00s dance music

1029. ‘Sorry’, by Madonna

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Our third disco influenced number one in a row. And leave it to Madame Ciccone to show them all how it’s properly done…

Sorry, by Madonna (her 12th of thirteen #1s)

1 week, from 26th February – 5th March 2006

The question I’d like address before we finish today is thus: Is ‘Sorry’ better than ‘Hung Up’? Answers at the end of the post. The two records are cut from the same cloth, at least. This is a little more laidback, more electro/new-wave than its predecessor, more reliant on synths and bass than strings and an ABBA sample. But it is still a great dance tune.

Lyrically, it’s the flip-side of ‘Hung Up’. In the earlier hit, Madonna was largely gagging for an unnamed man. Calling him on the phone and being both literally and metaphorically ‘hung up’. On ‘Sorry’, though, she is reading the riot act, in a very disco-diva fashion. Don’t explain yourself, ‘Cause talk is cheap, There’s more important things than hearing you speak… is a great line, as is the withering: You’re not half the man you’d like to be…

And yes, it’s another shadow #1, following in the wake of an even bigger hit, like so many chart-toppers were in the low sales climate of 2006, as Britain slowly transitioned from CDs to downloads. Casual physical purchases were dropping, and so having a fanbase like Madonna’s, willing to hit the aisles of HMV, was vital. But again, I don’t want to bandy terms like ‘shadow number one’, or the even less complimentary ‘non-number one’, around with songs as good as this.

Any song by Madonna automatically qualifies for gay anthem status. What nudges this record into camp classic territory is when Madge shows off her impressive polyglotism, by reciting the title in various languages. And as a very (very) low-level speaker of Japanese, the one thing I can pull Madonna up on here is for getting the stress completely wrong on gomenasai.

But hell, it’s Madonna. If she wants to pronounce it wrong then Japan will just have adjust its language to suit. I love this song, I love Madonna. But. Is ‘Sorry’ better than ‘Hung Up’? Well, I am enjoying it today, especially because you don’t hear it half as much as its predecessor, but all in all, no. ‘Hung Up’ is the better track. Though this was a hell of a one-two for an artist over three decades into her career.

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1028. ‘Thunder in My Heart Again’, by Meck ft. Leo Sayer

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On to another number one with a disco groove, albeit a more family-friendly record than its predecessor ‘Nasty Girl’…

Thunder In My Heart Again, by Meck (his 1st and only #1) ft. Leo Sayer (his 2nd and final #1)

2 weeks, from 12th – 26th February 2006

It’s been a while, but it’s nice to have a tacky dance song back at #1. This sound was all the rage back in 2003 and ’04 (also known as handbag house, but my woke self thinks that’s a bit misogynist), it usually involves an old disco or dance track tarted up with a modern beat by a young, preferably European, DJ. Think ‘Make Luv’, think LMC, think ‘Lola’s Theme’ and, of course, ‘Call on Me’. And anyway, ‘tacky dance’ can’t be much of an insult, as I quite like most of those songs. They remind me of nights out in my provincial hometown.

‘Thunder in My Heart Again’ ticks (almost) all the tacky dance boxes. A sample from Leo Sayer’s 1977 #22 hit ‘Thunder in My Heart’, a basic, pre-set rhythm, lots of swooshes and vocal effects… The only thing lacking is that Meck was British. I’d have sworn he’d be German or Dutch.

Meck didn’t have to work too hard to turn this into a nu-disco track, as Sayer’s original was pretty darn disco to start with. I do love the commitment with which he belts out the Do just what you wanna do with my love… line. In fact, listening to the original now, you start to think that Meck was a little cheeky in getting a credit on this record… I like Sayer’s quote from the time, in which he claims this remix “kept all (the original’s) integrity”. Leo, mate, it sounds almost identical…

Though Sayer had little reason to complain as his credit on the single brought an unexpected return to number one, exactly twenty-nine years after his sole previous chart-topper ‘When I Need You’. (Fun fact: Leo Sayer has only ever made #1 in February.) At the time it was a record, beating the twenty-six years between Cher’s ‘I Got You Babe’ and ‘The Shoop Shoop Song’. He didn’t hold the record for long, and it has since been beaten by three acts with longer gaps between their number ones. Answers on a postcard, or in the comments, if you know who they are…

After this, we’ll continue on a disco groove. From hip-hop, to tacky dance, to a pop legend showing everyone how to do dance music properly…

This video is a masterpiece of the tacky dance genre. Gloriously cheap looking!

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1022. ‘Hung Up’, by Madonna

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Let’s pretend that Westlife didn’t ruin what has been a great autumn for chart-toppers: Oasis, Gorillaz, Sugababes and Arctic Monkeys all with top quality number ones in September and October 2005. And now here’s Madge, wrapping the season up with the best of the lot?

Hung Up, by Madonna (her 11th of thirteen #1s) 

3 weeks, from 13th November – 4th December 2005

The sole impressive thing about ‘You Raise Me Up’ was Westlife scoring one of their biggest hits six and a half years into their career. Madonna sees that, thinks ‘cute’, and smashes it out of the park with ‘Hung Up’, a full twenty-three years on from her debut single.

What’s so good about it? It’s a dance anthem, but then so are many of Madonna’s hits. It’s neo-disco, but that’s yet another return for the genre in a new millennium that hasn’t been short of seventies inspired tunes. It’s a very ‘00s-era mash-up, but not the first to make the charts, or number one. Maybe it’s just the pure joyousness of it: it soars, it pounds, it flirts. It is my personal favourite of all Madonna’s thirteen chart-toppers.

At the same time, I’m also deliberately ignoring the big pink elephant in the room. The ABBA sample. Madonna + ABBA (an ABBA song inspired by Donna Summer) = gay heaven. I’m not sure allowing Madonna to get her hands on the electronic pan-pipes from ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’ could have gone wrong, but this was only the third time that Benny & Bjorn had ever permitted a sample from one of their songs. They needn’t have worried.

Cleverly, ‘Hung Up’ sticks to the spirit of the original, about needing a man in the middle of the night, so much so that it feels like Part II. But importantly, while Frida and Agnetha’s sexual tension is never resolved, Madonna quickly loses patience with her reluctant man. From Waiting for your call every night and day, I’m fed up, I’m tired of waiting of you… to You’ll wake up one day, But it’ll be too late…

In the video, Madonna runs through a particularly sexy ballet warm up, wearing a pink leotard. I remember some disparaging comments at the time, about a woman of her age blah blah blah, but watching it back now she looks amazing. If my arse looks that good at forty-seven, I will happily parade around town in a pink leotard. It is even more impressive to watch, knowing that she had broken eight bones in a horse riding accident weeks before filming.

It wasn’t just ‘Hung Up’ that brought Madonna back to the forefront of hit making. The ‘Confessions on a Dancefloor’ album was seen as a big return to form, and potentially the best LP of her career. So good that it would offer one further #1, a song every bit as good as this…

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1017. ‘Dare’, by Gorillaz

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Ten years on from the Battle of Britpop, and Oasis are knocked off the top by one quarter of Blur…

Dare, by Gorillaz (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 4th – 11th September 2005

Gorillaz were the ‘band’ that Damon Albarn had formed in 1998, and had run concurrently with the day job until Blur went on hiatus in 2003. I say band in inverted commas, because they were completely virtual. Albarn took care of the musical side of things, while artist Jamie Hewlett took care of the visuals and designed the band’s members: 2-D, Noodle, Murdoc, and Russel Hobbs. (I believe this makes them the 5th animated act to top the charts, after The Archies, Jive Bunny, The Simpsons, and Bob the Builder.)

Reading that paragraph back, you can imagine what the Gallagher brothers made of all this arty silliness. It would have been quite funny if ‘Dare’ had been released a week earlier  and had held ‘The Importance of Being Idle’ off number one, though by 2017 relations had mellowed enough for Noel to duet with Gorillaz. Anyway, even if proper rock groups would have turned their noses up at an animated alt-rock, art pop, trip-hop group, at Number Ones Blog we’ll do no such thing. For ‘Dare’ is a great track.

For a start, it’s a lot more upbeat and faster paced than many Gorillaz tracks, being both danceable and yet slightly melancholy. It’s got a filthy bassline, and a kooky beat that reminds me in places of White Town’s leftfield classic ‘Your Woman’. Then there’s the contrast between Noodle’s falsetto (provided by guest singer Roses Gabor, not Albarn as I’d always assumed) and Shaun Ryder’s more, shall we say, dulcet tones. It’s not quite pop, not quite dance, not quite a straight forward electronic song. It’s… dare.

Legend has it that the song was originally titled ‘It’s There’, but Ryder’s thick Mancunian accent prevented him from saying the word properly. Shaun himself has denied this, saying that it was because he’s dyslexic, and in text messages always writes ‘there’ as ‘der’. Either way, he’s the star of the show, both in his ranting vocals and in the horror movie inspired video, where he sings the song as a disembodied head. (All I can think of when I see it is Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…) Though uncredited on both, Ryder gets his second number one appearance of the year, after he’d been one of the many celebs marching with Peter Kay on ‘Amarillo’. It was something of a swansong for him, as his biggest chart hits had come fifteen years earlier with the Happy Mondays.

I loved ‘Dare’ at the time, was very happy a song as odd as this had made #1, and am glad that it still sounds enjoyably weird all these years later. It was definitely a shadow number one though, coming on the back of the much more popular #2 ‘Feel Good Inc.’ In fact, not many would be able to name this as Gorillaz’s biggest chart hit, and would probably go for ‘Clint Eastwood’, their 2001 debut.

Once again I have to try to separate nostalgia from cold, hard fact but… Despite the misty eyed memories I have of the autumn of 2005, as I started my third year at university and fast approached twenty, I do think that with Oasis and now Gorillaz, we’ve hit a rich seam of chart-toppers, and the quality will keep up for much of the rest of the year.

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991. ‘Call on Me’, by Eric Prydz

/ UK #1s blog / 4 Comments

Two sounds have dominated the charts of 2004: gloopy US R&B, and tacky dance records. Here we have the apogee of the latter genre.

Call on Me, by Eric Prydz (his 1st and only #1)

3 weeks, from 19th September – 10th October / 2 weeks, from 17th – 31st October 2004 (5 weeks total)

I’ve explained in earlier posts of what tacky dance consists. Basically it involves a sample from the ‘80s, and a trance-light beat. Basically, it’s basic. And catchy. And guaranteed to fill a provincial dancefloor. (That’s not me being snobby – I came of age on provincial dancefloors.)

‘Call on Me’ takes two lines from Steve Winwood’s 1982 #51 (and 1987 #19) hit ‘Valerie’, and adds a beat that alternately thumps then swirls. That’s about it. It does have a fill your ears, wall-of-sound quality to it, and I do remember it sounding very good in a dark and sweaty nightclub when you were five Apple VKs in. Earlier tacky dance chart-toppers, like ‘Take Me to the Clouds Above’ and ‘Lola’s Theme’, sound lightweight in comparison.

But like all songs of its ilk, it is repetitive, and ephemeral. Why was ‘Call on Me’ such a big hit, compared to the year’s other dance records? Why did it become, at the time, the second-longest running chart topper of the decade? I can’t hear any particular reason… Oh no, wait. Now I remember. The reason for this song’s success wasn’t just to do with the audio…

The video was set in a dance studio, and featured a bevy of beauties in skimpy swimwear doing a sexy aerobics routine (which must have chafed, looking back). A DVD single was available, that included a ‘late night’ version of the video. God knows what that involved. Opinion has been torn ever since. It won Best Video at a dance music awards, but was named 5th worst video of all time by NME. Eric Prydz himself refused to play the song for many years, apparently embarrassed by its success, and was once bottled on stage in Canada for not doing so. The final word on the video has to go to Tony Blair, Prime Minister: ‘The first time it came on, I nearly fell off my rowing machine’… These days, with all the filth we require at our digital fingertips, it feels quaint to think that randy teenage boys rushed in their droves to buy a DVD single. A relic of a simpler time.

Winwood’s ‘Valerie’ had been used in an earlier dance song by French duo Together (one of whom was Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter). They didn’t want to release it, and so Prydz – a Swedish DJ – recreated it with re-recorded vocals from Winwood himself. He scored his debut, and breakthrough, hit with it. While – correct me if I’m wrong, because he’s had a wide and varied career – I think this restored Steve Winwood to the UK Top 10 for the first time since his Spencer Davis Group and Traffic days. It’s bizarre to think that the last time the vocalist from ‘Call on Me’ was at #1, it was with the bluesy-garage rock of ‘Somebody Help Me’ in 1966.

Another reason for ‘Call on Me’s extended run at the top, other than the smut and its crowd-pleasing sound, was the lack of competition. When it returned to number one in October, it did so with the lowest sales ever recorded, scraping only 21,749 in its final week as a chart-topper. That’s very low. But sales will drop even lower in the next couple of years, before downloads finally fill the void.

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984. ‘Lola’s Theme’, by Shapeshifters

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A few chart-toppers ago, when writing about LMC’s ‘Take Me to the Clouds Above’, I announced a new genre: ‘tacky dance’.

Lola’s Theme, by Shapeshifters (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, 18th – 25th July 2004

‘Tacky dance’ involves taking an old sample and splicing it with a disco-lite beat. It’s cheap and catchy, and goes down like a Bacardi Breezer. I’ve also heard this genre described as ‘handbag house’, though I think that sounds even more derogatory, conjuring up images of large groups of screeching women on a hen night.

Anyway, after writing all that, it feels harsh to tar our next #1 with that brush. Yes, ‘Lola’s Theme’ is two samples and a disco-house beat. But it works better than ‘Take Me to the Clouds Above’, as the Whitney and U2 samples on that record felt gimmicky. Here, the Shapeshifters – a British/Swedish production duo – took two relatively unknown songs and created a much fresher sounding record.

The disco strings and horns come from Johnnie Taylor’s 1982 song ‘What About My Love’, while the I’m a different person… refrain comes from Anthony White’s ‘Love Me Tonight’ (neither song had been a hit in the UK). The result is a catchy, accessible dance record. Yes, it’s a bit basic. But being ‘a bit basic’ is essential when making a tacky dance record. And I remember it being everywhere in the summer of 2004, with the melody used as montage music on every daytime TV programme going for several years afterwards.

One thing I like about tacky dance is that it put dance diva vocalists back front and centre. The singer on this was soul artist Cookie, for whom this was a career highlight (though she has also been a live backing vocalist for Kylie, Ronan Keating, and Nick Cave). I do enjoy when she lets loose on the Turn my world around… line. I’m disappointed, though, to finally learn that the lyric in the bridge is You fired up my heart… when I had always heard it as You fag-burned my heart… A cigarette singed heart is the perfect image for the cover of a tacky dance single.

Before we go we must address the question that is presumably on everyone’s lips. Who’s Lola? She was the wife of Shapeshifter Simon Marlin, and ‘Lola’s Theme’ a placeholder title that was never improved upon. Still, very few people can claim to have a number one single named after them, so well done her. The Shapeshifters had one further Top 10 hit, and a few smaller hits, and are both still active today.

975. ‘Cha Cha Slide’, by DJ Casper

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Are you ready to cut some shapes? Cause this time, we gonna get funky…

Cha Cha Slide, by DJ Casper (his 1st and only #1)

1 week, 14th – 21st March 2004

I can truly see the appeal of a song that comes with a step-by-step, foolproof, IKEA-style guide to the dance. ‘The Timewarp’ springs immediately to mind. I’m an okay dancer, when freestyling, but get very stressed when following a routine (see my post on ‘Saturday Night’).

So, for DJ Casper to introduce this record with we’re gonna do the basic steps… is on one level helpful. But that’s all this record is. Three plus minutes of some very basic steps. Slide to the left… Slide to the right… Two hops this time… Hands on your knees… Even I can keep up. Okay it gradually speeds up, throws in some freezes, reverses, and something called a ‘Charlie Brown’; but it gets very repetitive, very quickly.

The ‘Cha Cha Slide’ has an interesting, and protracted history. DJ Casper, a prominent figure in the Chicago ‘stepping’ movement, wrote it in 1998 as a step aerobics routine for his nephew, a personal trainer. This chart-topping version is technically the ‘Casper Slide Part 2’, as Part 1 was just the steps performed to a track called ‘Plastic Dreams’, to which DJ Casper didn’t have the rights. So he recorded a new, fairly rinky-dink version with something called the Platinum Band. This version was released in 2000, making #83 in the US, but growing organically through local radio and mobile discos, not to mention exercise classes, to the point that it was released worldwide four years later.

And here we are. I don’t hate this, because it’s an old-fashioned novelty, and it feels like a while since we had a proper novelty number one. Was the last one ‘The Ketchup Song’, or even DJ Otzi’s ‘Hey Baby’? But also, like I said, it’s repetitive. On first listen, I checked the time remaining twice, so eager was I for it to finish. It just keeps going… And that’s only the single edit. The original is six and a half minutes long!

Despite DJ Casper’s long stepping career, this was his only real hit record (the name ‘Casper’ came from his penchant for wearing all-white, like the friendly ghost). In fact, the UK and Ireland were the only two countries where he ever had a follow-up hit, with his take on ‘Oops Up Side Your Head’. We really do love a novelty.

The story of this song’s creation, its long road to success, and its annoying nature, remind me of Fatman Scoop’s ‘Be Faithful’ from a few months earlier. Though ‘Cha Cha Slide’ is a lot more wholesome and kid-friendly. Speaking of ‘wholesome’, we have to finish on the Christian version of this record – The Bible Slide – which is so bad nobody can work out if it’s a parody or not. This time, we’re gonna get holy…

970. ‘Take Me to the Clouds Above’, by LMC Vs U2

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In previous posts on dance #1s, I had noticed a trend in the genre as we moved towards the middle of the 2000s. Gone were subtle house and disco revival beats, replaced by thumpingly unoriginal remixes of old non-dance hits, jazzed up with trance-light beats and cheap rent-a-singer vocals…

Take Me to the Clouds Above, by LMC (their 1st and only #1) Vs U2 (their 5th of seven #1s)

2 weeks, 1st – 15th February 2004

Well, our next number one is the perfect way to illustrate this slump, as it is a cheap dance mashup of not one, but two eighties classics, complete with a very of its time ‘Vs’ in the title. The bassline is a sample from U2’s ‘With or Without You’, while the chorus is an interpolation from Whitney Houston’s ‘How Will I Know’. And for anyone still not sure of the distinction, the sample is the reason why U2 get a featuring credit, while the interpolation is basically a re-recording (though the composers of ‘How Will I Know’ did get writing credits).

So I guess the fact that this is two borrowings in one, and manages to make two songs that you wouldn’t have necessarily imagined going together go together – merging Whitney’s girlish lyrics and U2’s melancholy bassline – makes this record slightly more original than, say, DJ Sammy’s ‘Heaven’. But it is still far less than the sum of its parts.

The dance dressings are all cheap swishes and swooshes, loops and echoes. It’s pretty tacky. The vocals were recorded by established dance diva Rachel McFarlane, who had been around since the early nineties and had worked with Loveland and N-Trance. She does lend a retro feel, a hark back to the days of Black Box or Livin’ Joy, though I wish she had been allowed to exercise her lungs a little more.

LMC meanwhile were a trio of English producers who had worked with all the greats of tacky dance – my new name for this genre – such as Lasgo, Flip & Fill, and Scooter. This was their only hit under their own steam, until they teamed up with McFarlane again two years later.

Going back to ‘tacky dance’, and hot on the heels of Scottish sweetheart Michelle McManus at number one, I think Scotland holds more than its fair share of blame for the success of songs like ‘Take Me to the Clouds Above’. I read an article once that detailed how dance tracks were bought in higher quantities the further north you went in the UK, and from my experience if you went to the one remaining nightclub in my provincial hometown in 2026 you’d get short odds on hearing this track (or DJ Sammy’s ‘Heaven’, or anything by Ultrabeat). I can’t remember the article, but I have found an interesting Reddit forum discussing the phenomenon…

Also worth noting again is the fact that U2 got a credit, and scored their fifth number one, without lifting a finger. Compared to some of the stars that have contributed a lot more to recent number ones with no recognition – Jay Z, Justin Timberlake and Faith Evans – it does seem a tad generous. And in the end this is the one U2 chart-topper that spent more than a solitary week on top, for which Bono and co. can presumably thank the record buying public of small town Scotland…

959. ‘Are You Ready for Love’, by Elton John

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Another chart-topping remix, in a summer full of them…

Are You Ready for Love, by Elton John (his 6th of ten #1s)

1 week, 31st August – 7th September 2003

Although, I think calling this a remix is generous. It’s more of a remaster, a sharpening of the mix, cleaning the tapes, that sort of thing. Even though it has been ‘remixed’, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between the 2003 chart-topping version and the 1977 original.

Which is a good thing. This is a slice of late seventies disco, almost unknown and unearthed, crashing incongruously to the top of the charts twenty-five years too late. All the flourishes that we remember from the golden age of disco are present and correct: a frisky beat, a natty bassline, swooshing strings… It begs the question why this didn’t do better than reaching #42 at the time.

John had recorded it in ’77, but released it in 1979 on an E.P. of songs recorded with legendary soul producer Thom Bell, during a period in which he and Bernie Taupin were not working together. The Spinners recorded a version, and also guested on a special mix of the song with Elton.

Fast-forward to 2003, and a remixed version of the song was being used to advertise Sky Sports’ coverage of the coming football season. Demand built up and, hey presto, Elton had his sixth chart-topper. It was also his third, and final, completely solo number one (though Ashley Beedle, the DJ who remixed it, might argue with that).

This great but slightly random #1 adds to the sense of 2003 as being the year for great but slightly random #1s… From Russian lesbians, to disco remixes from adverts for Lynx deodorant (and Sky Sports), to Bollywood covers of ‘Spirit in the Sky’ and proper heavy, emo rock, there’s a feeling of falling sales allowing the charts to breathe, and indulge in something more fun, rather than being an endless week-by-week parade of the biggest names in pop.

It also adds to the sense of Elton John’s later career being marked by slightly strange hits, such as this. It follows on sharply from his duet with Blue a few months earlier, the first time he had ever had two chart-toppers within a year. Stranger number ones are to come for Elton, before very long…

953. ‘Loneliness’, by Tomcraft

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Writing this blog has changed me, in many ways, but none so thoroughly as how it’s enhanced my understanding of dance music.

Loneliness, by Tomcraft (his 1st and only #1)

1 week, 4th – 11th May 2003

I’m still not 100% on top of the terms – it’s a process – but I’m confident in labelling this next number one as ‘techno’, or maybe ‘trance’. It’s not ‘house’, and definitely not ‘drum n bass’, or ‘ambient’, and probably not ‘breakbeat’ (though there’s a chance it could be).

I’m on safer ground when I stick to saying ‘I like it’. A good song is a good song, regardless of the genre. ‘Loneliness’ is churning, and ominous, with a bassline that vibrates right through you. The distinctive, throttled riff is memorable. Unlike other recent dance hits, it’s not an old song sampled and mashed up (a la ‘Make Luv’), and it’s not an old song backed by a basic sledgehammer beat and high-pitched vocals (a la ‘Heaven’). In fact, I’d say that ‘Loneliness’ is pretty dated by 2003 standards. It reminds me more of something from the late nineties, Wamdue Project maybe, or even Eiffel 65, and is indeed based on an excerpt from a 1998 track, ‘Share the Love’.

It’s quirky. Depending on which mix you listen to the structure of the song changes, curling itself in different ways around the main, industrial beat. Some mixes have a distinctive piano motif. The UK single edit, which for our purposes is the version attached below, has a rainfall break in the middle. It’s not a predictable dance track, and for a number one single it is fairly hardcore. Look at me, a regular Pete Tong, sprinkling this post with all the dance genres…

I remember this topping the charts, appearing out of nowhere to spend a week on top. And it seemed to vanish as quickly as it appeared, remaining fairly forgotten, with fewer than two millions views on YouTube. Tomcraft, a German DJ known to his parents as Thomas Brückner, only managed one follow-up #43 hit. He remained active and influential though, until his death in 2024, aged just forty-nine.

One other thing worth noting, and perhaps an explanation for tracks like this making number one, is how quickly single sales were plummeting in 2003. The downward trend had begun as far back as 2001, despite huge sales from reality TV acts like Hear’Say and Will Young bucking the trend, and by May 2003 Tomcraft needed fewer than 37,000 sales to make #1. Back in 2000, anything less than 100k per week for a number one was unusual. Sales will only drop further over the next couple of years, until the introduction of downloads in 2005 helps steady the ship. What these low sales will do, though, is give the charts an interestingly unpredictable feel.