awesome mix of huge trance-pop noughties anthems and more obscure stuff. And 'Walk On Water' - could be ok with a remix but in its official form is a bit too weedy and lifeless for me. And, again, that's someone miming to someone else's vocals in the video...

That classic "Dave on the train" line! Hugely impressive that Scooter hit as high as #4 with the followup, they really were unstoppable during their 2002-3 commercial peak. Amazingly this is their only number 1 hit in their native Germany - over twenty top tens from 1994 to 2009 but only Nessaja managed to make its way to the top. A later Scooter track that I thought was going to be way bigger was 2008's , which was set up for a single release but later cancelled in favour of another track (more of which below). It's got that 'classic' Scooter sound with the vaguely emotive high-pitched singing as heard on Nessaja, Weekend etc, but with a slightly harder dance backing - went top ten in Germany but that was it I think. It was cancelled in favour of the Status Quo-featuring ', which again could have charted seriously well in a lolz-novelty way but they properly messed up the release - it came out in stores in early November only to be immediately pulled a couple days in, the reason given that a 'major event' was planned regarding the song later in the year which I assumed was some kind of Scooter/Quo TV or live appearance, which ended up not happening. It got quietly re-released at Christmas and charted at #57 officially, but #19 on the (still just relevant) physical singles chart. I did read that early physical midweeks had it at #10, but that's a hazy memory I'm unable to confirm.

I read the first post of this thread and thought the 2007 Yves Larock song was about to get a new chart peak.r# (which also charted lower than was perhaps expected - #13 but a huge club favourite back in the late noughties)

It was by DJ Philip that was the hit in the UK. That's Milk Inc's current (since 2000) singer Linda Mertens in the video but I think she's miming to former singer Ann Vervoort's vocals, as Ann had been replaced by Linda by the time of the 2002 remix. Tragically Ann died a few years ago, which makes a bit uncomfortable today to see someone miming to her vocals and getting all the credit...

Wasn't it revealed that record companies would basically spam-call The Box requesting to play their own artists videos, hence why seemingly random songs few cared about would air all the time? And then if they underperformed in week 1 they'd almost immediately disappear and never be played again. And in the very early days, if no one was calling in at all (like during the middle of the night) they'd just show a blank screen until someone did! This changed eventually to playing random videos during quieter times. I have a really odd memory of one of the channels - I think it was Magic - going completely nuts one evening and playing Don't You Want Me by the Human League over and over again for absolutely no reason. I couldn't work out whether the computer system had broken down or some crazy obsessive was calling the channel up and requesting it a million times, or whether it was some kind of joke or gimmick. Something I've never quite worked out is when The Box & other 'music request' channels dropped the interactivity element and just became like any other music channel. It must have been sometime around the late-2000s when Youtube's rise meant the old format had become completely pointless, but back in the late 90s it felt like the coolest thing ever to ring in and request a song. I did it tons from around 1999-2003 and racked up one hell of a phonebill!

Oh god, I was trying to forget that ever existed :puke2: Didn't appear on their Greatest Hits because Liam Howlett hates it, a seriously bad attempt at doing another Firestarter/Breathe and failing miserably - they cancelled the entire album that was in progress and started again shortly after. The eventual album Always Outnumbered Never Outgunned wasn't great anyway tbh, but preferable to the horrors of BGAT.

Tons there! Thoughts: Tell It To My Heart - No. :P Sorry, I love Kelly but this is a mess, yet another late 80s classic butchered. Forever - Don't mind this one, only discovered it a few years back - nothing groundbreaking but a fun listen. It Just Won't Do - Only #14?! This got tons of airplay at the time, enough for a top 5 hit - no idea why it underperformed so much. It's ok but the video's all kinds of erm. Shooting Star - This for me is the only Flip & Fill track that I'll genuinely call fantastic, it's not theirs (a happy hardcore cover from the late 90s) but despite slowing it down it still works seriously well for me, Karen Parry does an awesome job on vocals. Saw her perform this live back in the noughties. Around the World - The UK got a very slightly beefed-up 2002 mix for this, viewable but I struggle to hear much difference. Fun and catchy dancepop and glad it eventually became a hit here after such a ridiculously long wait, sadly the same can't be said for so many other early noughties Europop classics. I do think there was some kind of industry push that year to bring Eurotrance-pop to a wider UK audience, a whole load of European hits from earlier in the decade were finally given UK releases that year. Milk Inc's In My Eyes took even longer - started getting Belgian airplay at the end of 1998, peaked in both Belgium and Australian charts in 1999...finally released here in summer 2002 and went top 10, although as a new remix. Alone - Again the UK mix was different, remade by LMC to sound like less of a 'Something' clone - irritatingly it doesn't seem to be on Youtube but easily found on Spotify. Love the intro but the rest of the track never really did it for me. Just The Way You Are - Bores me a little sadly. I think again this suffered from too much overplay, that 'do do doo do do dodo do' feels permanently burned into my head after all the times I heard it in the noughties. Starry Eyed Surprise - This seriously disappointed me at the time given that two years earlier he'd been responsible for the BRILLIANT Bullet In The Gun - hell, a few months earlier he'd released Southern Sun, and now here was this naff rap track pandering to the still dancephobic North American market. Not great and glad it wasn't included as a dance #1. Speaking of Southern Sun, Oakenfold's original is great but JESUS CHRIST is the Tiesto mix a thing of beauty. Many happy warm summers days I've spent listening to this! OkIJ-8bfGAI

...whereas this one... :puke2: Well, I think I'm pretty alone in disliking this, it seems to be an early noughties fave for many. I personally can't stand it, a cheap cash-in based on an already unneeded 'mashup' of one of the best Madonna songs ever made. Oddly passed me by completely at the time - not quite sure what happened during the summer of 2002 but I missed out on a lot of major hits, mostly only discovering them a year or two later. I might be a little warmer to it if it conjured up any fun memories from the time but instead it leaves me seriously cold, if I heard in it a club I'd just be missing the Madonna original. There's one final missing link in the story above, the Black Legend beat isn't actually theres, it's a 1990 house track by DHS called . So 'Like A Prayer' is a 2002 cover of a 2002 mashup of a 2000 remake of a 1990 song with vocals from 1989! The UK received a different CD single cover than the above, it looked like this (from discogs):

Are there any songs that you heard a remix of first before listening to the original? Did the real original end up being better or something of a disappointment? I'm aware some of the biggest-selling hits of all time have been remixes (Missing, Cheerleader etc) so I think of 'remix' as being just an alternative version to the main version everyone knows, otherwise the list is probably in the hundreds :P A few that come to mind for me: * I first heard 'Wide Open Space' by Mansun as its Perfecto remix, and thought for a while that Mansun were a techno group - was quite surprised to later discover them nothing of the sort! Like both versions equally though. * Amy Winehouse's 'You Know I'm No Good' I first heard as the Ghostface Killah remix, which is basically the original with him rapping in place of the verses - I wasn't that aware of her at the time and assumed the rapper was the lead artist and the singer was the feature act. Still feels odd to hear the original as I still think of it with the rapping. * And U2's 'Even Better Than The Real Thing' I first heard as the remix that was released later (charting higher than the original) - I knew U2 had gone more 'dance' for a while in the 90s but I remember being a bit astonished they'd gone this far down the dance path, finding out it was a remix made it a little more understandable. Any more?

SCOOTAH! ARE YOU READY!!!! (it's actually 'Are you Ratty' based on their pseudonym that reached #51 in the UK with ' ' in 2001, but still) Don't care how much some sneer at them for being naff Euro nonsense, I f%@&ing love Scooter. Their album reaching #1 in 2008 is one of my favourite chart moments ever just cus of how much it shut the haters up, I saw them live twice that year and they were AWESOME both times. Am I right in thinking The Box was a huge factor in this song's success thanks to them adding their video onto their playlist? That would explain the astonishing (for the time) chart run of entering low and rising high later. I remember the live Top of the Pops performance with a slightly baffled audience wondering what the hell they were witnessing, but being well and truly won over a few hits later! Love this track to bits and hugely deserved worldwide hit, even a #1 in Australia of all places.

Agreed totally to Jonjo above. I'm in my late twenties so I'm hardly gonna enjoy the charts as much as my partying college/uni days (2008-2012) but I look back at a year like 1995, which I'd adore if that was the stuff being released now, and wonder what's gone so wrong. I used to think music would evolve into new and exciting sounds - it hasn't, it's gone backwards and boring. It all started so well this year too, I was thrilled when 'In Ibiza' became such a huge #1. Then Drake happened :P

Yeah, this one was inescapable - even in early 2003 you could put a music channel on and expect to see the video of this at some point in the day. Have to embarrassingly admit I had a bit of a crush on one of the women in the video when I was 13 :blush: Think it was the Spanish dancer... Also major LOL at this being the dance #1 again in 2005 :P And that was even after downloads had been added! Combination of extremely low sales and the state of the charts at the time I think, like how half the big hits in 1992 seemed to be re-releases. No idea it got as high as #3 on the re-release, that really does seem ridiculous.

Oh yeah, Forgot about that one, yep I'd put that as trancepop's last gasp in the top 10 - with 'Anthem' as mentioned earlier its last top 40. More on that when we get to it! 'In And Out of Love' completely failing to chart here is just too painful to think about.

Favourite number one single from 2016: Mike Posner - I Took A Pill In Ibiza (SeeB remix) Favourite album from 2016: Pet Shop Boys - Super Favourite solo female single from 2016: Zara Larsson - Lush Life Favourite solo male single from 2016: Douwe Bob - Slow Down Single from 2016 you dislike the most: One Dance Best collaboration from 2016: Alan Walker - Faded (this is my fave song of the year and I couldn't see an obvious category for it, it's not a 'solo male single' or 'group' so I guess counts as a collaboration between DJ/vocalist?) A single from the top 40 that should've gone top 10: Elle King - Ex's and Oh's (top 5 in Australia tho, as was...) Favourite single by a 'group' from 2016: The Chainsmokers - Roses

Just found that, the source used is this DigitalSpy review which is just one bloke's opinion really. I've removed it from the Wikipedia page now. I'm Not Alone is almost trance, it's close but there's no real 'build' in it, the main synth riff just comes in straight away in the same way modern EDM does (a term I really dislike using along with its late-90s equivalent 'electronica' - it's dance music, Americans, stop being difficult!). Definitely influenced by it though and a commercial trance comeback would be glorious, Alan Walker's Faded is the closest we've had to it in years - speed it up a little and it's there. It'll never be the same though, all we'll get is dull vocal pop tracks with vaguely trance-like riffs and hooks in the background and probably all featuring rappers. Ferry Corsten feat. James Arthur & Drake? God no! 'Greyhound' is EDM. 'C'Mon' is similar to the Example track, a big trance build near the start but eventually fizzles out into your standard 2010s EDM 'drop', plus in C'Mon's chart version there's so much rapping over the top you can barely hear the backing anyway. I've tried a few times to work out what the last big trance hit was, only to basically find that impossible as the sound evolves so much with so many sub-genres it's hard to keep track. What I think of as the really 'classic' trance, as in the stuff Ferry, Rank 1 etc were releasing at the turn of the millennium...there's from May 2004 which reached #19, along with another track that same month that might appear in this thread (). Then it gets trickier - (#16 March 2005) is somewhere in the middle between trance and that 'UK hardcore' sound found on all the Clubland CDs, as is (#10 August 2006) which is definitely trance influenced but I wouldn't really call it a trance track, that whole Clubland sound which we'll be seeing loads of later in this thread is a whole other thing for me. Otherwise you might as well call Cascada, Basshunter etc 'trance' which would be like calling 90s Take That Eurodance. Genuinely I think of the first half of 2003 as the end of trance's chart domination, a handful of tracks sneaking into '04 and then commercially at least the charts move away from it.

That same CD shop in Battersea I think I've mentioned before had dozens of copies of 'Will I', 'Reason' and 'Try' for sale back in 2008, all for 10p each! Given the dust on them they looked like they'd been there since new... I've always oddly liked Reason, I give IVD credit for not doing what loads of dance acts do which is just recycle the same sound over and over again, creating steadily more inferior copies of their one big hit single. Say what you like about Castles/Will I/Reason but you can't say they sound identical.

Was gonna grab a copy of Everything I Do, but the only one available digitally on iTunes or Spotify is the full-length 6:33 album version, not the much shorter 4-minute edit that was on the music video, 7" and CD single, played on radio and the hit everyone actually bought at the time, which is a shame. I like the song but not enough to keep my attention a whole two-minutes-thirty more than I should.

Going back to 'At Night' - the radio mix I remember sounds a fair bit different to the one linked in the video, a stronger house beat rather than the more swing-like one heard in the video. Don't think I'd heard 'Freeloader' before - a top 40 hit in the UK in early 2003 (#32). The early part of it makes me wonder if Mylo had it in his mind when making 'Drop The Pressure'!

Wonder if Mark McCabe's Maniac 2000 could finally be a UK hit if his Gavin James remix goes big! Maybe as a 'Maniac 2016' update...

It's September 2008, and while most of what we take for granted today has already made its mark - Twitter was a small but growing community, Facebook was supreme with most having long ditched Myspace for its bluer, cooler rival, and hundreds and counting were regular users of a music forum called Buzzjack - there's still a fair few things that make eight years ago seem almost caveman-like to present day eyes. If you wanted one of those 'smartphone' devices, your best shot was the new iPhone 3G, with its whopping 2-megapixel flashless, focusless and videoless camera. Music downloads were established and the iPod reigned triumphant, but a revolutionary 'streaming' service called Spotify was agonisingly close to being launched, finally hitting desktops at the beginning of October - and even then you needed an invitation to sign-up for it, so good luck going through your Messenger contacts for someone who knew what the hell you were talking about (or was that just me). Otherwise, almost all of the top 40 were still available on shiny physical compact-disc singles, although even just compared to the start of the year you won't find much evidence of that in music stores. But it was also the month that truly set off one of the biggest events of the decade. On September 15th, Lehman Brothers collapsed and what became known as the global recession really kicked into gear. Was I worried? Hell no, I was nineteen!! My twentieth birthday was a week away, I was just starting uni, and surely by my eventual graduation everything would be ok again (hahaha no) - I was too busy partying, getting absurdly drunk and generally bidding farewell to my teens in style to care or realise the impact it was about to have on the world. While time-travel remains regrettably impossible, here's the chart from the last full week of my 19th year, eight years to the day the world said goodbye to Lehman and the chaos that followed. As with previous charts I've reviewed, I'll do the top 40 up to #11 in a block and the top 10 in video-vision, so let's boogie our way to #40 and begin: 40: Sonny J - CAN'T STOP MOVING Starting with one of the cruellest 'misses' and something of a chart injustice. When I first heard this feelgood track in the summer of 2007, I was absolutely enamoured by it and saw a potential massive #1 in the making. But a combination of terrible weather and generally half-assed marketing saw it completely flop, apologetically reaching #80 in September that year. Thankfully it was given another chance the following year. The song was remixed by French DJ Mirwais, adding a stronger beat and some vaguely electro-ish synths in the verses, this time it looked to finally be huge...but, again, the weather was awful and was perhaps released just too late to be a summer anthem. It sneaked up the top 75 but this one week at #40 was the best the track got, with even future appearances on The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent never giving it the high position it's always deserved. Maybe one day it'll 'do an Elbow' (bear with me), for now it's the potential smash that - sadly - never grabbed. 39: Basshunter - ALL I EVER WANTED At our first day at uni we did one of those 'name games' where we say our name and something we enjoy beginning with the same letter as our first. My name's Charlie and I like chocolate, I'm Lucy and I like Lost, I'm Xavier and I adore Xeroradiography etc. Mine, with a stupid smile on my face, was "My name's Billy, and I like Basshunter!". Cringe. But yeah, I was a huge fan of him back in the day, his synth-mad dancepop hugely refreshing after years of landfill indie and a key part of the random but welcome Eurodance 'revival' of the era. This reached #2 a few months earlier and was just still in the top 40, originally a Swedish track called 'DotA' - about, of all things, a custom map of the game World of Warcraft - and uses the melody of a massive early-noughties Eurohit called Daddy DJ, which bafflingly never reached these shores despite its major success across the continent. For DotA's English-language release, the Warcraft lyrics were completely ditched to be about some dull generic love story instead ("All I ever wanted was to see you smiling..." ugh) but no matter as it smashed here anyways. Cheesy to some, horrific to others, I still enjoy it for the happy late-teenage memories it conjures up. I'd go on but there's more of this dude to come... 38: Little Jackie - THE WORLD SHOULD REVOLVE AROUND ME One-hit wonder who passed me by at the time, but when I grabbed a second-hand copy of Now 71 a few years later this blew my mind. This is AWESOME, brilliant retro-pop banger that just gets everything right - the strong beat, the quirky orchestral backing, the sassy and clever vocals (which aren't censored on the Now version *at all* despite some fairly strong profanities at points), this shouldn't have just peaked at #14, this should have been a multi-week #1! That the duo behind this (vocalist Imani Coppola and producer Adam Pallin) have never appeared in the charts since is just ridiculous. , it rocks. 37: MIA - PAPER PLANES Though Sonny J may have underperformed and Little Jackie's success all too brief, here's a great example of a success story with MIA *finally* getting a significant chart hit. I'd loved 'Galang' from a few years earlier, a mad but infectious genre-mashup that was perhaps a bit too uncommercial to chart higher than the #77 peak it reached here. Now she was back and yeah this is much more commercial but still one heck of a tune, its memorable half-vocal half-sound effect chorus of "All I wanna do is *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* *BANG* and a *click* *CHING* and take your money" making it stand out pretty quickly and a big iPod fave for me that autumn. Managed to make it all the way to #19 in the end, and got an even bigger audience when used in the movie hit 'Slumdog Millionaire', released here a few months later in January '09. Unbelievably it was even more massive in the US where it reached #4, an incredible achievement. 36: Sam Sparro - BLACK & GOLD The music of 2008 has a huge amount of good memories for me, but christ did I overplay some of them at the time. I'd only got my first iPod at the end of '07 so at first I had a limited number of songs to choose from, and when this was released I played it to death to the point I'm not sure if I bothered with it at all for at least the next five years as I'd heard it enough to last a lifetime. This was one of the biggest songs of the year, peaking at #2, but seems bizarrely forgotten now and Sam - who I saw live at that year's Wireless Festival - never managed another major hit. Listening to it now, time's been really kind to it, an electro-pop sizzler with a distinctive repetitive thudding synthline which pretty much *was* my summer that year. As I listen to it a whole host of various partying memories zoom across me, many with friends no longer in my life (as in they've moved on rather than no longer being alive, at least I presume they are) but no matter, I'll always have the music. One that feels like it'll have a deserved second lease of life when the "noughties revival" begins in a few years, even if it's just as a crap cover version by Calum Scott. 35: Elbow - ONE DAY LIKE THIS Ah-ha, told you to bear with me at #40! The big and infamous indie hit which, for years, had reached its chart peak this week at #35, and immediately became one of those songs far more well-known than its chart position suggested as it hung around in the lower reaches for ages. An appearance at the Olympics Closing Ceremony four years later finally saw it get its well-deserved new peak of #4, although it half-reached #1 if you count its appearance in the Peter Kay Animated All-Stars Medley that hit the top in 2009. It doesn't really need much else introduction - the one that goes "Throw those curtains wide" etc etc, used in so many uplifting montages over the years it's now become little more than a cliché, although that's actually my least favourite bit of the song - the bit that I keep coming back to is those first few verses, which are a song in their own right until the memorable singalong chorus kicks off a few minutes in. Love it or hate it, it's an anthem of the noughties, and one of the last significant 'indie' hits of the decade along with one we'll be seeing much later. 34: Madonna - GIVE IT 2 ME Nearing the end of the days when Madonna was guaranteed a megahit no matter what she released, I was a bit stunned when I first heard this - having fell in love with her previous Confessions on a Dancefloor album and the #1s it spawned, followup Hard Candy's shift into more R&B territory seemed something of a shame. But a year later when I bought the album for three quid in Fopp, this track especially really stood out, absolutely filled full of different ideas and segments to keep you interested for the whole length of the song - I'd even go as far to say it's one of my fave Madonna tracks, if not up there with the gold dust she was releasing in her peak years of awesome that were 1989 and 1990. Peaked at #7, could have happily gone higher. 33: Queen & Paul Rodgers - C-LEBRITY Or technically just 'Brian May, Roger Taylor And The Bloke Who Sung 'All Right Now'", this was a mid-noughties project with two members of Queen and the former Free/Bad Company singer. They'd spent the last few years touring, and just before the end of the project they released the album 'The Cosmos Rocks' featuring this single, a comment on modern-day fame. Ok, it's not got Freddie's famous voice, but this is fairly close to a Queen track of old, and you can genuinely imagine this being a real release had the band kept themselves together/alive into the new millennium. Happy it reached top 40, but let's face it, this wouldn't reach anywhere near this high today - physicals (which this probably sold most copies on) are now dead other than the niche vinyl market and Spotify would chart a million Drake singles over this. 32: Chris Brown - FOREVER I have to listen to a Chris Brown song? Ugh, and it lasts bloody ages too. Pre the days before we all found out he was a massive violent expletive, he was on fire that year and had Spotify existed he could well have been the Bieber of his day, with this, 'With You' and some other collaboration all charting top 10 within a few months of each other. It still sickens me a little that he still has a career, let alone all the huge #1 singles he's amassed since his 2011 post-assault comeback, but even without that this song would bore me, just your typical meandering and plodding R&B chill track which doesn't take me back to good times on dancefloors, more like shouting "TWO CORONAS AND A STRONGBOW" over the music to a miserable bartender as you fork out a battered £20 note from your jeans pocket. And then inevitably spilling one of them on your way back through the club to your mates. Usually yours. 31: Taio Cruz - SHE'S LIKE A STAR One of my jams of the first half of the year was 'Come On Girl', the debut #5 hit from Mr Cruz which won me over with its synthy-R&B/pop backing and guest verse from Luciana of Yeah Yeah fame. Followup 'I Can Be' only reached #18, and this one only just sneaked into the top 20, so you'd be forgiven for deducing Taio's three-minutes-twenty-four-seconds of fame were long over. In fact he was just getting started, two major #1s to come and chart success right up to 2012, but I can see why this one wasn't one of his biggest - kinda dull, a world away from the more instant pop tunes he's more remembered for. He got a bit irritating eventually ("I THROW MY HANDS UP IN THE AIR SOMETIMES" oh shove off) but the best of his earlier stuff still sounds immense today. 30: Glasvegas - DADDY'S GONE More indie-disco from the last year of the genre's major success, before the early beginnings of 2010s EDM pushed it all out the charts the following year. I was *really* tired of the sound by then, hence my leanings towards the Euro-synth-dancier stuff, so Glasvegas and James Allan's memorable OTT Glasgow-sounding vocals weren't on my musical radar at the time. This reached #12 and was their biggest, and before this writeup I don't think I'd actually heard it before. And I'm enjoying what I hear, most of the track being a massive anthemic buildup with a monumental 'wall of sound' production likened to peak-era Phil Spector, before eventually kicking off drums 'n all at the end. Not quite sure the payoff is as big as the build suggests but still a very neat Strongbows-in-the-air singalonger, and listening to this as a gorgeous September sunrise streams through the windows makes it sound even better. 29: Flo Rida feat. will.i.am - IN THE AYER Not a misprint, that's how Will sings it - presumably it was just meant to be 'In The Air' but when they listened back to the vocals thought "Lol it sounds like 'ayer'" and just titled it that, either that or they really love a small village in the district of Sierre, Switzerland. From Flo's album 'Mail on Sunday', so called as it was given free with the newspaper of the same name (not really) it's got a fantastic backing track, but other than that it's just three minutes of people rapping about...stuff, I'm not particularly sure what, and even the backing is (as usual) sampled from another song so you might as well just listen to that. But it's not bad, it's quite catchy really and enjoyably quirky at points especially when Will's vocals pitch-shift up at the end for no obvious reason, a trick he'd later use on the Black Eyed Peas tracks that would dominate the end of the decade and early next. Indeed it sounds so much like the sort of thing that would be a major hit in a year or two I'm amazed that the #29 here was this song's peak (a top 10 in the US and New Zealand), especially with the names involved although I suppose Flo was still building his fanbase and Will a few months before the BEP comeback regenerated his. Said Swiss village merged with several other villages to form a new municipality just four months later, presumably due to the huge influx of tourists they were getting throwing their hands in the Ayer, A-Ayer, Ayer, A-Ayer. Or not. 28: Duffy - STEPPING STONE Soul-voiced former megastar who in true Welsh fashion has the hardly-spellable first name 'Whateverhappenedto', or that might just be how everyone refers to her now. Ah no I can't be too cruel, this was one of the many 'new Amys' flung onto the scene in 08-09 when the real Miss Winehouse got too out of control, Duffy's first name *genuinely being* Amy (ok, 'Amie' but same thing amirite) for added lolz. It all looked so promising at one point, a sheepload of hits throughout the year including one of the biggest-sellers of the era with 'Mercy', this reached #21 but isn't one of her most memorable, a downtempo number that you could easily imagine as a Massive Attack single with a beat and Tricky rap thrown over the top - interestingly this *was* at one point planned to be the big uptempo banger that 'Mercy' later became, which I can certainly hear in my head but not quite sure it would have had the same impact. Was it really just a slightly misguided Diet Coke that ended the run of fortune? Maybe, but more the lack of any obvious hits on the second album and Adele completely dominating the sound just as she returned. Surely she'll have another hit one day but for now 'Rockferry' remains a good listen and nicely evocative of the year. 27: Ne-Yo - CLOSER Our first former #1, no relation to the Chainsmokers hit that's currently #1 as I type. Ok, in theory this isn't too far off the dirge that is 'Forever' we heard earlier, but with a stronger beat, a catchier chorus and generally a slightly more exciting sound, this all works much better even if it still runs out of ideas before the end of its almost four-minute runtime. I may be biased as this was a club fave for years, but for a genre I've never been massively keen on this certainly has its fun moments and up there with the better ones. 26: Artists Stand Up To Cancer - JUST STAND UP Blimey, a charity single I don't remember at all. The artist and song names indicate the possibility of it just being a kind of 4'33/Two Minute Silence style masterpiece of just the sound of loads of famous people standing up, but while it isn't quite that it does have a fairly impressive lineup of artists - Mariah, Beyonce, Rihanna, Leona and more, turns out it's from a US telethon that aired on several TV networks stateside that month and no music video was made for it, perhaps explaining why the #26 here was its peak. And that it isn't really a memorable song, just people singing over the top of each other that at times sounds so disjointed it's like you're in an LA music recording studio hearing loads of megastars recording different songs at once. But hey, it's fighting cancer, and cancer sucks, so I'll give them credit all the same. 25: Keane - SPIRALLING I wrote in my last chart review how Keane went from one of the best albums of the noughties (2004's Hopes & Fears) to steadily more underwhelming releases after, this was the lead track from their third album which somewhat underperformed by only peaking two places higher than this, a fairly major drop from the #3 that Is It Any Wonder achieved when released as second-album's opener two years later. Startling new territory with its great opening disco-electro backing and "Woo!" vocals, but I'm not quite sure the rest of it lives up to its promise despite making a good effort throughout. The Wikipedia page for it has the baffling statement that the song became "the most broadcast song of the world" during its first week of release which sounds a bit exaggerated. 24: Basshunter - ANGEL IN THE NIGHT Jonas Altberg returns with more freshly-hunted bass! Single #3 and one that didn't quite match the #1 and #2 of Now You're Gone and All I Ever Wanted, but still did well by rising to #14. It's more of the same, and is missing the big synth hooks that the first two singles had in favour of what sounds like him frantically hitting the keyboard until a strong melody comes out. But for now at least the formula's still just working, and he remained a big name enough to headline Ministry of Sound's Dance Nation tour in April the following year, one I attended and got to see the dude live! To be fair he stormed it, the crowd loved him and the various 'comedy' skits he took part in between songs bizarrely amusing in an eccentrically-Scandinavian sort of way. A few more top 40 tracks carried on until 2010, as did a Celebrity Big Brother appearance (it says here) until a new generation of DJs arrived. But Sweden remains a hit-making powerhouse, so give him a Zara Larsson track to collaborate on and he could very well make the comeback of the decade! Well, behind Daft Punk. And Timberlake. And Bieber, Maroon 5, PJ & Duncan... 23: McFly - LIES Oh was it cool to hate on these guys in the noughties. Floppy-haired kids making crap guitar music for ten-year-old girls, songs that would reach #1 and then fall out the top 20 the following week (or something), indeed it's only once I left my twenties that I began to view them as a little better than my sneering teen self saw them at the time - ok, some of their cover versions belong in a landfill but you can't hate on Five Colours In Her Hair and Obviously too much, they're pop anthems of the decade. By '08 we're in their later phase as they tried modernising and updating their sound to stay relevant to their increasingly-aging fanbase, and this one's from the album 'Radio:Active' which was released free with the Mail on Sunday, although quite why Flo Rida fans would be interested in new McFly songs is anyone's guess (oh I *know*, I'm just being silly) - and I actually really like this! Still very poppy, but sonically at another level from the stuff they were releasing before and combines both a catchy guitar-hook and chorus, and today I'll listen to this and other McFly tunes without shame. 22: Alphabeat - BOYFRIEND Another act, like Sam Sparro and his black and gold, that I overplayed the living life out of through the year, their sugar-coated guitar-pop an absolute joy to listen to as the optimistic 19 year old I was. 'Fascination' is the one everyone remembers, their biggest hit peaking at #6 in the Spring and hanging around for ages, but when followup '10,000 Nights' reached #16 there was worry that their success was going to be brief. I'd seen them live in the June, and as they announced one of their "favourite tracks on the album" - Boyfriend - the crowd cheered like crazy before a single note was played, making it the obvious choice for the next release. And it ended up slightly improving on single 2 by reaching #15, there was hope after all! And again it's great, easily one of the best on the album and came with an actually-quite-brilliant retro 80s sounding remix by Pete Hammond that turned it into a first-album Kylie-sounding single. Two further hits would follow through 2009-10, but peaking at #20 and #29 the novelty of them was sadly wearing off here, lead singer Stine Bramsen later enjoying a major Scandinavian solo hit with Prototypical. Odd to listen to them now after how much I overplayed them at the time, and occasionally painful when I see the album I paid £10 for new in a ton of charity shops for less than a quid, but it's great how a a fun-loving bubblegum Danish pop group managed to briefly make it big here a decade after the last fun-loving bubblegum Danish pop group did. Sadly the Aqua vs. Alphabeat single of our dreams has yet to materialise. 21: Iglu & Hartley - IN THIS CITY This is another one I don't really remember new, but discovered years later on that copy of Now 71 when I fell in love with Little Jackie's single. And this, again, is brilliant, another one-hit wonder lost in the black hole midsts of time between "old school" (any year up to about 2006) and "recent" (2011 or so to present). People harp on about 'summer' songs but this is a great example of an autumnal one, a style hard to explain but a sort of wistful, looking-back, end-of-the-road-but-a-new-one-ahead type of sound that always sounds fantastic as the leaves turn brown and the nights get longer. See also Chipmunk's 'Oopsy Daisy' from the following year for another great example, and late 2007's charts a year earlier were full of them - Young Folks, Hey There Delilah, Dream Catch Me etc. I really can't imagine them working at any other time of year, and this midtempo pop-rap track was a deserved top 5 hit a couple weeks later. One to rediscover now as September rumbles on and the last of the summer weather slips away. 20: Steve Mac - PADDY'S REVENGE Back to dance music and this had a ton of hype attached to it at the time, so much so that the #17 peak it eventually got felt a bit disappointing. It's all based around a simple gimmick - an 'Irish jig' turned techno - and the video plays this up to somewhat OTT levels with violins and pots of gold and an over abundance of green throughout, along with your typical-for-the-era scantily-clad women to seal the deal. The full mix at almost 7 minutes is a bit pisstakingly long, but cut down to 2:30 for radio play it's not a bad listen, even if you've heard the whole thing by a minute in. But if you've got Now 71, be warned that you're not quite listening to the right version - something's gone weirdly wrong with the mastering on Now 71's copy and it's been sped up to almost chipmunky levels (if there were vocals, which there aren't), either that or it's an alternate mix/edit they put on the album accidentally or not. Or the compiler just hated it and wanted it to be over as quick as possible, I dunno. 19: Noah & The Whale - 5 YEARS TIME Something of a summer '08 anthem, this extremely pleasant guitar ditty was an unexpected smash a few weeks earlier, peaking at #7 - a simple love story entertaining the notion that in five years time, "we" - as in, the female sung about by vocalist Charlie Fink, rather than the actual person listening to the song which would be a bit creepy - could be walking around a zoo, sun shining down and all that, but as the song goes on the idea that things could all go horribly wrong and they might hate each other is also theorised. Backing vocals provided by Laura Marling of Laura Marling fame, this is another one I seriously overplayed that year but there's still something wonderful about it all, a nice break from the shouty pop and bass-heavy dance elsewhere in the chart and on a sunny day this continues to sound perfect. Five years later, sadly no follow-up single was released detailing whether they really did make it to that zoo or not - not even a photoshoot with the band comically posing next to some penguins or anything - and they eventually split last year, but luckily I got to see them at V Festival 2012 to an obviously adoring audience while they were still active. 18: Flobots - HANDLEBARS So this one escaped me so much that I don't even know what genre I'm about to listen to as I hover over the Spotify link - I'm presuming obscure indie, but maybe R&B? Even dance? Turns out it's actually something rather clever, starting out as a few plucked guitar strings with the singer informing us he can ride a bike with no handlebars, no handlebars, no handlebars, before slowly losing his mind as he starts nu-metal style rapping/eventually shouting about all the other things he can do as the backing gradually turns into a madhouse of distorted guitar and drumrolls, some trumpet thrown in for good measure. As a one-off gimmick it's pretty memorable, peaking at #14, but it remains Flobots' only hit which is understandable as a whole career of this sort of thing would probably get a little stale after the fifth single or so. Even so I *really* rate this, a more-than-interesting track with a fun build-up throughout, god knows how I missed it at the time but I was probably playing Noah & The Whale too much to notice it. 17: Coldplay - VIVA LA VIDA Another former #1, and astonishingly Coldplay's first ever, after 2005's 'Speed of Sound' was narrowly beaten to the top by a novelty computerised unhinged frog. I went to Italy that summer and this was playing all the time, so straight away I'm taken to 30+ Milan sunshine which is never a bad thing. As with most Coldplay tracks it's got that grand and 'epic' quality that sometimes veers into cliché - I can't listen to 'Fix You' seriously anymore thanks to all the times it's been parodied - but this is one of the best #1s of the year all the same, a soaring string-heavy track up there with my Coldplay faves. The Pet Shop Boys covered this on their tour the following year and released it as a track on their Christmas EP, but nah, stick to the original. 16: Jordin Sparks feat. Chris Brown - NO AIR Oh christ, not him again...well, at least he's just a 'featuring' on this one. This is actually a slickly-produced American pop-ballad featuring the winner of 2007's American Idol series (Jordin, not Chris) and is generally her biggest hit in most countries, top 3 here although in some countries she managed at least three more top tens during her few years at the top. As with a lot of US pop, particularly of this era, it's not really hitting me, too fancy and Disneyfied without an 'edge' that I presume they tried to bring in with Chris Brown, but he can naff off. Later single 'Battlefield' from her next album is way better, which just missed the top 10 when it peaked at #11 the following year. 15: The Verve - LOVE IS NOISE Downbeat indie kings of the late 90s with a much-hyped comeback, one that ended soon after as the other band members felt like pawns to help lead singer Richard Ashcroft's solo career, a problem we haven't seen the last of in this chart. To reach #4 with your first release in ten years is pretty good going, though like Queen earlier you can't imagine them doing so well in the Spotify era - the Stone Roses came pretty close earlier this year though, so who knows. It's not bad, fitting in perfectly with late noughties indie despite their decade away, but not as instant as their 90s stuff for me. 14: Ne-Yo - MISS INDEPENDENT Follow-up to the Closer we've already seen and another eventual top ten, this bored the life out of me when I first heard it and it's not doing much for me now either, although the opening synthy bit is something of a grower. The start suggests a Kevin Lyttle 'Turn Me On' style banger, but then it all goes smugly downtempo and chilled and I'm asleep a minute in. God knows how this did so well, I'm obviously 'miss'ing (ha!) the point. Maybe people were drawn to the song's message of a hard-working woman who does her own thing without others getting in her way, although the video somewhat destroys the point by showing Mr Yo in an office setting ogling every woman he sees. Ends with "the boss" (one of said women) apologising for cutting him off, asking if there's anything she can do for him. "What did you have in mind?" asks Ne-Yo, grinning into the camera like he's in a Carry On film. I presume they cut the comedy trumpet noise and the ghost of Kenneth Williams shouting "Ooh, matron!" at the last minute. 13: Dizzee Rascal, Calvin Harris and Chrome - DANCE WIV ME Well, this one doesn't need much introduction. I remember when this first hit Youtube, and wow, the fury of some of the comments - "THIS IS F&@%ING POP!" screamed one fan in a way I presume was negative. Yep, this is the moment former Grime king decided, screw it, I want #1 hits and enough money to retire on and ditched the musical creativity and hard-hitting lyrics for a radio-friendly pop track about 'dancing' with women in clubs ("I'm still hardcore!!" he desperately pleads) helped by some bloke called Calvin Harris who had yet to legally add the word "Featuring" to the end of his name by deed poll. Yeah, I loved this at the time, I'd been listening to Dizzee since 2004's second album Showtime, and while I secretly knew this wasn't as good as the older stuff I still played the hell out of it that year, and to be fair it *is* hella catchy. I just wish it was some new rapper who didn't have the baggage of groundbreaking grime behind him, and while the Rascal himself would go on to create some of the biggest and most memorable hits of 2009, it would lead to all sorts of similar artists ditching their roots for mainstream party songs like this over the next few years which always felt something of a shame. I ended up seeing Dizzee live three times, once supporting The Prodigy in early '09, again later that year at the Wireless Festival, and a third time supporting Muse (I know, I'm not sure of the logic either) in 2013. The two '09 shows featured pretty much his entire grime back catalogue with this and a couple more recent hits thrown in every so often, and were awesome. The 2013 show only had one pre-Dance Wiv Me song, Fix Up Look Sharp, and was an immense disappointment in comparison. How the mighty fall... 12. Gym Class Heroes feat. The Dream - COOKIE JAR Now this felt like a surprise at the time, I wasn't expecting the singers of previous year smash 'Cupid's Chokehold' to return with another top ten hit with their next album. This reached #6, and the UK was the only territory where it charted so significantly, missing top 40 in most countries. It does have a really nice backing, I'm presuming the cookie jar of the title is some kind of metaphor for women or something given how much the singer moans about not able to keep his hands, his hands, his hands off it. Or he just seriously likes cookies and couldn't resist making a song about it, your guess is as good as mine. It's ok, good for the odd listen. 11: Miley Cyrus - SEE YOU AGAIN Oh, we certainly will. Wasn't quite expecting a wrecking ball but you did half-warn us all the same. The first ever hit for who was then a squeaky-clean fifteen year old Disney star, and I'm fairly sure this is the first time I've heard it - I was expecting something a little more early S-Club than this, instead it's a pop-rocky track about teen love which was presumably seen as edgy enough to release as her debut at the time. I don't really have much opinion on it - Miley's later HEY LOOK MEDIA LOOK WHAT I'M DOING NOW bollocks would go on to irritate the hell out of me five years later, but at this point she was an inoffensive teen act I could happily ignore. So we reach the top ten, and video time for what everyone was downloading (and in one significant case, physically buying) this time eight years ago: 10: Biffy Clyro - MOUNTAINS NfzwM4pdyxU Down from its #5 peak two weeks earlier, the biggest hit for the Scot-rockers although a retitled version of 'Many of Horror' would be a #1 for some X Factor bloke a few years later. He is the mountain, he is the sea and apparently you can't take that away from him. Fair enough, give it a (Eve)rest - keep them, cus this isn't doing much for me at all, the type of dull indie that I've already mentioned I was sick of by now. I like the piano work during the bridge about two minutes in, but while it could be a grower it's not immediate enough for me right now. Give me a few ciders, blast it out in a club at 3am and turn the clocks back eight years and maybe my opinion could change tho. 9: Kid Rock - ALL SUMMER LONG uwIGZLjugKA A shock #1 at the time, and even more of a headscratcher now, someone who'd had their first hit here in 1999 and never charted higher than #25 randomly striking gold with this, a top seller all over Europe, Oz and New Zealand with ironically the only real underperformer being his native United States where this missed top 20. I remember comparisons with 'Dance Wiv Me' above at the time, former credible performer releases his most commercial thing ever and immediately reaches #1. This is *desperate* in its ultimately successful hit-making attempt, taking two memorable riffs from two famous 70s tracks - Warren Zevon's 'Werewolves of London' for the piano and Lsomething's Skysomething's 'Sweet Home Alabama' for the de-de-de-deow de-de-de-de-deow guitar - and singing some wistful 'nostalgic' nonsense of being young and carefree and "smoking funny things" over the top, although oddly using the year 1989 as the era in question, which although fits Rock's age (he'd have been 18) is a bit anachronistic when it comes to the songs sampled from a decade previous, a better choice surely being a Back To Life/Pump Up The Jam mashup. Both songs sampled were major hits in North America but few places else, which perhaps explains the big-everywhere-except-the-US chart story. But really, it was still *that* massive? Still baffles me, one of those odd megahits I'll never truly get and really my summer was preoccupied with other songs rather than this. 8: Madcon - BEGGIN' 8YVrnLa8V8M Norway make a rare appearance in the UK charts, not that I knew at the time as I assumed it was two blokes from North America - neither did I know it was based on an old Four Seasons track from the 60s, with some rap thrown in to be down with da kidz. A year earlier there was a dance remake of the Four Seasons original by a DJ called Pilooski, presumably Madcon saw an opportunity for a easy hit and released this a few months later - either that or it's just one of those odd chart coincidences. Anyway Madcon won in the charts with Pilooski's remake charting here at #34 and Madcon reaching #5. It's ok, and I remember enjoying at the time, but not one I'd listen to tons today, once you've got past that initial sample there's not much else here. 7: The Script - THE MAN WHO CAN'T BE MOVED gS9o1FAszdk Poundland's Coldplay who deserve credit for battling indie's 2010s downturn and surviving well into the next decade, even if it's taken middling will.i.am collaborations to do it. Until 'Hall of Fame' became their first #1 in 2012, this was their biggest hit, a #2 in August '08 and hung around the top 10 for ages. I do enjoy some of their tracks, 'Breakeven' makes deserved re-appearances every so often and 2010's 'For The First Time' a nice listen, this one's never hit me for some reason. It's just a bit too bland, background music rather than something I'd actually sit down and listen to. 6: Eric Prydz - Pjanoo llfNRGQ7Tlg Oh I adored this, a rare instrumental dance track that they could have easily spoilt by slapping vocals by a rising soul-voiced star of the moment over the top (who then 'mysteriously' appears in the BBC's Sound of 20xx as if it wasn't planned all along) but major respect to the Call On Me/Proper Education DJ for taking the risk and just releasing the instrumental, all based on a simple piano riff that could easily have come out of 1995 and building on it throughout before reaching a huge hands-in-the-air last minute or so. Like Paddy's Revenge earlier, the full mix - 7 and a half minutes! - labours it a bit too long, but it's full of power in its short but extremely sweet two minutes forty. And check out the video, finally something original without resorting to women-in-bikinis-being-sexy for once - which given how 'Call On Me' kinda started that era off is all the more impressive! Smashed at #2, not quite enough to unseat one of the most irritating tracks of the era - one which, regrettably, is still in the top five... 5: Rihanna - DISTURBIA E1mU6h4Xdxc ...but not this one. From the album Good Girl Gone Bad, still being mined for singles despite being over a year old, but with everything Rihanna released charting high at this point you can't blame them. We're a couple years away from her truly being the biggest singer in the history of the planet ever (or at least that's what her hype circa 2011 suggested) but she'd already had the 10-week #1 that was 'Umbrella' so she was certainly already part of pop's A-list. There's only a few of her tracks I genuinely enjoy listening to, the occasional hit that grabs me but a lot of dull mainstreamity to sift through first, and this one unfortunately bores me, not uptempo enough to be a club banger but not slow enough to work as a chillout track and just ends up in the middling middle. And that 'bam bam de um' hook that runs throughout just *irritates* me, which perhaps doesn't help. I have the same issue with a lot of Beyonce stuff from this era, with it sometimes feeling like people are just buying the track because IT'S BEYONCE/IT'S RIHANNA rather than, you know, actually being good...but they're mega-famous billionaires and I save up £1.99 burger & fries McDonalds vouchers from newspapers, so what do I know. 4: Nicole Scherzinger feat. Some Backing Singers - WHEN I GROW UP K0K46C82v9o Oh alright, yeah this was credited to 'The Pussycat Dolls' but infamously this really is just Nicole front stage with four increasingly irritated women mixed so low you can barely hear them behind her - no wonder they split up just a few singles later. I do remember liking this one when it first hit but now I'm wondering what the hell I was on, there's barely *anything* in this other than some dross about growing up and being famous and having...yeah, I thought they were singing "boobies", but it is apparently "groupies" which isn't that better. Ironic or not, it's seriously dreary and belongs in the depths of the noughties past. Will admit to loving Nicole's later (real) solo track 'Don't Hold Your Breath' a couple years later though, great memories attached to that. 3: Cliff Richard - THANK YOU FOR A LIFETIME bx0djK5eWxM Yep. Uh-huh. This so easily could have been #1. Imagine that - Cliff, who by now was 68 and celebrating 50 years of his music career, becoming the first and only person to have a #1 single in every single decade the charts have ever existed. He's the only one to do it from the 50s to the 90s - last #1 'The Millennium Prayer' infamously selling a TON at the end of 1999 - and as the noughties reached its close, the campaign for this single began, a major attempt to give Cliff his first noughties #1 and continue an unmatched record. And just a couple years earlier when CDs were bigger, this would have done it - it shot with ease to the top of the physical singles chart by a massive margin, 31,765 physical copies sold and some assumed he had this in the bag. But on downloads? About 1,600. Had Cliff's fans realised how big iTunes had become, and bought even just *half* of the CD sales total on downloads (to be fair, if they had computers at all they probably didn't have iTunes installed) then this would have done it, so despite selling more copies than he managed when 2006's '21st Century Christmas' reached #2, a top 3 place was the best he got. Really can't see him ever reaching #1 again now unless some epic Major Lazer collaboration is in the works, and stranger things have happened. From what I can see, there's no official video for this - the only ones on youtube are fan-made from the same time this was out, including the above. Really there's not much point trying to review the song itself - an inoffensive ballad thanking his fans, various looking-back lyrics in an All Summer Long stylee - as the campaign is the reason for this being here, rather than the song itself. But while it's extremely fashionable to sneer at Cliff, I give him credit for managing to keep his chart career alive a whopping half-century, something barely anyone else still alive (McCartney I suppose) has managed to do. And I prefer listening to this than the single below. 2: Katy Perry - I KISSED A GIRL tAp9BKosZXs GOD did I hate this. The first single for a future megahitmaker who chooses to break into the charts with a track giggling about kissing a girl and liking it. The sort of thing a two-year-old would find edgy, a track based on a 'gimmick' as a sort of 'All About That Bass' of its day, and just generally on a desperation level of Kid Rock times ten. And, no, she's not a lesbian so you can't even say this is a positive message for anyone struggling with their sexuality - this is cheapening it all to get played on the radio and written about in the media and getting the huge #1 that she did with ease. Hated, hated, hated it, in a way that might seen overly harsh to those who enjoyed this but the OVERPLAY it proceeded to get over the next six months or so (until the slightly-better-but-still-not-great'Hot N Cold' replaced it) made it even worse, the only joy being ironically shouting the lyrics in clubs in a comedy manly laddish voice ("HOPE MY BOYFRIEND DON'T MIND IT") which would always amuse at least someone on the dancefloor. She has done some better songs since, with the 'Prism' era being genuinely quite brilliant, along with a few oh-god-please-make-it-stop overplayed monsters ("Do you ever feel..." NO GO AWAY) so does deserve her continued success, but at the time this felt like an awful cheap one-hit-wonder that I wanted away with as soon as possible. But, thankfully, it wasn't #1 this week at least. That honour goes TO... 1: Kings of Leon - SEX ON FIRE RF0HhrwIwp0 This one. Surely the biggest rock 'anthem' of the late noughties, as overplayed as Perry and went top ten all over again a year later. Can't really say much that hasn't been said here, I didn't like it at the time and its overplay right into the next year made me briefly despise it, until a fair few happy memories put it finally in the don't-mind-it level I'm with it today. Thanks for reading and looking back with me to 2008 good/bad/ugly times!

Oh man, Shake Ur Body has such a good start but the moment those vocals come in it all just completely fizzles out :( I appreciate it for being a rare D&B top 10 hit this early but Addicted to Bass manages to do it all so much better, this is exactly the sort of thing that made vocal D&B so dull in the 2010s - a mediocre vocal pop track with a bland drum loop behind it, made even worse here by sounding so low in the mix compared to the vocals it barely needs to be there at all. Particularly a shame as Shy FX absolutely kicked ass just six years earlier with Original Nuttah, a massive anthem of the jungle era. EDIT: Actually, thinking about it more Shy probably knew exactly what he was doing - a deliberate attempt at a D&B/pop crossover to be played on radio and get the kids on board, in the hope that they'd be encouraged to listen to more D&B and eventually end up raving away in Fabric when older. Looking at it like that it does its job well, particularly when you consider how few D&B tracks had really crossed over and made it at the time. Still not my cup of tea though. Temple of Dreams on the other hand is fascinating - half of it's early noughties trance (the opening and middle builds) and the other half a foreshadowing of future EDM, that main synth lead could come from almost any song in the last five years!

I don't think there was much of a delay in this case - 'Something' might have first been recorded in 2000 but it definitely didn't start smashing across Europe until late 2001, so the gap between that and the UK release was only a few months. Wikipedia says it charted in 2000 but the links further down on the page say otherwise. Vocals aren't Jelle Van Dael's by the way, she was only born in 1990 so would have been far too young at the time! They're by Evi Goffin, Jelle replaced her in the group a few years later. (ah yeah, just seen gooddelta saying the same thing above me) The song itself - the "I don't want to say I'm sorry" opening is great, and I love the vocals throughout, but I've never been too keen on the rest of the song. Once the beat comes in it's all just too poppy, it sounds mixed for radio rather than club play and it's not got that 'kick' other Eurohits like Castles In The Sky do. It's a bit too minimal for me, but given a remix it would be great.