BillyH

For any archivists, Switzerland were the initial odds favourites, only to be overtaken by Malta who were strong leaders for a while, and then France and especially Italy made huge gains once the rehearsals started. Malta's back up to #2 since they qualified and Ukraine's had a significant increase too.

I think it's incredibly concerning that pubs can open indoors and we can legally hug people again next Monday. The virus has clearly evolved over the last year and the new variants could cause massive illness and deaths within days of contact, maybe even as far as 1.9 metres apart. We could have horrifying scenes shown live on the news of bodies being lifted from restaurants within hours of opening and stories of children hugging their grandmas only for her to suddenly fall to the ground dead in front of them, traumatising them for the rest of their short lives until they too succumb to this demonic pandemic. We MUST all stay indoors at all costs and potentially never leave our houses if we want to live like we did in 2019 again. I worry that death zone countries like India could be wastelands by Christmas, just acres of abandoned ghost towns like Chernobyl and that evil young Instagram influencers could go over and take selfies there only to bring the deadly variants back to the UK and cause total destruction across the country. The very air that we breathe could "test positive" and start contaminating even the double-Pfizer'd of us, burning through even the most expensive of face masks and leading to stampedes as we all try and run away from each other only to reach the other side of the planet and collide in the middle. Drivers of cars could slump over their wheels and motorway pileups could lead to huge petrol explosions, steadily growing until uniting into one massive blast that completely blows a hole in our planet and causes the great 'reverse bang' of our solar system, wiping out all life and the few survivors suffocating from lack of oxygen as they float around the vastness of empty space without masks. Millions of years could pass until Covid levels reduce to a safe amount and the evolution of our species from the tiny slugs that remain on this earth can start again, only reading about Covid in history books and old posts on Twitter, worshiping as a religion the mythical figure of a blonde, scruffy-haired man who sacrificed himself to try and save the world. But I think as long as we keep washing our hands we'll be fine.

I had my first vaccine dose on Tuesday, I just went to one of the local centres around 6pm and they were giving out spares at the end of the day to anyone who wanted them - I’m 32 so could have been waiting a while longer otherwise! It was the AZ one so still restricted to 30 and above, and I was able to book my second dose online for the first week of July. Worth giving it a try as long as you time it right, they said I was one of the only first doses they’d done all day as they’re generally doing seconds right now. But had I not been there it would have been wasted so I didn’t “steal” it from anyone who needed it more.

Quite impressed that I know all of these from 1967 to 2017, and vaguely/know of them after that. Easter 1999 was when we got The Box and I started really getting into music for the first time!

Some friends of mine in their early 20s were genuinely surprised to learn recently that Mr Brightside is from 2004. They thought it was some old 70s/80s song that had been around for many more decades than it has. (to be fair I used to think the same about Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl)

There were several times where I'd hear the intro for Shape of You in a club and get all excited thinking it was Sia's Cheap Thrills.

To be honest I was surprised (and secretly a little disappointed) that Friday wasn't a huge chart hit, it seemed so big on Youtube that I thought it would crossover a lot more than it did - I came to the conclusion that just because something's popular online it won't automatically translate into downloaded sales. Then a year later came Gangnam Style which blew that theory out the water :lol:

And S Club 7's Reach!

I can’t remember the last time there were two neck-and-neck favourites in the odds like this - normally there’s one favourite that towers above the rest, whether it actually ends up winning the thing (Toy, Arcade) or not (You Are The Only One, Occidentali’s Karma) but this year Switzerland and Malta are basically twins as to who’s gonna win. Preparing already for a full-on draw and 2022 being held simultaneously on a beach in Valletta and a freezing tent at the top of the Matterhorn.

Not that I was expecting to go anyway, but Easyjet cancelled the flight to Amsterdam that I'd booked in May last year using the credit from the equivalent 2020 flight - along with almost every other flight to and from Amsterdam that weekend, save for one on the Friday night and one on the Sunday (which are now several hundred pounds each for anyone genuinely still hoping to be there). It would have been a bit of a mess anyway, as mentioned in a previous post I was annoyed how crazily expensive Rotterdam accommodation was for both 2020 and 2021 weekends, even pre-Covid - no other country in recent years had done this and kept their hotel prices pretty standard. Rotterdam hostels shot up to three figure sums a night for that weekend and hotels were basically the price of a round the world trip. Can't really book for May next year yet until I know where it'll be and what weekend!

They should update their style and get Ringo to do a grime beat.

Ah thanks. makes more sense as I remember the original the most! Similar situation with Sonny J's Can't Stop Moving, it charted top 40 for the first time in 2008 with the lead track on the CD single being a Mirwais remix, but on iTunes it was the 2007 original that sold the most. Still feel like that would have been a bigger hit had it not been released during two of the wettest and coldest summers in recent memory...

Registered, there was a couple I think I knew (the and questions) but by the time we got to 2010s related questions I was in mad guess mode :lol:

Joss Stone feat. Ne-Yo needs to happen tbh.

Every new decade has a bit of a clearout from the music of the previous, a combination of changing styles and music distribution - disco became incredibly uncool a year or two into the 1980s and ABBA were surprisingly unpopular for a few years up until their 90s revival. A lot of 80s synth groups struggled to move into the 90s, a lot of 90s pop acts didn't make it long into the 2000s and then there's the download/streaming transition in the 2010s as mentioned. On the plus side there's always a revival of the bands and styles of 20 years previous, so look out for a lot of 2000s-era acts getting a second go at things in the years ahead!

From memory 'Gold Dust' charted in two different versions, a remix outpeaked the original a few years later. A big reason for several 1980s songs getting new leases of life in the 1990s was because they were on CD for the first time, often coinciding with a Greatest Hits album release - as people binned their vinyl collection and bought CD players they'd be purchasing their favourite songs all over again, similar to when DVDs overtook videos in the 2000s. A TV premiere or video release of a film would also bring back a movie hit to the charts, I think that's the reason It Must Have Been Love by Roxette went top 10 again in 1993.

Flat Beat in 1999 I think? Although an underrated Levi’s advert track for me is Before You Leave by Pepe Deluxe, #20 in 2001.

My vote goes to Addicted to Bass for reasons mentioned earlier, although Sunchyme too had the bad luck of being released just after one of the biggest deaths of the 20th century.

This is why I still buy DVDs and treasure my iPod and 2000+ collection of downloaded/CD-ripped music! I get ridiculed for it sometimes as being stuck in the 2000s, but it's nice to know I can watch a film/listen to a song at any time without the fear of it being removed or my internet connection going down. The Now albums on CD are a godsend for many of these, the equivalent playlists on Spotify are either missing songs or feature the wrong versions of others, either longer/shorter edits or completely different mixes.

My 2008 “prediction” for Now 100 in 2018 is on there! Actually a rather fascinating time capsule of late noughties music there, even if it was the least accurate prediction of all time :lol:

Seem to remember 2007 was one of the few years where every single #1 that year made it on a Now.

I remember being really frustrated in the noughties when UK releases of dance tracks were given ridiculously short radio edits, just over two minutes sometimes - it felt like they were suggesting that no one's going to want to listen to them for too long so have the most minimum amount possible, although perhaps it was also a way of essentially forcing you to buy the CD to hear the full thing. Elsewhere in Europe you'd get better three-four minute edits that would keep the breakdowns/buildups at a good level, rather than just jumping straight into choruses as soon as possible.

There'll be some kind of major disaster this decade that kills thousands of people, and the charity song released to fundraise for the victims will overtake Candle In The Wind because someone mimed to it on Tik Tok once. (then LadBaby rewrites it to be about sausage rolls and it's #1 all over again)

It can get quite complex as sometimes radio edits exist but either were never officially released, or only appeared on certain formats, or showed up much later on compilation albums, or a radio station would just make their own but it was never official. A couple of cases from my favourite musical year of 1999, not #1s but close enough - Alice Deejay's Better Off Alone was released as a single in the UK only as a 6:44 extended mix, and to get the 3:36 radio edit you either had to buy Now That's What I Call Music 43, or just tape it from the radio or a music channel. Followup single Back In My Life included a radio edit of Better Off Alone, but confusingly this was an extra short edit that differed significantly from the actual one. So had it got to #1 it's possible it would count in the top ten, even though there was an initially-unobtainable shorter version? Hey Boy, Hey Girl by the Chemical Brothers had a similar story, but in this case even Now 43 had the full 4:48 version. The edit existed as a promo release sent to radio stations, but one of the only ways to get it outside of the radio (the music video had a ton of sound effects/dialogue over the top) was many months later on the Brit Awards 2000 compilation the following year, long after it was released as a single! DanG's list from 2017 looks mostly correct, agreed that some did have shorter versions but it's hard to know as mentioned whether they were available to buy as a single at the time. Ironically 'Sign of the Times' is mentioned when the version that later showed up on Now 97 is 4:08.

I listened to a lot of dance music in the mid-noughties and I still assume a lot of them were massive hits from how much I heard them, when they didn't make top ten - 'Love Generation' as already mentioned (which was colossal around Europe), Axwell's 'Feel The Vibe' (#16), Freemasons' 'Love On My Mind' (#11) and Joey Negro's 'Make A Move On Me' (#11) all stand out.