BillyH

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

And for any international readers wondering where the hell 'Ai Se Eu Te Pego' is in this thread...it didn't chart high in the UK. #66 is the best it got. One of the biggest European hits ever that didn't make its way across the channel, surely> I'll never forget the awkwardness of being at a house party about a year later, this playing on the random Spotify "party" playlist...and everyone stopping dancing in confusion, wondering what the hell they're listening to, and someone stopping the track after a few seconds to put Pharrell on or something.

It became a "standard" extremely quickly - people covered it all over the place, so it kept getting new audiences. And compared to something like The Beatles, which was cutting-edge pop mostly purchased by teenagers, this was a traditional-sounding ballad that could be enjoyed by everyone young and old, Sinatra's career going way back to the Second World War so he'd been around for ages and had a massive fanbase. The constant demand for it would have ensured it always in print and always in a prominent position on the record shelves. Dorothy Squires covered it a year later, peaking at #25 and remaining in the chart for five months (all while Sinatra's version was still in the charts!), and an Elvis cover reached #9 in early '78, a few months after his death. The lyrics - end is near, final curtain etc - also, rather morbidly, made it a top pick for those in their final days requesting it to be played at their funeral. It's still a popular choice now, although ironically Frank apparently grew to hate the song. A re-issue after his death in 1998 just missed the top 75. Drake's covering it for his next single. (not really)

Yeah it has to be this, surely? Everyone knows it (or at least a lot of people), a top 50 regular from April 1969 to New Year 1972. All this on a chart comprised entirely of physical vinyl records and limited to a top 50. First week: http://www.officialcharts.com/charts/singl.../19690402/7501/ Final week: http://www.officialcharts.com/charts/singl.../19711226/7501/ Imagine a song first charting this week staying most weeks in the top 50 until the spring of 2019!

Just got to BBE's 'Flash' on Disc 2, and it's a bit of a revelation - I've been listening to a remix all these years instead of the original! The version I thought was the original, turns out, with a bit of searching, to be the 007 Mix: ygVHRvGzusQ This was used on the compilation 'Now Dance 97' edited down to be the same length as the original radio edit. Not sure which one I prefer, they both have their qualities. Here's the original as heard on disc 2 of the Buzzjack compilation: 0YjfpXABOLw

The sequencing is brilliant, particularly given the huge mix of styles everything nicely segues into the next. Top work on using the proper UK mixes for all the songs as well, which often isn't right on these sorts of compilations that use other or re-recorded mixes - just on Disc 1 now and the correct Rapino Brothers mix is used for Corona's The Rhythm of the Night, which seems much rarer today than the original that was released elsewhere!

All kinds of wow for late-2007/early-2008 pop...I am hugely biased because it was a ridiculously good time in my life (oh to be 18/19 again!) but tracks like About You Now and Call The Shots are just glorious. Crazy to remember how huge GA and the Sugababes were back then, truly A-list popstars and at the time I'd have believed they'd last well into the next decade. And I was a major fan of Booty Luv at the time too, I even saw them live and still have their album! Would have been a landslide victory of Katrina proportions, surely? Even if the Sugababes were unknowns I can't see anyone that year challenging ABY at all. I can even imagine people claiming the high standard of songs in 2009's contest as a direct result of About You Now's success! Realistically though there's no way their management would have thought about it.

The one I was hoping for was Barber's Adagio for Strings! Equally massive chart run over late 1999/early 2000 (#4 peak) but I guess Rewind or C vs I outsold it for its peak weeks. But I've enjoyed the Cuban Boys track since I first got sent it as an mp3 (on MSN Messenger I think!) over a decade ago, it's a fun update to the sample-heavy dance tracks of the late 80s and shows us the power of that exciting new internet thing on its way. Echoing everyone, fantastic thread and it's introduced me to songs I'd never heard before which given how much I *thought* I knew about 90s dance I'd never have expected. I'd totally follow a noughties thread too although I'm prepared for a tough ride once the early noughties are over :P Thanks all and thanks Colm for the files, looking forward to one heck of a listen!

Who'd have thought when this thread started that Craig David would be back in the top ten this year! Rewind's very much the noughties come early - I always forget it's a '99 track rather than 2000. Like how 'French Kiss' by Lil Louis is a 90s house track a year early and Tubeway Army's 'Are Friends Electric' the sound of 80s synths a year early...I'm now trying to think of a 2009 track that signals the start of the 2010s, I think there's a few of them!

December 1999 was particularly special because of the millennium hype, which might explain the huge amount of dance hits that Christmas as everyone went out and partied. Now 44 is the biggest-selling Now album by some distance for I think similar reasons.

Just trying to predict the last few...one of them's fairly obvious but I've no idea about the very end of the year. Late 1999 was absolutely crammed with dance classics, some of them not reaching their peak until January 2000 once all the Christmas songs were out. But if the last #1 of 1999 is what I hope it is then HOLY HELL that's one heck of an end.

An internet radio station I listened to back in the mid-2000s would play Another Way all the time, but for some reason it was listed as For An Angel on the system and would be called that by the DJs and displayed as the Now Playing data - I was surprised when I finally heard the real For An Angel and wondered what on earth I'd been listening to all this time! Always loved it and awesome it charted that high.

Everyone had their own version! I thought it was "I'm a leader for Di" and wondered if they were referring to the late princess. Another one I enjoy for the childhood nostalgia more than the song itself...the opening piano melody bit is great, but that weird filtered house beat that thuds over the song never sounded great to me. And the radio edit - at FOUR MINUTES FOURTY THREE SECONDS (seriously!) was utterly taking the piss, thankfully the video edit is much shorter and doesn't outstay its welcome. Crazy how well it did in the US given how utterly dance-phobic the Billboard charts were at the time, I guess the novelty factor took off in the same way Ace of Base's 'The Sign' was randomly massive there a few years earlier.

The one that always comes to mind is Scooter's surprise #1 album (Jumping All Over The World) in 2008, outselling Madonna's Hard Candy that week. The album was almost a year old, available to buy as an import in HMV for months, and they hadn't had a big UK hit for five years, so to suddenly sell 33k in a week (perhaps on the low side for 2008 but pretty decent now) seemed to come out of nowhere and hugely deserved. Following that, Loreen going top 3 a few years later and creating one of the best top 3s (Feel The Love/We Are Young/Euphoria) of the decade!

Been reliving my mid-teens tonight with some of the hard house and trance that late-night Radio 1 would blast out 10-15 years ago. This one I've always loved from the time, the Dogzilla remix of Poloroid's 'So Damn Beautiful' from 2003 - takes me back to cold winter nights, chatting on MSN Messenger and IRC chatrooms into the (very) early hours and desperately wanting to be 18 so I could properly go out clubbing to stuff like this! (and then finally reaching 18 and it's all made way for dull minimal electro bollocks...) Full-length version as the radio edit cuts out all the best bits: m9_oLGHdsi0

I think the events of November 22nd, 1963 prove that to be sadly not the case.

Just remembered Bowie died in early January...had he died a few weeks earlier I could see 'Little Drummer Boy' recharting pretty high, if maybe not beating its #3 peak. Come to think of it Terry Wogan did a version of that song too!

Aaaand the number 1! 1: Nelly Furtado - MANEATER PLolag3YSYU (song starts at 01:27) HELL yes to an awesome number 1 and a summer 2006 anthem, one of the biggest that reminds me of that season's heatwave to the point where I can hear it in December and feel warm again. Fantastic production by Timbaland and one of my fave #1s of the year. Here's the full chart, plus the rest of the top 75, as posted by Jester in the Buzzjack thread posted on this day ten years ago: Sandi Thom grabbed the week's top album, with The Feeling at #2, Ronan at #3, Paul Simon at #4 and Primal Scream at #5 forming an entire top 5 of new entries. And there we go! Certainly not a typical chart from 2006 with all the football songs, but a fun mix of classics and what-were-they-thinkings along the way :P Wonder how many of these will still be played in 2026...

Top ten time in Youtube video spectacular-vision! 10: Baddiel/Skinner/Lightning Seeds - THREE LIONS RJqimlFcJsM The 1996 original, charting on downloads for the first time and going top 10 all over again. THIS is how to do a football song. It keeps coming back every few years because it just works so brilliantly - this and 'World In Motion' you can listen to as actual songs rather than just novelty football tie-ins, and I'll always love it for taking me back to being seven years old and my earliest memories of any football tournament. 9: Keane - IS IT ANY WONDER? fVe_KVzBFOo They never really matched that first album, did they? 'Hopes and Fears', despite the overplay of certain singles, is a wonderful album and a noughties classic, this was their triumphant return but I never really took to anything after this. My heart sinks a bit when I hear that squealing electric open as the beauty of Hopes & Fears was the lack of all that, and then the song just kinda happens...tracks like Somewhere Only We Know, She Has No Time, Everybody's Changing etc worked because you really felt them, this is just average indie-pop. Got to #3 though so has its fans, and sneaking a look at the rest of the top 10 it's far from the worst song up this high... 8: Tony Christie - (IS THIS THE WAY TO) THE WORLD CUP hz5nFNjEZZM ... It's Amarillo. But about the World Cup. I... ...yeah. 7: Pink - WHO KNEW NJWIbIe0N90 After the last song this sounds like the best thing ever recorded, absolute classic Pink if a little close to Kelly Clarkson at times. 'Just Like A Pill' is her pinnacle but this ain't bad either. 6: Infernal - FROM PARIS TO BERLIN THt5u-i2d9k The big Eurodance hit of the era and one I heard a bit too much of at the time, but at least it isn't the 'From London To Berlin' World Cup version, which made absolutely no sense as they're from Denmark but sang about how "we" - as in England - are gonna win the World Cup. Sixth-biggest seller of the year and the biggest-selling non number #1 of the year (though 'Chasing Cars' has probably overtaken that by now) so probably doesn't need much else of an introduction. 5: Gnarls Barkley - CRAZY bd2B6SjMh_w And probably neither does this. Nine weeks at #1 in a chart run that anyone who isn't Drake can only dream of today, the year's biggest-seller by Christmas with almost a million sold (finally reaching six figures in 2011), but thanks to the odd chart rules at the time, it completely disappeared from the chart the week after this due to the CD single being deleted - the song had to have a physical release in order to stick around at the time, a baffling rule that was ditched at the start of 2007 which caused Crazy to magically reappear at #30 in the new year chart. This wasn't a great time for me so the song holds bittersweet memories, but it's certainly a noughties classic. 4: The Automatic - MONSTER pr8fRmhUF5A Haven't heard this in years! Indie with an instant hook ("What's that coming over the hill..." etc) that is by far their biggest hit, their second-best being a #16 in 2008. Today it doesn't quite grab me as much as it did at the time, probably as there just ended up being too much of these shouty indie songs by the end of the decade to tell them apart anymore. 3: Embrace - WORLD AT YOUR FEET KZLyoBNCJek The winning football song, at least chartwise - the "official" England one that year, the only football song in '06 to go top 3. And, erm...it's no 'Three Lions' is it? I remember being underwhelmed by it but maybe I was just expecting Three Lions Part II, this is just standard string-heavy indie - another indie genre that by 2009 was overdone. Come Back To What You Know is a hell of a tune from them though. 2: Sandi Thom - I WISH I WAS A PUNK ROCKER tLyw7jytykE The "Myspace sensation" which briefly became a major marketing ploy to launch new acts into mainstream stardom, this had a motherload of hype behind it when it charted at #1. And, unfortunately, I've never been a massive fan of it - it always felt like it was promoted and built up way more than it actually deserved, and there was a lot of suspicion as to how managed and pre-arranged Sandi's "rise to fame" actually was. But it was popular. It sold a lot, particularly in Australia where it was (amazingly) the year's best seller, it just never particularly did it for me. Things didn't last and Sandi was last seen in a video rant shouting "F*** you Radio 2" for not playing her new single, which isn't particularly endearing given she should kinda be happy with, you know, the number one hit she got a decade ago - something a tiny handful of the entire world's population have ever managed. Some of us jump for joy at sneaking into the iTunes top 1000.

The glorious, scorching summer of 2006. A time of big transition in music, technology and telly - legal mp3 downloads were rapidly gaining pace in what was still a predominantly physical CD chart, 'Top of the Pops' was creaking towards its last few episodes and Apple's iPod was selling bucketloads by the season as people upgraded in droves from their old Walkmans to thousands of songs in their pocket. The Sudoku craze filled up most of people's spare time in Britain's newspapers, Myspace looked on course for online and possibly world domination, David Tennant was in his first season as Doctor Who, 'Deal or No Deal' was the unlikely cult gameshow hit of the year and 'The Da Vinci Code' raked it in at the movie box-office. And I was a skinny, socially-awkward seventeen year old a world away from the skinny, socially-awkward twenty-seven year old I am today. The chart announced on Sunday 11th June sees a whole host of mid-noughties classics intermingling with forgotten one-hit wonders, TV tie-ins and a ton of novelty tracks that have barely been heard since, and despite being only a decade ago I might have trouble tracking some of them down to hear them as Youtube was only a few months old at the time. But let's crack on with the first lot of the chart and positions 40 to 11... 40: Orson - NO TOMORROW Kicking off with a track that probably needs no introduction as the former #1 from March was still just in the top 40, infamous for being the lowest-selling weekly #1 to this day but ultimately selling pretty well for the time, 200k and the 12th biggest-seller of the year. It's really not deserving of its weekly statistic as this is an absolute noughties anthem in my mind, hugely evocative of my late teens and I feel that when the big Noughties Revival starts in a few years this is gonna get way more love and airplay than it currently does. To listen to their full album 'Bright Idea', go into your nearest charity shop where you'll almost certainly see it for 50p or so on the shelf - seriously, this one's as common as the back catalogue of the Sugababes. 39: Hope of the States - SING IT OUT Hope of the Who?! Two tracks in and already we reach a song I'm unfamiliar with, turns out they were an indie group who had few hits in the mid-noughties, their highest-charter being #15. This was their last top 40 appearance as they split a few months later, and it's typical indie of the era really although there's some nice moments in it. Feels like a grower. 38: The Kooks - NAIVE I didn't know this one was theirs! Big radio hit that peaked at #5 and I've heard this plenty of times since, a huge chart run that saw it in the top 75 for months and two weeks after this chart it was back in the top 30. It's alright although 'She Moves In Her Own Way' is my fave of theirs, the follow-up to this that peaked at #7. 37: talkSPORT Allstarts - WE'RE ENGLAND (TOM HARK) Sigh. This isn't the only one of these we're gonna hear, just to warn you - 2006 was the year the 'football song' reached saturation point, virtually everyone and their frog being dragged into the studio to attempt to record a new Three Lions or World In Motion. It was the World Cup in Germany and hopes, as ever, were high that all the years of hurt - 40 by now - would be over and England would lift the trophy once more. And indeed this was the last time England performed well in a world cup, reaching the quarter finals which they didn't come near to in 2010 or 2014 and that might be a reason why football songs, other than the established classics, died a death after this. But in '06 absolutely everyone had a go and this was radio station's talkSPORT's effort, a rewrite of 'Tom Hark' with "We're En-ger-land! All stand up!" and other vaguely football-related lyrics shouted over the top. It's painful, but there is a certain charm that something like this could actually reach the UK top 40. The video's on youtube for added cringe factor. 36: Shayne Ward - NO PROMISES The 2005 X-Factor winner with the first follow-up to winners song That's My Goal, not just peaking at #2 here but an unexpectedly big hit overseas - top 5 in Sweden, top 20 in Norway and massive on Brazilian and Lebanese radio. The sixteenth biggest seller of the year, I barely remember it from the time and while it's not too offensive a listen it's not great. 35: Duncan James - SOONER OR LATER As in that bloke from Blue. He'd started off quite well with duet 'I Believe My Heart' reaching #2 in late 2004, so with this being the lead release from his debut album you could be forgiven for thinking this was gonna do well. #35 was the best it got, and that does seem a bit unfair - yeah it's a little anonymous but it didn't deserve to flop that badly. Particularly as, like Shayne above, Europe absolutely loved it - a big hit in various parts of the continent, but the UK turned up its noses. Oh well, Eurovision was only five years away... 34: Michael Jackson - EARTH SONG Yep, that one. Re-issued as part of a CD re-release campaign like Elvis the year before, at about the former King of Pop's lowest point where his career was all but over after damaging - and bankrupting - court cases. In these early download days, most of the re-releases did quite well and made top 20, 'Billie Jean' even getting #10, but by now we were reaching the end of them and this was one of the lowest re-issue peakers, the massive #1 of Christmas 1995 so many probably already owned it. Overblown as it is, I've always liked this one and I listened to it a lot after his 2009 death when it did feel quite poignant. 33: Orson - BRIGHT IDEA They're back with single #2! And this one I don't remember - it peaked at #11. Nowhere near the instant-hit sound of No Tomorrow, this is a little more leftfield and leaves me cold unfortunately. They did well though, two more top 30 hits would follow before they quietly split. 32: Sugababes - FOLLOW ME HOME I thought the OCC had made a mistake for a second as I hadn't heard of this one at all, but it did exist and was their lowest-charting single, peaking here on its first week. The single mix was re-recorded from the original album version, replacing the vocals of departed Mutya Buena with new Sugababe Amelle. Didn't get great reviews and I can kinda hear why, bogstandard album track with some ok moments but not really single material. 31: Christina Milian/Young Jeezy - SAY I I'd forgotten she was still having hits this late, it continued her unbroken top 10 run by peaking at #4 although this is the last worldwide hit she had - s collaboration with some Australian DJs took her top 5 in that country in 2013. Some of her songs are great - 'When You Look At Me' and 'Dip It Low' especially are early noughties R&B classics - but this is really run of the mill stuff, coming and going without leaving much of an impression on me. 30: Trinidad & Tobago Tartan Army - SCOTLAND SCOTLAND JASON SCOTLAND Yeah, this needs some explanation. Jason Scotland was part of the Trinidad & Tobago World Cup team, but played, amusingly, for a Scottish football team - and with Scotland the country out of the World Cup, but Scotland the player in, a Scottish radio station made a comedy-reggae song hailing him as Scotland's "representative" in the Cup - it's as wacky as it sounds, but I can't really knock it as it struck so much of a chord with people that, in the Scottish Singles Chart, THIS WAS THE NUMBER ONE SINGLE THAT WEEK - beating every other song we're about to see!! It sold enough to just make top 30 in the UK despite, I imagine, almost no one buying this south of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Fair play and it's kinda fun that something this mad was a UK top 30 hit - it's actually rather catchy, much more effort put into it than most of the other football songs that year that just rewrote an old song. 29: Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Dani California Back to normality with, finally, one I actually remember from the time! A memorable video showing the 'Peppers performing in different 'eras' of time, from 1950s rockabilly to present day, and being the first single from their new album it went top 10 virtually everywhere, #2 in the UK. Not up there with the best of Chilli singles but many a time did I blast this out in the hot summer weather that year, so lots of nostalgia points for this. 28: Beatfreakz - SOMEBODY'S WATCHING ME The '80s looped house' dance craze was still very much at its peak, to the horror of all wanting something more to bop to than a three-second sample repeated over a generic house beat over and over again, but this was one of the better ones, a big radio and top 10 hit and another hot summer memory. The original Rockwell hit this was taken from famously featured Michael Jackson singing the chorus, the same section that's used here - so either they got a impersonator to re-record it or had to pay a hell of a lot of money to the MJ estate, I can't work out whether it's the original sample or not but they sound very similar. 27: Mariah Carey feat. Snoop Dogg - SAY SOMETHIN' Two stars who'd enjoyed a major commercial comeback in the last year or two unite here, although by now the Neptunes-produced track was well over a year old as the final single release from Mariah's The Emancipation of Mimi album, hence it's low chart peak as surely everyone had the album by now. Usual R&B falling in the Average pile, and joins the million other 'Say Something' songs I often get confused by over who sings what - Karen Harding's song playing on Spotify for me straight after this. 26: Ordinary Boys/Lady Sovereign - NINE2FIVE After appearing on January's Celebrity Big Brother series, Preston and his band The Ordinary Boys were suddenly hot news after most had gone "Who?" on his entry to the house. A re-issued 'Boys Will Be Boys' had peaked at #3, while this was a 2005 solo Lady Sovereign song remixed to feature Preston and the 'Boys and continued their chart success by reaching #6. Both songs are great, although god knows what Miss Sovereign is actually rapping about with one of the few clear lines referring to Katie Price's breasts. The Ordinary Boys could have carried on at least another couple years, but Preston screwed it up early in '07 by storming off the set of BBC's 'Never Mind the Buzzcocks' after Simon Amstell said some jokes. Obscurity followed almost immediately, and a lesson to all emerging popstars that, for the love of god, don't lose your sense of humour when you're heading to the top. 25: Lordi - HARD ROCK HALLELUJAH It's one of those "Where were you when" moments. VE Day. The fall of the Berlin Wall. And Lordi appear on the Eurovision Song Contest. The Finnish heavy metal group decked out in monster costumes caused a sensation when they spectacularly won the contest with the maddest song in the show's history, a rock stomper unlike any Eurovision song before and gave Finland, finally, their first ever win. The UK took to it enough for it to chart top 30, a fantastic achievement for the time and the first Eurovision winner to go top 40 in the UK since 1999. The Eurovision "renaissance" (Rybak, Loreen etc) was still a few years away at the time so big credit to Lordi for standing out from the crowd and giving everyone one hell of a classic Eurovision moment. 24: Rihanna: SOS Mad to think now that this was only her third big hit, and in these pre-'Umbrella' days I don't think many expected her to end up one of the biggest stars of both that decade and the next. Charting at #2, it used the melody of Soft Cell's 'Tainted Love' cover but in a way that worked really well, a song that stood proudly on its own and evoking both it's 80s-throwback past while also sounding nicely current. A gleaming 2006 pop gem. 23: Nerina Pallot - EVERYBODY'S GONE TO WAR Singer-songwriter who had a couple of hits but this was by far the biggest, peaking at #14. An anti-war protest song written at the peak of the Iraq War, it's ok. Standard fare for the genre. 22: LL Cool J ft Jennifer Lopez - CONTROL MYSELF God I was obsessed with this one, I wasn't a huge R&B fan but this completely won me over and I played it tons over that summer. It's all about that bubbling, twitchy backing track which fits the stop-start nature of the song and sounded glorious in the hot weather, and then there's that infamous "Zizizizizi! Zizizi! Zizizizizizizi!" lyric section which sounds like Mr J just gave up writing lyrics for the last bit of the song and starts improvising, J-Lo going along with it. Noughties R&B at its weirdest best. 21: Ronan Keating & Kate Rusby - ALL OVER AGAIN Ronan was having hits this late? Turns out this was his last top 10 in this country (#6) and his penultimate top 40 ("Iris" went #15 just after this), helped by being the lead single from his new album. Usual textbook ballad fare, but I do like Kate Rusby's voice - her only top 100 singles chart appearance but plenty of albums. 20: The Streets - NEVER WENT TO CHURCH Back when half-talking half-singing in a vaguely cockney accent was chart gold, Mike Skinner was briefly one of the biggest musicians in the country when 'Fit But You Know It' and 'Dry Your Eyes' were two massive singles of summer 2004. By '06 he was on his third album, another UK #1 but single success faded quickly and while lead release 'When You Wasn't Famous' hit #8, this one only just scraped top 20. He's made some fantastic tracks over the years, especially on the (brilliant!) Original Pirate Material album, this one's a tribute to his deceased father and goes for the Dry Your Eyes approach of strings and singalong choruses. I prefer the more dancey, less chart-friendly stuff. 19: Busta Rhymes - TOUCH IT The best type of US R&B - the "What the hell?!" weird stuff - that manages to be completely mental and disjointed but irresistible to listen to, I prefer the original that inspired this (Daft Punk's 'Technologic') but this was a deserved megahit for Busta. 18: Depeche Mode - JOHN THE REVELATOR/LILIAN Still guaranteed top 20 hits as recently as a decade ago, more of the same dark synthpop for the Mode men in this double A-side. 'John the Revelator' is the more obviously commercial single, 'Lilian's a little more experimental - both feel kinda albumy and neither megahit potential. 17: Primal Scream - COUNTRY GIRL Another legacy act doing well in the late CD age in a way that would be much tricker in the download/streaming age (I dunno though, the Stone Roses aren't doing too badly), I quite like this country-themed track - not something I'd have noticed as a seventeen year old as I'd have had no idea who they were. But really it's Screamadelica these guys are gonna be remembered for, 'Rocks' at a push. 16: The Feeling - FILL MY LITTLE WORLD Whereas THIS rocked my - indeed - world at the time, a band I do feel sorry for as they only seemed to be sneered at these days for what's seen as bland, overly-commercial indie-pop, but everything they released was GOLD in my book and this is absolutely their pinnacle, a wonderful pop track that, again, conjures up hot summer mid-noughties days and will be up there with Orson's 'No Tomorrow' when the noughties revival kicks off. Seeing them live at V Festival 2012 was a brilliant moment - they may have been buried away in the early afternoon, causing them to make self-depreciating jokes about becoming "old gits" as they performed to a criminally small audience, but I sang along with every word of every hit. 15: Stan Boardman - STAN'S WORLD CUP SONG Oh christ. 70s comedian Stan Boardman sings some nonsense about the Germans "bombing our chippy" and "singing Ai Ai Ippi Ippi Ippi Ai" and charts ridiculously high. Just think, this outsold every song that week in this thread so far. Amazingly it's available on Spotify, as is a 2010 remake which I can't bring myself to listen to. 14: Morrissey - THE YOUNGEST WAS THE MOST LOVED Smiths frontman with another solo hit, two years after releasing one of the best songs of the decade with 'First Of The Gang'. More melodic sing-along pop of what you'd expect from him, just not as good. 13: Tonedef Allstars - WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE KIDDING JURGEN KLINSMANN? Another (bloody) football song, this was The Sun's "contribution" and features Frank Bruno ("Watch out, we're gonna knock you out!") and some old geezers covering the theme from Dad's Army with rewritten lyrics. The original of course, is about "Mr Hitler". This is about a German footballer. THEY REWROTE A SONG ABOUT HITLER TO BE ABOUT A FOOTBALLER. Jurgen himself was, understandably, pissed off. This actually happened. This existed. 12: Oakenfold feat. Brittany Murphy - FASTER KILL PUSSYCAT Yeah I really didn't like this back then, I was kinda horrified tbh as DJ Paul Oakenfold had done what I now call a "Tiesto 2014" and switched from incredible euphoric dance anthems to mainstream pop nonsense like this. But listening again now, maybe that's a little unfair, it's great to hear a mid-noughties dance track that isn't looped 80s house for once. And poor Brittany, she was beautiful and could have had a whole pop career ahead of her with the right material, but three years later she died at the age of 32. Still sad to think about. 11: Crazy Frog - WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS (DING A DANG DONG) The Crazy Frog is simply one of those things we're gonna have to accept happened, but what's often forgotten is that they kept up the hype for a whole year and a half - 'Axel F' was over 12 months old and the frog was still getting big hits that would continue until Christmas. Again the World Cup's to blame here, a Europop remake of - oh jesus no - Queen's 'We Are The Champions' with the frog ding-dang-a-donging over the top throughout. THIS HAPPENED. THIS EXISTED. It's so offensive it does actually become weirdly awesome to listen to, especially when THE RAP STARTS OH MY ACTUAL WHAT.

...so did 'Be The One' never actually happen in the UK then? Assumed this was the followup but just found out Be The One never even charted here :/

I think that's a huge part of it and I'd wager that most of us feel the same about whatever music was around at our equivalent age. I started secondary school in 2000 and while life memories weren't always great, any music released during that time I have nothing but love for. Agreed with you about 2009 as I was in my first year at uni, so similar good times just with lots of alcohol :P I wasn't too keen on 2013 but then I was a miserable 24/25 year old working a zero-hour contract in a cinema that played the same few recent hits on loop, so the likes of 'Burn', 'Get Lucky' etc remind me of cleaning toilets and sweeping up popcorn - it's not gonna give me the best memories! But I really liked a lot of the dance in the second half of the year, Disc 2 of Now 86 is full of classics.

I loved this but completely killed it from overplaying at the time - saw Alphabeat twice live that year and they were awesome both times!

Another one that just conjures up all sorts of summer '99 memories and impossible to hate, although I can see how nightmarish it would have been for those not the Vengaboys' target audience. That main instrumental hook has a habit of suddenly appearing in my head when I'm least expecting it. I remember being at a 90s club night a year or two ago and this mixing slowly into Darude's 'Sandstorm' throughout the song - which might have worked in theory but sounded a complete mess (and Sandstorm isn't 90s, at least in the UK), I guess the DJ just wanted it over as soon as possible.

It's all about the 1980s and 1990s for me - I used to say all the best songs were released between 1980 and 2000, but as I've heard more stuff I add a couple years either side to that now. Maybe '79 to '03...but then that still leaves off a lot of brill mid-noughties indie, hmm. Fave musical year is 1999 with 1991, 1995, 1996 and 2003 following close behind. It gets a bit hard to call after that as it's tricky to work out if I like a song for what it is or the nostalgic memories attached with it - like I love almost everything released from around 2008 to 2011 as they were my big student partying years, but musically I'm the first to admit that lots of it is a bit shit in comparison to two decades earlier. Something like Usher's 'OMG' or Taio Cruz's 'Dynamite' would mean nothing to me if released five years earlier or later, but in terms of clubbing memories they're major positive flashbacks.