BillyH

I think it's one of those genres whose definition depends from person to person, in the same way everyone's classification of "dance" music is individual. Stardust, Phats & Small, Daft Punk etc I think of as filtered house, and Eric Prydz/United Nations/Hi-Tack/pretty much every major dance hit of the mid-noughties I think of as looped house.

One of the many tracks that missed out as dance #1 during Silence's reign is an almost-forgotten gem from Fatboy Slim, one of my faves of his if nowhere near as remembered today as his 98-99 stuff: First time I heard it was on the Ministry of Sound Annual 2000 CD, where a slightly sped up version mixed surprisingly brilliantly into Spiller's Groovejet. Fatboy Slim was incredible at his peak, and I found it something of a shame that his mid-noughties stuff fizzled out into "nice video, shame about the song" irrelevance - Eat Sleep Rave Repeat was pretty good but that charted as a Calvin Harris remix.

That's the one. Just wow - the Airscape mix is the one I first heard and fell in love with but huge respect to Tiesto's too, even in the mid-noughties this was just one of the most incredible things I'd ever heard. One of the first songs I downloaded from iTunes when their Music Store launched a few years later - I liken it to 'Insomnia' by Faithless in that the best bit's the one at the very end, building up until reaching that moment. Makes me all the more annoyed that I was still only a kid when it came out so missed its club-play peak, in fact I've only heard this once in a club and that was way back in 2008, but still sounded pretty damn special!

Think I'm right in that one of the biggest anthems of the decade is coming up next - I'll save more thoughts for when it's posted! Until then, let's just gaze on the brilliance of the tracklisting of Now 47, disc 2 especially full of jams. After being spoilt for choice in 1999 I often forget how great a lot of 2000 was too...

I Turn To You...I've never found it *great* unfortunately :( I remember it sounding ok as a kid, but when I rediscovered it about eight years later I was kinda underwhelmed. The beat's too low down in the mix for it to properly kick - I suppose understandably so as it's intended as a Mel C dancepop song rather than a 'Hex Hector feat. Mel C' club track, so her vocals have to be far higher than the backing. But if there's a remix out there that keeps the trance sound but throws a harder beat in then I'm in for one hell of a heavenly listen! EDIT: And Modjo just as I was writing this! Nice and catchy, nostalgic of the era (think this was #1 the week I started secondary school), a nice listen if not on the level of the trancier stuff. EDIT EDIT: And cus I've been away for a few days...massive love for Time To Burn, an fantastic example of electro done right and a ton better than the stuff that was charting highly by 2006 or so. There's a dance #1 coming up very soon which mixes into this brilliantly, indeed several mix CDs of the era would feature them as a pair!

Yeessss! Craig from the top of my dole! (Or whatever it was) One of the most evocative songs of summer 2000 for me, linked in the mind with Pokemon, Big Brother series 1 and my imminent start of secondary school - 'Freestyler' does almost feel like the end of an era in that respect for me, the last truly happy summer for about six or seven years :P Still great.

Don't forget the too, not dance in the slightest but a Britpop classic :P (even though I prefer Walkaway) Sunstorm is also definitely worth , quite forgotten now but I listened to it a lot during sleepless nights as a mid-noughties teen. What the hell, while we're on underrated trance classics, here's another from 2000... (#35 in May 2000)

Regarding the Bryan Adams song - Summer/Autumn 1991 was a time when the charts became absolutely dominated by hardcore rave acts, and even Right Said Fred's I'm Too Sexy - while hardly a 'rave' track - had a strong 'dance' sound of the time which would have sounded pretty alien even half a decade earlier. The gentle soft-rock guitar sound of Everything I Do would have made it stand out hugely on the Woolworths/HMV/etc shelves of the time, being one of the only non-rave/dance songs high up in the charts, and this is what I think helped ensured its success for so long. Remember this was an era where, like today, people of a certain age were getting extremely worried about the state of the charts - vinyl record sales were sliding but CDs weren't catching on quick enough, kids and teens were spending their money on video games more than music releases, and the invasion of these new - and to some rather terrifying - "dance" songs caused some disgust at the time, a DJ pressing some samples on a keyboard not seen as "real" music in the same way any new trend is sneered at first. This is when 'Top of the Pops' banned miming and forced everyone to sing live, which was a huge problem for half the chart as there wasn't any actual live singing in their singles - causing some very odd (and memorable) performances! So again, a "real" singer with a "real" musical instrument singing a "real" song would have stood out a lot to the average shopper, ahead of such obscure new faces such as "The Prodigy" and "The Shamen", neither of whom will surely never have a #1 single in a million years :P Or maybe I'm just overthinking it...I find the late 80s/early 90s a fascinating time in general!

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was released in the UK on Friday July 19th 1991, near the end of Everything I Do's second week at #1 - so the song was already an established hit before most even saw the movie. Unlike the song, the movie was only #1 at the box office for two weeks - 'Terminator II' would be the truly huge movie of that year's summer. Four Weddings and a Funeral was Friday 13th May 1994, and two days later the chart announced on Sunday 15th May had Wet Wet Wet a new entry at number 4, which in those days was astonishingly high for a first weeker. It rose to #2 the following week and its first week at #1 was the week after. Surprisingly 'Four Weddings', while seen as a huge classic of the 90s today, was never the #1 on the weekly box office chart - that honour went to, of all things, 'Ace Ventura Pet Detective' followed by the third Naked Gun movie! I suppose it's one of those movies that always did well without having huge mainstream appeal, unlike the Wet Wet Wet song. While we're here...'The Bodyguard' opened on Boxing Day 1992. Whitney's 'I Will Always Love You' had already been #1 for a month - her first week at the top was 29th November - but the film was massive right into early 1993, ensuring even after Christmas and into January (and February) the song would dominate in the charts. Not a box office #1 though, Christmas 1992 was the era of Home Alone II and especially The Muppet Christmas Carol.

Gotta admit I've been distinctly underwhelmed by a lot of the noughties dance #1s so far, I see 2000 as one of the greatest years ever for music but most of my faves weren't actually #1. Sandstorm though, jesus christ yes - not just a great of 2000 but all-time for me. Everything I love about dance in one song, and I've always been pleasantly surprised that it never got butchered with a vocal track - you'd think they'd at least have some bloke whispering "Sandstorm!" throughout the song so people knew what it was, but thankfully it remained an instrumental classic. Had the likes of Spotify and especially Shazam existed back then I could see it being a huge multi-week #1. Black Legend passed me by at the time and I remember thinking "Huh?" when I first saw it on a list of #1 singles about three years later. I like some bits of it, but it got butchered twice between original white label and commercial release - first the replacement of Barry's original sampled vocals by a soundalike, which turned it from "clever remix" to "novelty cover version", and then a radio edit that reshuffles it and chops all the best bits out and makes it sound less dance and more cheesy pop. More of that pleasingly thudding house beat (which we might hear again if a summer 2002 track reaches #1 on this thread) and less "Put your hands together! Put your hands together!" and I'd enjoy it much more. Here's the original Black Legend white label version with Barry White's original vocals, for those who want to compare. The first time I assumed I was hearing it was on an internet radio station, but I couldn't hear anything remotely dance about it - then I realised the song I was listening to wasn't Black Legend at all and just the 70s Barry White original!

Anyone fancy giving 1995 a crack? I had a try but there's so many big and long-running hits, particularly near the end of the year, it's difficult to guess which ones would still have been #1 on streaming - would Set You Free have got there? Common People? Guaglione? Missing? Wonderwall? And would Robson & Jerome have had anywhere near the success they did? I think streaming would have boosted the Outhere Brothers even more, I can see them being huge Spotify faves - and, as controversial as it may sound, I don't think 'Some Might Say' would have made it. Instead Take That's 'Back For Good' would have hung on another week, followed by 'Dreamer' for a bit and maybe even a quick appearance of Guaglione, I can imagine it getting tons of streams at ironic student house parties of the time. The trickiest is the Set You Free/Think Twice battle. In theory you'd assume Celine would do excellently on sales but N-Trance would kill it on streams, but I think Celine could still have managed a couple weeks around Valentines Day that year - Set You Free was big but Think Twice was a huge radio hit, one of the few that six-year-old me remembers from the time.

True for most of the higher-charting stuff, but there's still some brilliant tracks in 2002 to the point where I rate the year higher for dance than '01. , and (admittedly with a female vocal track) Take Me Away Into The Night are all spellbinding for me, sadly I don't think we'll be seeing any of them in this thread.

Thought I'd try a challenge and give 1999 a go, a year of virtually a new #1 every week in the fast-moving charts at the time, but I've condensed it down to (a probably controversial) seventeen: Steps - Heartbeat/Tragedy (7 weeks) Britney Spears - Baby One More Time (5 weeks) Mr Oizo - Flat Beat (3 weeks) TLC - No Scrubs (3 weeks) Backstreet Boys - I Want It That Way (2 weeks) Shanks & Bigfoot - Sweet Like Chocolate (3 weeks) S Club 7 - Bring It All Back (1 week) Vengaboys - Boom Boom Boom Boom (1 week) ATB - 9pm (Til I Come) (2 weeks) Ricky Martin - Livin' La Vida Loca (4 weeks) Alice Deejay - Better Off Alone (3 weeks) Lou Bega - Mambo No. 5 (3 weeks) Eiffel 65 - Blue (Da Ba Dee) (3 weeks) Christina Aguilera - Genie In A Bottle (3 weeks) Five - Keep On Movin' (2 weeks) Robbie Williams - She's The One/It's Only Us (3 weeks) Artful Dodger - Re-Rewind The Crowd Say Bo Selecta (7 weeks) Christmas Number One ...and I can't see anything tackling The Dodger until Britney's Born To Make You Happy in early 2000. The bit I'm most unsure about is those two one-weekers in the summer from S Club and the Vengaboys, one week each seems too low for the streaming era but both seemed huge at the time and I can imagine ten-year-old me playing them to death had Spotify existed - otherwise it's two extra weeks for Sweet Like Chocolate. And really it has to be Re-Rewind for Xmas #1 surely, an astonishing last #1 of the millennium although I'd have preferred Adagio for Strings. TLC and Alice Deejay are the two additions that would have both been #1 with ease I think, incredible chart performances for the time.

I Gotta Feeling could have reclimbed as high as #2 in the New Year of 2010 - it was still massive at the time and soundtracked every new year party. I remember the club DJs would "tease" the song by playing the opening few seconds before going into something else - you'd hear it at least twice a night! Florence's 'You Got The Love' could have joined it at #3 with Bad Romance supreme at #1. See also We Found Love for New Years 2012.

The general pattern for many dance trends tends to follow roughly this: * Emerges underground, perhaps not quite fully formed yet but with some of the characteristics already there - will later form the basis for arguments on dance music forums about which songs "came first". * Evolves quickly into a huge scene - one or two tracks stand out as huge club favourites and anthems of the time. Record labels perk up their ears. * Said one or two anthems are cut down to three minutes, released as singles and become massive chart hits, at least one of them going top 5 or even #1. The "mainstream" takes notice. * Another dozen or so tracks that sound fairly similar jump on the bandwagon and fill the top 40, many of them with ill-fitting raps or vocal tracks - some from people you'll later see announced as the BBC Sound of (YEAR) in January - awkwardly thrown over the top to sound more commercial. A "The Sound of (GENRE)" compilation is immediately released with as many songs crammed on as possible, along with a ton of underwhelming remixes to fill up the album. * Various dodgy cover versions of 80s songs remixed to sound vaguely like the genre in question get rush-released, gain little to no critical acclaim but do stonkingly well in the charts, probably outpeaking the tracks they inspired. "Not as good as the original" arguments rage until the end of time. * Pop acts jump on board and quickly stick smatterings of the elements of the genre onto their newest singles, watering down the original sound even further but getting the needed top ten hits they require. * The inevitable "novelty" hit or two, sampling a kids TV show/viral youtube video/bloke in the street etc gets released, barely sounding like the genre at all anymore and by this time it's all retreated back underground or died a sad death, UNTIL... (twenty years later) * A new dance track uses elements of the original genre, sounding hugely inferior to the tracks it's been inspired by, is labelled a "revival" and the whole thing begins all over again. Rave, Eurodance, UK garage, dubstep, every time...

This is going to be interesting to see when dance's so-called "decline" really began, at least for me - apologies for those who love the mid or late noughties dancewise but they're not for me I'm afraid! 2000-2003 contain most of the best of the decade, for the mid-noughties it's the indie rock that ruled and the late-noughties is all about the pop, although I have fond memories of the mini-Eurodance comeback around 2008 and looking forward to seeing if a few Clubland acts make it to #1! It's odd when I think about it as I was eleven when the decade started and twenty-one while it ended, so in theory I should enjoy the songs more as the decade goes on as I evolve from a S Club 7-listening primary school kid to a cider-swilling student raver, but it's the stuff that was released before I even went near a club I like the best. I was following the charts quite heavily by 2005, but often with frustration as dance just seemed completely dead as a chart force, the very occasional breakout/crossover hit that would go top 10 but on the whole very few standouts. But at the time I dismissed all the 80s looped-house stuff as not "proper" dance music, so there was probably a lot more around than I noticed at the time - looking forward to hopefully being pleasantly surprised! By 2009 it was getting harder and harder to differentiate between dance and pop, as the "club banger" sound came in and started to take over the charts - I'm somewhat relieved the decade does end there so we don't get any arguments as to whether the likes of 'We Found Love' or 'Starships' etc are pop songs or dance songs, and god forbid the poor sod who ends up doing 2010-2019 as it's surely an impossible task! But yeah, without getting too ahead of myself - early 2000 was phenomenal for dance music, the charts in the first few weeks of the year were crammed full of underrated classics and disc 2 of Now 45 is a brilliant listen for the sounds of the time. I've always really liked 'Adelante' especially (#1 in Scotland and a really random huge hit in Australia, who hadn't really taken to Sash before but it peaked at #4 over there) - it's all about the different layers coming in one by one, particularly after that odd stuttering accordion bit in the middle, and struck me as a great update of his usual sound.

Going back right to the early 90s, not a "flop" in terms of recognition as I'm fairly sure this is an anthem of its era, but in terms of chart position this should have done way better: Ratpack - Searchin' For My Rizla VHHwoKZvIMQ #58 in 1992, presumably hindered by a lack of radio airplay thanks to various drug references in the lyrics. Although I have heard a censored radio edit in the past which replaces all the drugs with random noises, which made the bridge at 2:16 incomprehensible.

If we're including Youtube mashups then wins everything.

Mashups really were huge in the early-mid 2000s, weren't they? It was a few years before my clubbing days but I remember even the music channels would have entire sections of the day dedicated to mashups - I remember a Britney Spears/Bee Gees/Shakira one getting some airplay.

Similar lines as Stroke of Genius, another one that started as a popular mashup and became a chart hit with the 'mashup' element removed. Rank 1 vs Donna Williams - True Love Never Dies (not Kylie Minogue as some videos claim!). Combines Rank 1's 'Airwave' (#10 in 2000) with Donna Williams 'True Love Never Dies' (never charted): 0nUpLApdfIU Later charted as Flip & Fill - True Love Never Dies (#7 in 2002), but with vocals re-recorded by Kelly Llorenna and the instrumental re-written to remove all traces of Airwave. This confused me for years as everyone used to call it an Airwave mashup but I couldn't for the life of me hear it in the song! ClyZkPQgLa8

Combines Hard To Explain by The Strokes (#16 in 2001) and Genie In A Bottle by Christina Aguilera (#1 in 1999), created by The Freelance Hellraiser in 2001 but wasn't officially released due to copyright issues so didn't chart. What did chart was a soundalike cover version of the whole thing by a group called Speedway, retitling it just 'Genie In A Bottle' and reaching #10 in 2003. This one probably takes it away from being a 'mashup' though as they slightly change the chords so it's no longer Hard To Explain in the background, just a guitar backing that sounds slightly like it. Original: (EDIT: Posted by Colm above!) Speedway version: wyyCIXx8KyU

Quick question on a similar theme - who's the most recent deceased person to have a #1 single before they died? I know George Harrison, 2Pac, Eva Cassidy etc have posthumous #1s but what about in terms of those still living at the time of their chart peak? Closest I can think of is Cory Monteith who reached #2 as part of the cast of Glee with Don't Stop Believing in 2010, unless I'm missing an obvious one. Michael Jackson's last #1 was in 1997 but surely there's one since then.

It includes a track that I'd never heard before this thread existed (Black Box's 'Fantasy') which was great to hear! Hugely different from the legendary Ride On Time but has its charm. Really good work, I think I prefer it as it goes on as it feels like disc 3 has more of the more underrated/lesser known hits, while Disc 1 starts off with perhaps the most known tracks. It's reminded me actually how few some of them are played today...The KLF's 'Justified & Ancient' was absolutely massive in 1991/early 92, just that bit before my time but tons of people I know a few years older than me know it virtually by heart. But I've very rarely heard it played in recent yrars, and don't think I'd heard it at all until about a decade ago - indeed virtually any KLF track other than 3am Eternal seems frustratingly absent from recent dance CDs and comps, perhaps due to them deleting their back catalogue?

That's interesting, I knew about a few of these but I didn't know there were alternate versions of The Power and What Is Love - what's the difference?

Forgot about that one - had they done a 'Band Aid 10' the lineup would probably be near-identical to that.