After partying all night on ‘Flava’, Peter Andre aims for the flip-side of ‘90s R&B: a sickly slow-jam…
I Feel You, by Peter Andre (his 2nd of three #1s)
1 week, from 1st – 8th December 1996
I assumed that by late-1996, as we near my eleventh birthday, there wouldn’t be any number ones that I’d never heard before. But I reckoned against the fact that, as chart-topping turnover increases, there will be lots of one-week wonders to contend with. Like this.
‘I Feel You’ has some nice Boyz II Men style chord changes, a funky bassline and, if you squint your ears (you know what I mean…) you could just about mistake Andre for Michael Jackson. It also has, as most songs of this ilk do, some unintentionally stomach-turning lyrics: I’m thinking about the bedroom, baby, We’d be making love…Making love! As well as a very steamy video featuring, naturally, Andre’s six-pack as one of the main characters.
By and large, though, this song is dull. Spotify only hosts an extended five-minute mix, which is a slog when it comes to a song of this quality. And it’s sexiness is so forced, that anyone who isn’t Pepe Le Pew will be turned off. It’s custom made for horny teenagers to put on their make-out mixtapes, and they were presumably one of the song’s main customer bases in getting it to the top.
This should have been the last we hear from Peter Andre. His star shone brightly, but briefly: seven Top 10 hits between 1996 and 1998. Fate had different ideas, however. It does mean that, in seven years or so, he will reappear, and his best single will belatedly make #1… But at what cost?
Since this is looking like being a very short write-up, I’ll mention something that I’ve hinted at in earlier posts. Late-’96 is the moment that the singles chart became the chart I grew up with – not just in terms of the songs sounding like modern pop, as I’ve discussed before, but in the way they started entering at #1, and staying there for just seven days at a time. As I said above: ‘one-week wonders’, like this one, and the next song we’ll be featuring…
The UK Number Ones Blog 
I’m not gay, and this is definitely before my time, but I don’t really see the appeal of this guy besides his six pack. His music is just generic 90s R&B (and I have a huge soft spot for 90s R&B). At least the guys in Take That, those guys were quite handsome young men, and some of their music is pretty good.
Yeah, the six pack was definitely his thing. I was too young, but I’m not sure if he was flirting, so to speak, with a gay audience. I don’t get the feeling he was… You mention Take That, and they spent their pre-fame years touring primary schools and gay bars, knowing exactly who their target audiences were. Plus, some of their early videos are among the gayest things ever committed to film… As for Peter Andre, check out ‘Mysterious Girl’, which will get to number one eventually after his reality TV comeback (shudder…) It’s a fun, if very cheesy, reggae-pop song, and way better than this slushy bore.
I’m the opposite end of the age bracket to you and this is the first song you’ve posted since 1971 that I’ve never heard before, although the Boyzone song a few entries back would have probably taken that particular crown if it wasn’t a cover. By the time you get to the mid 00’s I’m sure that the ones I’ve actually heard of will be in the minority, old age and all that!
Re most records entering the charts at number one from the mid 90’s onwards do you know why this happened? I can understand it these days of downloads and streaming but that was over a decade away at this point, people still had to go to a shop and physically purchase a single, so what changed?
I believe it was the fact that by 1996 records were being released to radio several weeks before they were in the shops, which built up demand. Plus, by the very end of the decade record companies were targeting specific weeks, maybe even agreeing amongst one another, so that each big act could get a week at number one. This is definitely how Westlife racked up so many! Before that, only the biggest acts like the Beatles, Slade, the Jam, or big charity singles, could be relied upon to enter at number one without much prior airplay. And nowadays, streaming has pretty much killed this off, as records are released straight away, without much promo, and mostly climb to the their peaks.
Is it me or did the voice just not match the guy? 1995 is about the time I stopped listening to radio after The Beatles hit that year… I had stopped going to clubs because I met my wife by this point…still hadn’t married but still.
I doubt this was on the radio in the US. You had plenty of your own drippy, ballad singers at this time 🙂
Yes we did! We filled that quota fine.