2000 #1s

866. ‘Life Is a Rollercoaster’, by Ronan Keating

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Straight on from the Corrs, it’s more Irish joy at the top of the charts. In fact, 2000 might just be the best year on record for Irish number ones, with Ronan Keating becoming the year’s third, with three more yet to go…

Life Is a Rollercoaster, by Ronan Keating (his 2nd of three solo #1s)

1 week, from 16th – 23rd July 2000

And while, yes, this is already Groanin’ Ronan’s eighth appearance in less than four years, I’m not feeling too apprehensive about this record. For, finally, Ronan is going upbeat. Strap yourselves in folks, because This. Is. Not. A. Ballad!

Like the Corr’s ‘Breathless’, ‘Life Is a Rollercoaster’ was a song impossible to escape when it came out. Radios nationwide blasted Ronan’s dulcet tones from dawn to dusk, all summer long, or so it seemed. So on one hand, it’s easy to groan when you think of how over-exposed this song became. But on the other, we should admit that this is actually quite a good pop tune. Nothing amazing, nothing revolutionary; but given the singer, it’s a welcome change of direction.

Strangely, I’d always remembered it being faster-paced. I thought it was more of a rollicking pop number, much like an actual rollercoaster. Listening to it now it feels slower, with a dreamy quality in the way Keating’s voice echoes against a wall of sound in the chorus. It’s somehow otherworldly, to the extent that I had to check I wasn’t listening to a remix, and ‘otherworldly’ is not a word you often associate with Ronan Keating. (Any otherworldliness, though, is undone by the fairly trite lyrics. Life as a rollercoaster. Because of all the ups and downs. Duh.)

Also, because it’s not a ballad, he doesn’t feel the need to chew every single syllable like tough steak in an attempt to convey ‘emotion’. He just sings the words, doesn’t overthink it, and produces what is by far the best vocal performance of any of his, or Boyzone’s, number ones. He even lets loose at the end, adding a semi-saucy adlib: Life is a rollercoaster, Just gotta ride it… (All night long!) I’m sure it had grannies across the land reaching for the smelling salts.

In writing this post, I’ve just realised that this song owes a big debt to George Michael’s ‘Fastlove’, with its Hey baby! refrain, and its similar tempo. I’m sure I’m not the first to notice, but it doesn’t seem to have caused a fuss at the time. Where there was controversy was in the fact that one hundred thousand copies of ‘Life is a Rollercoaster’s enhanced CD single were deemed ineligible to chart, due to an obscure chart rule about what an ‘enhanced CD single’ had to include. This didn’t stop the song from entering at number one, but it did cost it a fortnight on top when a further fourteen thousand copies were discarded the week after. And as we’ll soon find out when we hear the next #1, this was a costly error…

865. ‘Breathless’, by The Corrs

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Our next number one feels very much of its time – the Corrs were probably playing on at least one British radio station at any given moment between 1998 and 2000 – but also a bit of an outlier among the chart toppers we’ve been working our way slowly through.

Breathless, by The Corrs (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 9th – 16th July 2000

‘Breathless’ isn’t dance. It’s not hip-hop. It’s not bubblegum. Instead, we’ve got some good old-fashioned MOR pop-rock. With actual guitars! And it’s a welcome sound!

At the time, as an unsufferable teen, I thought this track was a bit naff. And yes, it has lots of unfashionable touches. There are some cheesy synth fills, revving guitars, and that naggingly catchy (but also pretty annoying) Go-ooh on! Go-ooh on! hook. But the driving riff, and the sheer breeziness of the song wins me over, belatedly. I’m just disappointed that I’d written it off for a quarter of a century!

The fact that I wrote it off, and didn’t pay much attention to it, is probably tied to the fact that, despite being chart-obsessed from the age of eleven, and despite owning every ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ album between… I think… Now 35 and Now 44; by my mid-teens I’d lost interest. I went from taping the charts from the radio and writing them out in notebooks every week to not really knowing who was who in the Top 10. I knew the big songs, from the radio and from classmates, but couldn’t have told you who was #1 on any given week. This lasted until around late-2002, when my interest in the charts suddenly burst back into life, and has never left!

Anyway, back to the song at hand. It also has some vaguely Celtic touches, which every Irish act had to have at this time, but these are dialled well back from some of the Corrs’ earlier hits. What it reminds me of is Shania Twain’s huge ‘Come On Over’ album from around the same time (now she really should have had a couple of number ones out of that…) It’s no surprise then to learn that this was produced by ‘Mutt’ Lange, producer of, and husband to, Shania. And thanks, presumably to Lange, we are treated to a guitar solo! When was the last time we heard one of those?? (Oasis, a couple of months ago, but you get my point…)

The Corrs are a family group, consisting of siblings Andrea, Sharon, Caroline, and Jim. The three women are raven-haired Irish beauties, which meant the jokes in the playground at the time were mainly at Jim’s expense… ‘Breathless’ was the lead single from the follow-up to the hugely popular ‘Talk On Corners’ album, and so was always positioned to do well. I’m glad it did this well, though, as I’ve been able to rediscover a fine slice of power pop. It represents the pinnacle of the Corrs’ chart fortunes too, as they only managed one further Top 10 hit. They split in 2005, but reformed a decade later and remain a touring and recording concern.

864. ‘The Real Slim Shady’, by Eminem

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May we have your attention please? May we have your attention please? Won’t the highest selling male artist of the 21st century please stand up?

The Real Slim Shady, by Eminem (his 1st of eleven #1s)

1 week, from 2nd – 9th July 2000

Whatever your opinion of rap as a genre, or on the talents of Marshall Mathers III, it’s hard to deny that we’re introducing a massive cultural phenomenon with this next chart-topper. And for the record, I will not deny Eminem’s skills as a rapper, which are well on display here. This is hip-hop for the new millennium – sharp, slick and rapid-fire – making much of the rap that we covered in the eighties and nineties sound slow and antiquated.

And, even though this wasn’t his first chart hit, ‘The Real Slim Shady’ acts as the perfect introduction to Eminem. The beat is robust, if simple and repetitive, starting as the theme to a kid’s TV show gone wrong, ending with a slightly out-of-tune recorder coda, and peppered with lots of fairly juvenile sound effects. While the lyrics – which are what we’re all here for – are spat out with precision, and venom. Not a beat or a syllable is wasted, as this sleek, modern rap-bot veers from vulgar, to profound, to problematic, to funny, quickly marking off all the boxes in Eminem Bingo.

We’ll deal with the vulgarity first, as this is the most explicit number one single we’ve met yet. Aside from the actual swear words, we’ve got reference to clitorises, VD, Viagra and jerking off, and whom Christina Aguilera may or may not have given head to. Some of the cultural references haven’t aged too well, though: for example I don’t remember why or when Tom Green humped a dead moose. Profundity (of sorts) comes from the fact that Eminem anticipates the controversy that this song will cause, positions himself as a voice of the disenfranchised (the little guy at Burger King spitting on your onion rings), and encourages everyone to raise their middle fingers to the world.

The problematic bits, for me at least, are his making light of Tommy Lee’s domestic violence against Pamela Anderson, and his comparison of homosexuality to bestiality. Yes Eminem duetted with Elton John shortly after this, and has gone on to show that he’s probably not homophobic; but the lyrics are still there, ringing in this gay man’s ears as loudly as they did when he was a closeted fourteen-year-old. But then other parts of this record are undeniably funny, and the Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records, But I do, So fuck him, And fuck you too… line ranks as one of my all-time favourite chart-topping lyrics.

We have ten more of his number ones to get through, so plenty of time to dissect the many guises of Eminem. His music can be extremely unpleasant; but at the same time, to react to it with outrage is to give him exactly what he wants. This isn’t his best chart-topper, and I think its impact is now marred by the fact that we’ve had twenty-five years of similar schtick, and several (far less funny) comedy singles, from him down the years. But it does represent a moment in time when Slim Shady was becoming both the biggest star on the planet, and public enemy number one.

863. ‘Spinning Around’, by Kylie Minogue

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And she’s back. Forget Billie Piper, this is the pop comeback of the year 2000. Surely one of the biggest pop comebacks of all time?

Spinning Around, by Kylie Minogue (her 5th of seven #1s)

1 week, from 25th June – 2nd July 2000

Amazingly, it has been over a decade since Kylie’s last number one (‘Tears on My Pillow’ in January 1990), and almost six years six since her last Top 10 hit (1994’s ‘Confide in Me’). Since her debut in 1988, we’ve had ‘Neighbours’ Kylie, Pop Puppet Kylie, Creative Control Kylie, Indie Kylie… and then a couple of years of silence. Was that, everyone wondered, that?

As an unashamed Kylie fan, I’m glad about what ‘Spinning Around’ did for the Princess of Pop. It brought her back, set her up for a glorious, and so far never-ending, second act. She was still only in her early-thirties here, but quite often early-thirties might as well be early-eighties for a female pop star. It was truly impressive the way she returned, with an updated yet familiar, utterly-commercial-but-critically-respected sound, as if she’d never been away. But…

As far as ‘Spinning Around’ is concerned, I’ve always found it a bit basic. A bit Radio 2. A bit hen-night in a provincial town. It’s catchy, for sure, and it’s funky bassline and sparkly synths are more proof that we’re in the midst of a disco revival. I like the middle-eight – the Baby, baby, baby… bit – but the rest of the lyrics are a whole lot of nothing, vaguely themed around this song as a comeback. I’m spinning around, Move out of my way, I know you’re feelin’ me cause you like it like this…

And let’s be honest, as reluctant as I am to reduce Queen Kylie to a mere sexual object, the one thing everyone remembers about this record are the gold hotpants she wore while writhing around on a bar top in the video. (Hotpants that were allegedly bought for fifty pence in a market, and which have since been displayed at the V&A museum.)

So the best I’ll say for ‘Spinning Around’ is that it’s a perfectly serviceable pop song which did what it had to do. Kylie was back, back, back, and free to release better songs in the coming years. Of course there’s the colossal lead single from her next album, but even the Latin-tinged ‘Please Stay’ was a better track from later in 2000, while there’s also the industrial camp of ‘Your Disco Needs You’, which really should have been a single. Still, maybe it’s just me. ‘Spinning Around’ seems to be remembered fondly, and was the first in a run of sixteen straight Top 10 hits for Australia’s highest-selling act, lasting right through until 2008. It also earned Kylie enty to a very exclusive club – the #1s in three decades club, which at the time consisted only of Elvis, Cliff, the Bee Gees, Queen, Blondie and Madonna.

862. ‘You See the Trouble With Me’, by Black Legend

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Our slow meander around the year 2000’s many, many chart-toppers continues, and we find another interesting stop along the road: the lost Barry White number one.

You See the Trouble With Me, by Black Legend (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 18th – 25th June 2000

First, we do have to state that it is not Barry White’s voice on this record, though vocalist Elroy ‘Spoonface’ Powell does a mighty fine impersonation. He even manages to make this sound like a live sample, introducing it with a spoken In 1975, we brought you an album, With a song… backed with lots of crowd noise.

Is it too early to suggest a mini disco revival, after Geri, Madison Avenue, and now this? (I’m also sneaking a peek at the record which replaced Black Legend at the top.) Though what dominates this record is not so much disco strings, but a naggingly insistent, thoroughly modern, house beat. On the radio edit the producers toy with us for the opening two minutes, teasing snatches of ‘You See the Trouble With Me’ (a #2 hit in 1976) that cut in and out, before finally letting ‘Barry White’ loose. For a bit. When the house beat kicks back in for the third or fourth time, it officially becomes annoying.

Barry White had refused the use of his original vocals for this remix, as he felt it ‘was cheap and had no soul’. I can understand his point, as the song uses the sample as bait, almost, to lure you to the dancefloor. The choppy nature of this song, the insistence on falling back on that irritating beat, means that there’s no release, no climax. You’re left with blue (disco) balls…

Black Legend were a very short-lived Italian production duo, with the aforementioned Powell on singing duties. They were together for three singles, and their only other appearance on the UK singles chart is with the #37 peaking ‘Somebody’. They fall agonisingly short of verified one-hit wonder status.

While I don’t much care for this remix, I am being won over by the year 2000’s fast turnover, which allowed curios like this to make number one, records that may not have made the top at any other period in chart history. Speaking of which, Black Legend are the first chart-toppers in a run of twelve one-weekers, from mid-June to mid-September 2000: a record-breaking stretch. Let the frantic fun begin!

861. ‘It Feels So Good’, by Sonique

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In a year packed with dance hits, here’s one of the best…

It Feels So Good, by Sonique (her 1st and only #1)

3 weeks, from 28th May – 18th June 2000

The strings; the husky, ominous vocals; the garage beat. It’s of its time, but also one of those hits that transcends its moment. Maybe it’s a sign of how pop music has lost its forward movement in the early years of this century, but ‘It Feels So Good’ sounds like it could be a hit from 2025. Plus, lines like You give me such a vibe, It’s totally bona fide… feel very much like how the young folk speak these days.

In my mind, I always imagined the chorus was autotuned, especially the It’s you I’m always thinking of… line. But listening now, I don’t think it is. It’s just very distinctively sung, in a very high key, oddly far back in Sonique’s throat. Hey, every hit needs a hook, even one that makes it sound like you’ve got a bad cold.

As with many dance tracks, my attention starts to wander in the second verse, which is more of the same. But I do like the lasering synths that become more prominent as the song progresses. Having said that it sounds very much of the year 2000, it turns out that ‘It Feels So Good’ was almost two years old by the time it made #1, having reached #24 on its original release in December 1998. Interestingly, given that the US is usually quite resistant to European EDM, it was the song’s success stateside (where it eventually made #8) that prompted the re-release.

Sonia Marina Clarke, AKA Sonique, had been active in the music biz since the early eighties, when she had formed a reggae band, and had released her debut solo single in 1985. She had also worked with S’Express, though joined after ‘Theme from S’Express’ had topped the charts. She had two other Top 10s – ‘Sky’ and ‘I Put a Spell on You’ – which tread much the same territory as this single without being as good. She still records, and DJs, and played Glastonbury just last year.

‘It Feels So Good’ is also noteworthy due to being the joint longest-running number one of 2000, with a grand total of three weeks at the top. I feel I should also note how darn basic the title is. ‘It Feels So Good’ rivals ‘I Love You’ (#1 for Cliff and the Shadows in 1961, chart fans) for simplicity. Just drop the ‘It’, I think, and things become much cooler. But what do I know? It’s not as if proper sentence structure hampered this record’s success…

860. ‘Day and Night’, by Billie Piper

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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.

859. ‘Don’t Call Me Baby’, by Madison Avenue

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Though it may have been a chaotic year of one-week wonders, of number ones with the lifespan of butterflies, there’s something joyous about the chart-toppers of the year 2000.

Don’t Call Me Baby, by Madison Avenue (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 14th – 21st May 2000

This is the fifteenth number one of the year (we’re only in May, and there have been years in which the entire twelve months saw fewer than fifteen #1s). Of that fifteen, I’d count eleven as being in some way upbeat, uptempo, uplifting… It’s as if the record buying public had bounded into the new millennium full of optimism, ready to fill their CD players with fun records. Such as this slice of disco-funk.

Other than the chorus, the one thing that stands out about ‘Don’t Call Me Baby’ is the catchy bass riff that propels the song along. And it’s surprising how much of the record is left ‘blank’, with just that bass riff and the disco beat to fill the spaces between the verses and chorus. I suspected that it might have been a sample, so timeless does it sound, and so it is: from a 1980 Italian hit called ‘Ma Quale Idea’, by Pino D’Angiò, which in turn had been based on disco classic ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now’, by McFadden & Whitehead.

The lyrics tell a story of female empowerment via the dancefloor: Behind my smile is my IQ, I must admit this does not sit with the likes of you… You’re really sweet, You’re really nice, But didn’t mama ever tell you not to play with fire…? I like the modern sass and the bite of the lyrics against the retro beat. Don’t underestimate me boy, I’ll make you sorry you were born… In fact, this brings us to another emerging theme of the year: Girl Power actually kicking in, half a decade late. I’ve already mentioned that the 21st century would see female pop stars dominate, but I hadn’t quite noticed how spunky many of the songs would be. This, straight after ‘Oops!… I Did It Again’, and ‘Bag It Up’, for example. (We’ll ignore ‘Born to Make You Happy’…)

Madison Avenue were an Australian duo, producer Andy Van Dorsselaer and singer Cheyne Coates. This record’s success made them the first Australian group to top the British charts since Men at Work back in 1983. ‘Don’t Call Me Baby’ had actually made #30 the year before, but hung around in clubs and the lower reaches of the charts, prompting this successful re-release.

They may not quite qualify as one-hit wonders, having one further Top 10 (the similarly fun ‘Who the Hell Are You’), and one more Top 40, hit. But I’d say Madison Avenue definitely qualify as the latest member of our rapidly growing ‘random dance’ sub-folder, with more to come very soon.

858. ‘Oops!… I Did It Again’, by Britney Spears

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Earlier I claimed that Britney Spears’ second number one – the nice enough ‘Born to Make You Happy’ – was a placeholder, something to keep things ticking over until her next main event. Here then, is that main event.

Oops!… I Did It Again, by Britney Spears (her 3rd of six #1s)

1 week, from 7th – 14th May 2000

Yes, Britney’s debut ‘…Baby One More Time’ is a classic: a timeless pop song that managed to win over the even the snobbiest ‘proper music’ critics. And ‘Oops!… I Did It Again’ is much more rooted in time by its crunching Max Martin turn-of-the-century production. But ‘Oops!…’ is also a work of genius. It’s basically ‘Baby… One More Time’ – they share the same piano, and the same chords – deconstructed and rebuilt in a brutalist fashion. (The two songs are also exactly the same length.) It’s the evil twin. It’s the version of ‘Baby…’ that you’d hear in the Upside Down.

Then there’s the little Easter eggs, the pronunciation of baybay, and the ellipsis in the title. And the fact that said title refers not just to the song’s lyrics, but to the fact that, oops, she’s come back with another monster hit. It’s all very modern, very now: the in-jokes and the sarcasm. Oh you shouldn’t have… Brit deadpans when presented with a diamond in the spoken middle-eight, which parodies ‘Titanic’, another pop culture behemoth. In fact, this song just might have invented 21st century pop culture. I hope you don’t think I’m going overboard here…

All this is compounded by the fact that the submissive Britney of her first two number ones is gone. I think I did it again, I made you believe, We’re more than just friends… she teases, before announcing: I’m not that innocent! In the video she dances in a red catsuit while brandishing a whip.

The entirety of her second album, which shared the same title, was a bit of a reinvention. It’s now something of a cliché, that a female teen-pop star’s second album has to see them ‘grow up’ in some way, and Britney’s main rival Christina would take this concept to the extreme a couple of years later. But Britney laid the foundations for a long career here, and in singles like ‘Stronger’, about empowerment, and ‘Lucky’, about the loneliness of fame. Plus, the album also included an actually half-decent cover of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’.

But back to the aforementioned main event. The question remains: is ‘Oops!… I Did It Again’ better than ‘…Baby One More Time’? I’d say no, musically it is not. But also… yes. It’s conceptual, it’s clever, it’s camp and catty. I’ll bet a greater number of Britney fans list this as their favourite song over ‘…Baby’, which is almost too prefect, too pristine.

So, three number ones and two solid-gold pop classics. Not bad going for a singer still in her teens. We’ll have to wait a while for her next chart-topper, but when it does come it too will be worth the wait. And many of the Britney singles that didn’t get to the top during this imperious, pre-breakdown phase are also classics of their time. Churning out hit after hit, banger after banger? That is just so typically her…

857. ‘Bound 4 da Reload (Casualty)’, by Oxide & Neutrino

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The garage revolution picks up pace. All three so-called ‘garage’ chart-toppers that we’ve met so far, though, have been light and fluffy. Garage with the edges softened. Garages that you might find on a semi-detached house in a middle class suburb (Craig David did sing about a jacuzzi, after all).

Bound 4 da Reload (Casualty), by Oxide & Neutrino (their 1st and only solo #1s)

1 week, from 30th April – 7th May 2000

Here though is some proper garage. A garage covered with graffiti on an inner-city estate. Sirens. Gun shots. The theme tune from a long-running BBC hospital drama… Okay, that last bit doesn’t sound too street, but the sample from the ‘Casualty’ theme lends this record its name. It adds a dramatic energy to parts of the song, and works interestingly well when repeated on staccato synths. And it’s the only good thing about this record…

The rest of this song is abrasive nonsense. Bound for da bound bound for da reload… is the hook, repeated over and over, against a simple two-step beat. There’s some rapping, toasting, scatting, call it what you will. There’s a jarring spoken sample from the film ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ (Ah! Shit! I’ve been shot…) I was fourteen when this came out, and yet hearing it now I feel like an old fogey. It’s borderline unlistenable.

Having said that, the sweary sample above meant that ‘Bound 4 da Reload’ received little radio play, and so this probably passed me by unnoticed at the time. It does mean that it becomes one of a handful of chart-toppers so far to have featured swearing, and only the second after The Outhere Brothers to feature an F-bomb. But we’re on the precipice of swearing in number one singles becoming commonplace. Glancing down the list I can see the imminent debut of a certain bleach-blonde rapper, which will contain more swears than any previous number one combined.

Oxide and Neutrino were members of garage/hip-hop collective So Solid Crew, a group of anywhere between nineteen and thirty singers, rappers, DJs and MCs. In just over a year the group will score their one and only chart-topper, but it is Oxide & Neutrino who struck first here. Leading me to wonder, is this the only instance of someone enjoying a solo number one before their group has had one…?

Full, un-edited version: