BillyH

No one's posted this yet?! It's just been announced early this morning, looks to be the real deal. Almost certainly a reworked cover of the 1996 Jamiroquai hit. http://i.imgur.com/I3UgcHM.jpg http://i.imgur.com/3cyCg2z.jpg http://i.imgur.com/abLWEcc.jpg No point making a poll, whatever it sounds like it'll be an easy #1!! Presumably we'll get to hear it very soon. Here's the (classic) original for those unfamiliar: 4JkIs37a2JE

You can definitely see the eras when dance and pop intermingle as essentially the same thing, eg 1998-1999 and the last few years. Similarly it really shows you how the genre completely disappeared from major chart relevancy in the indie and R&B-heavy noughties, and I can't help thinking another rocky era has to be on its way soon. It's hugely depressing. Many of the trance hits going back to 1999 (of the Ferry/Tiesto type) still sound unlike anything in the charts today, let alone 15 years ago. Ferry did an EQ'd remaster of System F's 'Out of the Blue' a few years back where he mixed it to fit modern day audio standards and it sounds utterly astonishing, it would blow people's minds today.

Bought mine today and it's the most expensive price I've paid for a new Now in years. For ages you'd have at least one online retailer (out of Sainsbury's/Tesco/ASDA) selling it for £10, but this time there's nothing under £12.99. I ended up buying my copy in the local ASDA as it was £13. But then saying that, it's probably still cheaper than a decade or two ago when CDs were much more expensive.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I've lost count of all the dance hits in the last few years that everyone raves about but massively underwhelm me, but this is fantastic - it's like an updated version of Sash's Ecuador. Fantastic to hear a proper euphoric kick-ass melody for once rather than a half-hearted couple of notes randomly hit out on your average deep house track, easily my fave track of 2015 so far. Needs to be top 10 if it keeps its momentum going.

This might just be from before my time (I was six years old and remember very few from original release) but this is an astonishing Now. It was really hard to find at one point because of 'Whatever' being on there, which wasn't on any Oasis albums (or even iTunes) until the 2010 Greatest Hits, but I'd finally picked up my copy the previous year. Disc 1 03 Freak Power - Turn On, Tune In, Cop Out 06 Janet Jackson - Whoops Now 08 Boyzone - Love Me For A Reason 00 Cher, Chrissie Hynde & Neneh Cherry with Eric Clapton - Love Can Build A Bridge 08 East 17 - Stay Another Day 07 Mike & The Mechanics - Over My Shoulder 08 Jimmy Nail - Crocodile Shoes (one of the only ones I actually remember from the time, when he performed it on Live & Kicking!) 10 Scarlet - Independent Love Song (hugely underrated, brilliant to get it see a lot of love here) 04 Simple Minds - She's A River 09 Boo Radleys - Wake Up Boo! 09 Human League - Tell Me When 02 M People - Sight For Sore Eyes 04 Sting - The Cowboy Song (Spotify and most of Youtube is really misleading, the version on Now 30 and the one released as a single was a reggae remix with Pato Banton) 01 Shut Up and Dance - Save It 'Till The Morning After 04 R Kelly - Bump N' Grind 04 Eternal - Oh Baby I….. 07 Massive Attack feat. Tracey Thorn - Protection 08 Portishead - Glory Box 10 Oasis - Whatever (this would have been an easy 11 had it not been for the brilliance awaiting us on disc 2) Disc 2 08 The Outthere Brothers - Don't Stop (Wiggle Wiggle) 09 Alex Party - Don't Give Me Your Life 10 Strike - U Sure Do 07 Kelly Dope Presents The Bucketheads - The Bomb (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind) 06 Nightcrawlers - Push The Feeling On 09 Tin Tin Out feat. Espiritu - There's Always Something There To Remind Me 07 Corona - Baby Baby 05 Clock - Axel F 11 TIMES INFINITY N-Trance - Set You Free :wub: 07 JX - You Belong To Me 09 Perfecto Allstarz - Reach Up (Papa's Got A Brand New Bag) 08 Rednex - Cotton Eyed Joe 01 Deuce - Call It Love (but follow-up 'I Need You' is incredble, can't believe it was almost a Eurovision entry - it would have been a massive Euro-hit like Gina G was a year later, but didn't have a chance with Love City Groove sounding a lot more current) 07 2 Unlimited - Here I Go 09 MC Sar & The Real McCoy - Run Away 04 Nicki French - Total Eclipse Of The Heart (this exists in a few different mixes, the Now 30 one was the 1995 remix which starts with a slow piano. Don't believe the Spotify playlist which puts a mad 2006 remix here by mistake!) 03 Sean Maguire - Suddenly 07 Bobby Brown - Two Can Play That Game 06 Ultimate KAOS - Hoochie Booty 03 Pato Banton with Ranking Roger - Bubbling Hot 08 Mica Paris - One The first half of disc 2 is all kinds of incredible.

Ah, that'll be it I think. It's the same year Lonestar's 'Amazed' reached its peak of #21, rising five places in the same week Woolworths first stocked the single - it's ninth week on sale!

I literally know nothing about them except NOUGHTIES CLASSIC Upside Down. Did they make anything else worth listening to? (genuine question, I'm a huge Scandipop fan especially from that era)

Yeah I would have thought the same circa Call Me Maybe, you had Steps returning to #1 on the album chart (and undertaking a huge sell-out tour) plus the return of boybands such as One Direction and The Wanted doing absolutely massive - I thought a bubblegum pop revival was imminent, but it never quite happened. It's really difficult to class what is and isn't 'pop'. Looking at the last 15 years you had the kid-friendly Britney/Steps/S Club 7 era at the start, then it all became very R&B-influenced in the early-mid noughties, then indie-pop dominated until 2008 and then the Gaga/Guetta/Calvin madness began - you could go from S Club 7's 'Reach' to Liberty X's 'Just A Little' to Scouting For Girls's 'She's So Lovely' to Lady Gaga's 'Poker Face' to Taylor Swift's 'Blank Space' and call all of it "pop" music, just adapting based on the era and style that was relevant at the time.

The exact two I was going to mention! Amazing, if brief, comebacks. Scooter is my favourite surprise of the two, they sub-headlined a major Clubland Live tour with Cascada in March 2008 and the album came out a couple of months later. I remember being in the long-gone Zavvi music store in Tottenham Court Road and a group of teenage girls went nuts when they saw the album on the shelf, screaming "OMG SCOOTER" and buying it immediately! I think it felt so brilliant at the time because they'd always had such unfair derision here despite their success, particularly in the south of the UK - they sold huge numbers in Scotland and Ireland but not as much elsewhere. It felt like we were finally rewarding them for their fourteen years of mad brilliance, I saw them live twice that year :lol:

Definitely wasn't Rugrats in Paris, that wasn't released until Easter 2001 here. That was the era of music channels, particularly The Box, having a huge impact on the charts - especially regarding international hits that wouldn't normally have got major airplay here. I'm guessing it just started getting massive airtime on the channel shortly after it charted, coupled with two Top of the Pops performances (one in its first week at #13 and again when it rose to #2) and possibly CD:UK as well. But this is just a theory - it happened with Scooter's 'The Logical Song' a couple years later which had a similar chart performance. Astonishing to think that it only peaked at #40 in the US's Billboard Hot 100, but was a huge hit all around Europe and a massive #1 in Australia and New Zealand!

Wonder how much Adele's management paid for this article :P ABBA Gold sold a hell of a lot in 2008, Mamma Mia was a huge box-office hit - plus it's probably sold well in every year of the century.

Free As A Bird? Real Love?

Does anyone remember the odd version of Uniting Nations 'Out of Touch' on Now 60? It's the only place I've ever heard it, it's got a full vocal added to it when all the radio/video airplay I heard of it at the time was a simple Call On Me-style loop of the one sampled line.

Was there ever any chance of Maniac 2000 ever being released in the UK? It's an extreme example of a song being absolutely massive in one country and virtually unknown in the other, especially remarkable given that Ireland is right next to it. Did they just assume that British audiences wouldn't take to some random Irish bloke they've never heard of shouting over a Flashdance cover? Even then a shortened edit removing some of McCabe and just selling it as a straightforward 'Maniac' remix would have probably done well, there were tons of trancey covers of old hits in the chart at the time. For me though it's Gigi D'Agostino's 'La Passion' I feel sorry for. Big all over Europe, huge #2 in Ireland in early 2002, tenth biggest selling single of the year there and I don't even think they bothered with a UK release. It's catchy as hell! SzT0dvNrFc4

'Relax' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood is on Now 2, and was still in the top 10 when Now 3 was released. So Hozier isn't the first!

DID I JUST SEE THE WORD MUSE *LISTENS* F*** YES. It rips off Personal Jesus but BRILLIANT to hear them back, sort of a cross between Supermassive and Uprising! And up to #18 as I type :D

With a Peter Kay comedy version of 2 Unlimited's No Limit. "No, no, no no no no..." "NO WHAT? EH ANYONE REMEMBER BULLSEYE" etc.

One Direction clone cash-in band, given one 'hit' song and one hit song only (Carry You) and then left to die. But their place on The Big Reunion 2025 - along with JLS, The Wanted, Stooshe, Lawson and Girls Can't Catch - is assured.

Sally Sweetland. Number 1 with Eddie Fisher in 1953 with 'I'm Walking Behind You'. She was born on September 23rd, 1911. She's still alive. :) Yq7wdiruQNU

Yeah this is also the biggest injustice for me, they included the song on Now 43 thinking it was going to be a hit (after Killing Time went top 20) but it so deserved top 40 at least. Instead it's a rare top 40 miss for the Now series. qy8bS03H8z8 :heart:

Yeah, these are incredible. Scotland was much much bigger on happy hardcore and bouncy techno - acts like QFX, Q-Tex, Ultra Sonic and Scooter appear in the top 10 all the time in the mid 1990s. QFX even got a number 1 hit with Freedom over there when in the official UK chart it didn't even go top 20. A few more things I've noticed in the 1990s Scottish charts: * N Trance's 'Set You Free' spends six, agonising weeks at number 2, but still doesn't quite get there - the Rednex/Celine Dion double bill was too strong for them even in Scotland :( 'Common People' also stalled at #2 over there. * 'Roll With It' actually won the Battle of Britpop in Scotland, but Country House overtook it at #1 the following week! * Robert Miles's 'Children' was a deserved massive multi-week #1 * The 1995 Christmas number 1 was Mike Flowers Pops :lol: Although Michael Jackson still got lots of weeks at #1 there * Ice MC's 'Think About The Way' went top 5 in 1996 * The Scottish Euro 96 song by Rod Stewart peaks at #2, falls down the chart quickly and then 'Three Lions' shoots up into the top 10 from #23 once Scotland leave the competition and England reach the semi finals * Sash actually hit #1 in Scotland twice - 'Ecuador' and 'Adelante'! * DJ Sakin's 'Protect Your Mind' was #1 in 1999 the week after Blondie's Maria - I love 'Maria' but Protect Your Mind is an utter anthem! * System F's 'Out of the Blue' went top 10 in 1999 :cheer: * BETTER OFF ALONE WAS A NUMBER 1 FOR TWO WEEKS :cheer: :cheer: * And just slightly cheating by going into 2000 here, but DELERIUM's 'SILENCE' WAS A NUMBER 1 TOO :cheer: :cheer: It's great to see lots of hits do so much better up there - some of them always seemed a bit odd how low they were in the official chart, but it makes sense if they were selling massive in the north but not as much in the more populated south!

Up there with Michael Jackson, John Lennon and Johann Sebastian Bach IMO.

Wish You Were Mine: Go to McDonalds and eat a burger. Stay With Me: Get married to someone I'll meet in five years. Chandelier: Celebrate the birth of my second child. Thinking Out Loud: Retire and travel the world on my pension. All Of Me: Sadly I'm not sure I'll still be alive by the 22nd century...

54? That actually surprises me as the first part of this decade seemed to return to multiple one-week #1s, after the stability of the late noughties. I know not all would agree but give me a 7 week #1 any day instead of 7 one-week #1s. It really takes the fun out of things when you've got a release schedule planned meticulously in advance.

'Sonnet' only charted on import sales. It did get released here but only as part of a limited edition set of 12-inch vinyl, which wasn't allowed to chart. Reading that though made me feel sorry for The Feeling again, massive through 2006 and getting a top 10 single in early 2008 only to completely fall out of favour within months. The end of the indie era saw a lot of bands of their style disappear though, so I suppose their days were numbered anyway.