BillyH

Another huge one from the 1980s, Gazebo - I Like Chopin. Not sure if it was even ever released in the UK as it would have gone top 5 with ease I think.

Modern Talking - You're My Heart, You're My Soul 4kHl4FoK1Ys Top 10 in most European countries twice over, once in 1985 and again as a remix in 1998 - even reached #8 in Ireland. Only got to #59 in the UK, but 'Brother Louie' would eventually make #4. 1998 remix: u6EdMjo8d18

Yeah 'Hello' was made for Disc 1 Track 1, even the name fits. It's a big shame they couldn't get it. What's the writeup for You Don't Own Me? Does it mention the TV advert or just "Here's a random hit from Australia that might be big here in a few weeks"? Now 93 is looking to have an early release because of the early Easter next year - probably around the middle of March, making it the earliest Spring Now since 2008's Now 69. Difficult to know yet if they'll have enough hits to fill the album between now and then.

I assumed that Baby One More Time taking so long to appear on a Now was connected with the equally late appearances of 'Tragedy', 'That Don't Impress Me Much' and 'Kiss Me' on the same volume - a few really massive megahits all held back for Now 44 so it sold more copies for the millennium, basically a mini best of the year rather than just the usual late summer/autumn period. Given how much that one sold it was clearly a good decision.

YES!! Go Grace & G!! I mentioned in another thread that I live in Australia now, and I only first heard this track on the radio a few weeks ago - it was a #1 hit here a few months ago. Really hoped the Now 92 inclusion was a good sign and hoping this is gonna do well!

This confused me for years. Not having any recollection of this and their other one (which inevitably will also be here in a few months) at the time, I first heard about it around 2003, and yet the only version I could find was that Townhouse edit. Not realising it was virtually a different song, I couldn't work out what on earth was so controversial about what appeared so harmless-sounding - were people furious about the word "Wiggle" or something? Was there some filthy undertone to the words "Don't stop moving baby, all you do is drive me crazy" that I was completely missing? I remember listening quite intently trying to decipher any supposedly controversial lyrics I was missing! Wasn't for a few more years I realised I was listening to the wrong version, obviously the Now 30 mix is also censored.

Early 1995 is generally my favourite dance era since around late 1991/early 1992, disc 2 of Now That's What I Call Music 30 is all kinds of incredible. Next mega-era is mid-1996 (although 'mid' is used quite broadly as generally that whole year's pretty damn incredible) and then from the spring of 1999 the classics are unstoppable. DGMYL is great, bizarrely 'Wrap Me Up' was the bigger hit in a few countries though. Wasn't there a random remix/remake of this in the late noughties? Wikipedia's coming up blank but I'm sure I remember it on the music channels around that brief craze for remixing old 90s hits was around.

I also worried for a second that Cotton Eye Joe had robbed Set You Free of it's deserved #1, but hurrah :D Absolutely up there in my top ten fave songs of all time. My current worry is - and this will inevitably happen - that, in the near future, someone's going to give it a terrible cover/remix that will end up being more known in the next generation than the original. A bit like how You Got The Love is basically a Florence and the Machine song to anyone under the age of 20 now. Whether it's 'Set You Free (Dull John Lewis acoustic ballad mix)', 'Set You Free (Underwhelming deep house mix)' or 'Set You Free (feat. Jessie J & Pitbull)' it's probably only a sad matter of time. But that original's gonna stay in my arms forever :)

I remember 2007, once the Hits albums had bit the dust, had every single number 1 featured on a Now album (66 to 69). Are there any other years that managed that?

I moved from the UK to Australia a few weeks ago and only just heard You Don't Own Me the other week, it blew me away - it's still being played on radio here and was a #1 hit in Australia a few months ago. Actually astonished to see it on this tracklist :o I really hope this means it could be a UK hit as I adore it!! Here it is for your listening pleasure: 8SeRU_ZPDkE There's a fair few songs being played on the radio here which to my knowledge haven't been hits in the UK, I hear both of these all the time, both top 10 Ozzie hits but were never big in the UK, were they? rpLITtLRltw bvC_0foemLY Then again, Gotye's 'Somebody That I Used To Know' was #1 in Australia months before its UK release, which gives me huge hope for Grace :D

Are there any songs that topped the chart in 2005 that would still be huge, perhaps #1, if they were released today? Not in a re-issue or re-release sense, but if they'd never been released before and were a brand new single from the original artist or group. To avoid this getting too complicated (some groups having long split up, the CD single market that allowed the Elvis re-issues to happen now being nonexistent) don't get too caught up thinking about the artists or release methods themselves, but simply consider it based on the songs. Cast aside Madonna's age and recent chart performance and just imagine if 'Hung Up' came out today and if people would buy it or not. And try not to just turn it into listing your favourite songs :P Doesn't matter how much you hated Westlife or the Crazy Frog, think about the song and if it would have a genuine shot at the top today. The list can be viewed here amongst other places, and in a rough order starting with the most likely, I think these might have a strong chance: James Blunt - You're Beautiful oofSnsGkops Sorry, I know it's got a lot of haters, but it's the biggest shoe-in out the lot for me. An easy #1 in any year since at least the 1990s, indeed in today's sales/streaming climate it would probably sell a million within a few weeks. 2Pac feat. Elton John - Ghetto Gospel Do5MMmEygsY Another one which would get there with ease, 2Pac's legacy still huge almost 20 years after his death - he'd already been gone for nine years by the time this was made. Sugababes - Push The Button oJDGcxAf9D8 Ok, it would be pretty astonishing if Keisha, Mutya and Heidi were still recording as the Sugababes today - particularly as all three in their 30s. But tell that to John Legend and Rachel Platten, who predate the three of them and have both hit #1 this year. But as mentioned it isn't about the artists and chart success, it's about the song - and no matter which girl group were to record and release this in 2015, it would still be an easy #1 I think. It doesn't have the mid-noughties R&B trappings that most other pop had at the time, stood out a fair bit then and would still now. Westlife - You Raise Me Up 9bxc9hbwkkw Yeah. I know. But imagine if One Direction did this today, instant huge chart-topper. Even if Westlife were still around, this is one of their easiest major ballad smashes and I did kinda (secretly) like it until it became the ultimate cliche you're-through-to-the-finals slow-motion hugging X Factor soundtrack. Akon - Lonely 6EEW-9NDM5k I had to think about this one. It's a very of-its-time mid-noughties R&B track, but that fifties/sixties sound is mega in right now thanks to the likes of 'Marvin Gaye' and everything Meghan Trainor's released. Akon might be 42 now, but this could still work. And finally, and perhaps most depressingly: Shayne Ward - That's My Goal gWSfBggWBek Placing an early bet for Simon Cowell to bring this one back in a couple years (or even this year) for the show's winner, and watch it work all over again. Happened with Unchained Melody. What do you think?

I wish it were clearer sometimes to work out which mixes were the actual hit singles, it can massively vary even with huge million-sellers - particularly in the UK, which would often get a track a year after the European mainland often in a remixed form. The oddest is Ian Van Dahl's Castles in the Sky, which I assumed charted in the same mix everywhere but if you listen on youtube you'll really struggle to find the familiar one that charted here and features on Now 49. I think I finally found it on the tenth page or something.

I misread this and thought she'd interviewed the members of One Direction for some reason.

I first heard Doop around 2003/4 time and was briefly obsessed with it. The version I heard was the Sidney-whatever one which just has that same pounding Charleston riff throughout the song, I get what the Urge 2 Merge mix is trying to do but for me it's not as good. It often gets mentioned as a classic "bad number 1" like Mr Blobby a few months earlier, but I've always really liked it.

176/295 but looking at the ones I missed I could have done way better - Beyonce, Bon Jovi and Blazin' Squad massively got in my way, and am kicking myself over the few Britney ones I missed! EDIT: For part 3 186/286, should at least have been 190 though as I missed Cuban Boys and somehow completely forgot to put the obvious Cher Lloyd one in...

I don't know if it's still the case now, but Cologne in Germany last year have a major music store (Saturn) which had, to my huge surprise, a whole wall of CD singles of every song in the chart from Taylor Swift to The Avener. It was like stepping back in time a decade or so! That was in November 2014 but might still be there, so I'm not surprised at the 6m figure above. I find the decline of CD singles oddly fascinating, mostly because there was a lot of press coverage of it around the mid-noughties and then everyone just seemed to completely lose interest in them eventually, and they began an extremely slow, prolonged fizzle-out. The last time I remember seeing a whole wall of CD singles in this country was the (now long gone) Zavvi megastore in Piccadilly Circus in early 2008, and that didn't even last to the summer. HMV in Oxford Street (also gone!) kept a fairly hefty section of their store to singles until around August/September 2009, when they got relegated to one shelf, then half a shelf, then just a handful tacked onto the end of one. I often wondered what the last song released as a CD single would be but it looks like we might never know, they'll just stop one day and only have the occasional one-off release. Vinyl should generally stay around and even cassette singles have a novelty retro charm to them which has helped a few indie releases on the format in recent years, I can't see CDs getting the same treatment though.

179/282 before the time ran out, midway through speeding through the Atomic Kitten singles :P I got caught out a lot with alternate spellings, brackets etc, although made a wild guess for the Arnee and the Teminators track (which I'd never heard of) and guessed right.

Re: Ride On Time, it seems to be about 50/50 these days as to where you hear the original Loleatta Holloway sampled vocal or the re-recorded Heather Small vocal, different compilations and different youtube uploads have both. My iPod copy is from 2003's Now That's What I Call Music Decades and it's Holloway, but on 1989's 'Monster Hits' it's Small. The biggest difference for me is on the line "You're such a" which sounds notably different on the Small re-record. Here's both to compare: Loleatta Holloway MiJ2B8PFjqU Heather Small igJJi34b4dQ

Brilliant song but does anyone know why they completely messed up the radio edit? The video - and the 12" mix - starts with that brilliant opening synth riff, but the radio mix has a really underwhelming first minute or so in comparison, like they massively watered it down. And there doesn't seem to be a radio edit like the one in the video, unless you edit the 12" or copy the sound from the video. EDIT: Oh, even the linked video above has the radio edit I mentioned. The video mix I mean is this one, which is the first version of it I heard. Note the completely different intro: cLttooauNyA

1993 isn't one of my favourite musical years of the 1990s anyway, it's probably only just above 1992 for me which is my least fave year of the decade. But then I only discovered most of it years later, I'm massively more biased to the second half of the decade as I remember more of it from the time. Just scrolling down my iTunes for 1993 tracks, the likes of Suede and James stand out more along with the whole of the 'Very' album by the Pet Shop Boys. Although The Time Frequency made some pretty good tracks that year.

15 years ago people would have said the same thing about mp3s - you're just downloading computer files, you aren't actually purchasing the CD. And 15 years earlier than that it would have been about home taping - you're just recording it from the radio. Heck, go back to the birth of recorded music and you probably got people mumbling about these new fangled musical cylinders, like you're not really a fan of Enrico Caruso unless you see him live :P

This is such an underrated pop gem - it feels very poppy now but I guess it would have been closer to a dance track for 1993 ears. Has anyone heard it played in the last 20 years? I wasn't even aware of it existing until a decade ago, my iPod copy is from a second-hand purchase of Now Dance 93.

While I mostly agree, Kygo's 'Firestone' does genuinely stand out for me because it actually has a recognisable melody, as opposed to a load of bland deep house/D&B tracks which just have random notes hit on keyboards. It's really odd to remember how drum & bass was seen as an exciting underground genre until comparatively recently, as opposed to basically a way of Paloma Faith to get a #1 single by taking a crap pop song and putting an extremely standard unchanging D&B drum loop over it - it's all so dull to listen to, when if you listen to the 90s and 00s stuff - Goldie's Timeless, Roni Size/Reprazent's New Forms, right up to Pendulum's Hold Your Colour - it's so much more exciting and interesting. Nowadays it's literally just take a pop artist, record a dull vocal track and put a three-second drum loop over it and you've got an easy #1 hit. It's not D&B anymore, it's tedious pop. I think it wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't for all these recent songs becoming MASSIVE MILLION-SELLING #1S when there's stuff from years ago so much better that's only sold a fraction of it.

My ideal mix of Temptation would be somewhere between both versions - the 1992 mix is almost perfect but add on some of the synths and that thudding 80s drumbeat from the original and I'd be in heaven!

1992's commercial dance scene really doesn't compare to the brilliance of mid-late 1991 for me, and this isn't based on any memories of the time as I'd have only been about 3 then. Bizarre Inc's transition from Such a Feeling/Playing With Knives to I'm Gonna Get You is kinda painful to listen to, it's so bland in comparison. The Shamen have their moments but their singles, particularly by now, are just too poppy for me.