The biggest pop comeback of the new millennium. Step aside Madonna, All Saints, Oasis, and Britney… It’s Billie. Piper.
Day and Night, by Billie Piper (her 3rd and final #1)
1 week, from 21st – 28th May 2000
She’s added a surname, as well as beefing up her sound. While her team may, just may, have been listening to Ms Spears. And perhaps a bit of Backstreet Boys too… Okay, in fairness this is a pretty wholesale ripping off of that big-chords, big-chorus Max Martin sound. It is the female version of ‘Backstreet’s Back’. I did check to see if Martin had been involved here, but no. ‘Day and Night’ was written by English songwriter Eliot Kennedy, as well as two members of Dead or Alive, and produced by Stargate, who will become one of the biggest names in ‘00s pop. (And who are from Norway, so there is a Scandinavian influence after all…)
So, yes, this is a lot more muscular, a lot more mature, a lot more internationally appealing, than Billie’s two teeny bopping hits from 1998. The beat is chunky, the production slick, and the chorus lands like a big slab of granite. But despite all this I’m finding it fairly forgettable. Twenty-five years on I vaguely remembered the chorus; and after listening to it three times in succession I still only vaguely remember it. Compare it with ‘Oops!… I Did It Again’, a song it longs to be but that it falls far short of matching.
This track is also, inadvertently, evidence for the defence in the ‘Britney can’t sing’ case. Billie performs this competently, but her voice also sounds a little stretched. Brit could have sung this in her sleep. It also goes to show that while people may write off all pop music like this as disposable, it’s actually quite hard to locate that hidden ingredient which promotes a song from ‘decently catchy’ to ‘proper classic’.
The video is going for an ‘all grown up’ message (bear in mind she was still just seventeen when this made #1), with Billie and her friends partying in some sort of damp, underground garage. And a laundrette. This video debuted, according to Wikipedia, on 9th March, well over two months before the single was actually released, which gives another glimpse into why the turn-of-the-century charts were so fast-moving.
Billie released two further singles from this, her second LP. By the summer of 2001 she had announced her retirement from music in order to focus on her acting career. And a pretty successful acting career it has been, twenty years in. She’s most famous for her role as Rose Tyler on ‘Doctor Who’, but has starred on both stage and screen without ever being tempted back into the recording studio. No matter, to a generation of Brits rapidly approaching their forties, the name Billie Piper will always bring to mind ‘Because We Want To’s chanty chorus, and some low cut jeans.
The UK Number Ones Blog 
This sounds much beefier and harder-edged than Billie’s early hits, like her sound has hit the gym and buffed up, I guess to compete with Queen Britney and even Princess Christina.
I have no memory of this track, but it’s one that peaked at 16 in my charts of the time, which is much higher than her early stuff – not surprising as I was well into Backstreet Britney N’Sync pop gems and most Max Martin stuff since. But yes it’s more of a lacklustre copycat effort in retrospect. So. Much as it annoys me still, Because We Want To is memorable (for the wrong reasons) and this one isn’t.
When I heard she was going to be the new Doctor Who “assistant”, I thought, oh dear that doesn’t bode well! Teenage popstar has-been going to embarrass herself on TV. Ooh was I wrong, she won me round pretty quickly and turned into one of the great co-stars of the show. She was never an “assistant” though, and there was clearly more going on offpanel… oopsie!
It feels like a second-hand cast off, rather than a brand new, exciting single. If she’d had better material then maybe the pop career might have lasted longer? But, like you say, the acting career hasn’t gone too badly for her.
Oh hey, it’s Rose Tyler!
One of my top 3 favorite Doctor Who companions, if you must know (the other two are Donna and Amy, in that order!) 🙂
I’m a bit late to the Doctor Who party, so I didn’t get into it until Netflix put the revival series on their service in the early 2010s. So the first Who episodes I ever watched were with Billie Piper in it.
It was only when I was looking up more about the show that I found out Billie was a pop star before becoming an actress. Of the three number-ones she had in the UK, I like this one a little more than the others? This song at least has a harder edge to it. I can tell it wants to be Britney Spears. Just wish the chorus were a bit more memorable.
I was curious as to whether her music ever charted here in the US. Looks like her song “She Wants You” made it to #9 on the US Dance charts and her first album hit #17 on the Heatseekers chart. But that’s it.
Yes I’ve had a few American commenters who knew Billie from Dr Who over her pop career. Whereas I’ve never seen a single episode of the show, but remember very well ‘Because We Want To’ being a big hit when I was twelve!
She will always be Rose to me…always. I agree though…it was more mature than the others.