I know very little about dance music. I can just about tell my techno from my chillout, but you may have noticed from my previous posts on dance #1s that I play pretty fast and loose with the terminology. So indulge me while I throw around some ideas that may be complete nonsense…
Let Me Be Your Fantasy, by Baby D (their 1st and only #1)
2 weeks, from 20th November – 4th December 1994
‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ might be the most ‘hardcore’ dance chart-topper yet. The beat is either ‘house’, if we’re looking backwards, or ‘garage’ if we’re looking forwards. Is it maybe even the first ‘drum ‘n’ bass’ number one? I’ll also throw in the suggestion that it also incorporates ‘jungle’, if only because I think it sounds fun.
I could list dance sub-genres all day long (Wikipedia also suggests ‘breakbeat’ and ‘happy hardcore’) but to be honest, they mean little to me and probably mean as much to you. Let me give the quotation marks a rest, and describe what ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ makes me feel… Well, it’s atmospheric – I like what sounds like a robot breathing in the mellow breaks between the verse – and the vocals are impressive. They’re the part of the song that feels the most familiar: a dance hit helmed by a large-lunged diva a la Black Box, or Snap!. Here the singer is Dorothy ‘Dee’ Galdes (presumably the ‘D’ in Baby D) and she has a wonderfully light-yet-full-bodied voice.
It’s another step towards the dance music that was dominating the charts when I came of age in the later part of the decade – dance music that had moved away from samples and novelty raps, dance music that had the confidence to strip things back, to drop the beats per minute, to let things breathe. This record is similar in that way to 1994’s other ‘cool’ dance hit by Tony Di Bart, rather than the more novelty offerings from Doop and Whigfield.
But I’ll also take that word ‘cool’, strengthen it into ‘cold’, and use it to describe how this song leaves me feeling. It’s not my thing, and as much as I try I can’t move past detached admiration as I listen and critique – much like I would an artefact in a museum – and I move on without particularly wanting to hear it again. I will always, sorry to say, enjoy the inane cheesiness of a 2 Unlimited song more…
Baby D had been around since the late eighties, and had scored a handful of minor hits earlier in the nineties. ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ had been around since 1992, when it made #76 and become something of a lost classic. Until it was ‘found’, re-released, and it reached #1. Baby D followed it up with a couple of #3 hits before fading. Their last hit was a remix of this, their biggest hit, that made #16 in 2000. Their keyboard player, Terry Jones, took a slight change in direction and went on to write and produce for the Backstreet Boys, Eternal, and Peter Andre…
The UK Number Ones Blog 
Loved this. It was trance dance music I think. You had to be there to appreciate it, the clubs in the mid 90’s were something else. In a way I feel sorry for the millennial generation, we had this and the Prodigy, they had Atomic Kitten and Westlife
I think the Prodigy straddle the generational divide… Their biggest album was released when I was at high school. And if we’re taking the blame for Westlife and Atomic Kitten (who actually had some good pop tunes on their first album) you have to shoulder responsibility for NKOTB… and Sonia…
Yes that’s true
I think the difference was down to the way music was promoted/purchased when your generation came of age. NKOTB etc didn’t have more number ones than anyone except Elvis and the Beatles, Westlife, regrettably, did. This means that, to a casual observer with no knowledge of how music sale formats and promotion techniques work (ie, most people) the Westlife generation seemed to be more prone to purchasing absolute shit in huge quantities over and over again than the NKOTB generation were. Now, with streaming included, it’s even worse. Maybe time to completely overhaul how the charts work
This is just observational, so not based on any hard figures, but… I was at high school when Westlife were racking up their number ones. My friends were maybe a bit older than the average boyband fans, but I don’t know anyone who would have bought a Westlife record (or perhaps they just didn’t admit it…) I’m sure kids did buy them, especially in the beginning, but by the time Westlife were releasing Barry Manilow and Bette Midler covers I doubt many people under thirty were responsible for them making #1. And these were a lot of the same people who were responsible for Robson and Jerome’s success too, I’d wager…
I’m Gen X ( as you’ve probably gathered). The baby boomers were the guilty party with Robson and Jerome, so maybe you’re right and they were the ones behind Westlife’s evil reign too. If so they could have inflicted Boyzone’s awful covers too. Wouldn’t it have been marvellous if the only Irish contributors to this blog were U2 and the Boomtown Rats? As a chart expert, do you know why so many naff late 90s early 00s acts were from the Emerald Isle? Is Louis Walsh to blame?
Not sure about the chart expert title, but thank you! I don’t know re. ‘The Irish Question’ to be honest. Since the sixties Irish acts have had a reputation for being a bit cosy and twee… Val Doonican, The Bachelors… not to mention all the showbands. So maybe it was a 90s updating of that? But Westlife weren’t overly ‘Irish’ (they could have been British, or American, at first glance) whereas B*Witched leaned right into it and it became their schtick.
I’ll save my ‘opinions’ until we reach the gilded age we’ve been discussing. Classic Christmas song up next
Oh I love this one, great dance track, still fresh to my ears and pretty influential I think, has that aura of coolness about it that lasts. Every era has chart rubbish, the only variation is whether they are topping the chart or not – and often that’s down to PR people and targeting audiences of a certain type, be they 10-year-olds or housewives and grannies, or sullen introverted teens and macho-crap lads. Great records last in the long run though. Westlife was the housewife market, NKOTB block the pre-teen girlies. Neither of them were much good on the whole. This was teens and 20’s clubbers and it was damn fine played loud. Still is!
Not my thing but yea…the 90s was a lot of dance tracks. I heard them in clubs but I never paid attention to see if they were on the charts.