After a fairly underwhelming run of boyband fluff and novelty covers, we finally arrive at a number one record worthy of its exalted position…

Can’t Get You Out of My Head, by Kylie Minogue (her 6^th of seven #1s)

4 weeks, from 23^rd September – 21^st October 2001

This is sophisticated pop by the standards of any era, not just when compared to the trash that it regally swept aside to spend a month on top of the charts. Pop to sit with the likes of ‘Dancing Queen’, or ‘Heart of Glass’, or ‘…Baby One More Time’ (not to give away my next Very Best award, or anything…)

And like the best pop songs before it, it has layers. Yes, ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ is catchy, and has a la-la-la hook which lodges itself deep in your brain. But it’s actually quite a sinister record, almost a dirge, with a hypnotic marching beat setting the foundations of this tale of obsession. There’s a dark secret in me, Don’t leave me locked in your heart… Perhaps the most telling line is when Kylie breathes the Set me free… Feel the need in me…

It straddles that fine line of being strange enough to be interesting, yet catchy enough to be a huge hit. You can dance to it, sure, but you can also think about it, and analyse it. You couldn’t do the same with ‘Hand on Your Heart’. And it hasn’t actually got a chorus. Or does it? Are the lalalas the chorus? Is it the Set me free…? Or is it one big chorus? This fluid, hypnotic element means that the song could potentially be played on a never-ending loop and not grow old…

I can remember hearing this record for the first time, on a radio in my old Scout hut. That same night (unless I’m mixing two memories here) I had also been clobbered over the head with a hockey stick and knocked unconscious. I’d like to claim that I came to with the sound of Kylie’s new single in my ears, but I think that really would be stretching things. Anyway, concussed or not, it sounded like the biggest-sounding hit I’d ever heard. My love for Kylie, which had been bubbling away since the early nineties, now came to the boil. She remains an icon, a legend. She is, and always will be, the moment.

Many would claim that this is Kylie’s signature song, but that’s not a simple claim to make. Has any other pop star released their signature song a full fifteen years into their careers? So I’d definitely agree that this the signature song of her post-comeback career, proving that her return the year before, with ‘Spinning Around’, wasn’t going to be a one-album flash in the pan. And Kylie of course remains active, and dare we say relevant, a quarter of a century on. But she also has one final #1 to come, so we won’t wrap things up for her just yet.

‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ was a final number one, though, for one of its songwriters, Rob Davis (alongside Cathy Dennis). Davis had an incredible career in music, from his early-sixties debut in a Shadows tribute band, to his role as lead guitarist in Mud, to his three classics of the early ‘00s: ‘Toca’s Miracle’, ‘Groovejet’, and this.

Having waxed lyrical about this record for seven paragraphs, I will spoil it all by admitting that ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ is not my favourite Kylie record. I will never not enjoy it, but like ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘…Baby One More Time’ before it, copious airplay has taken the edge off. Nowadays I’d rather hear it in the brilliant New Order mash-up ‘Can’t Get Blue Monday Out of My Head’, which Kylie debuted at the 2002 Brit Awards, and subsequently released as a B-side. Get your ears around that, if you never have before…