If the year 2000 has a defining sound – and I’m far from convinced that it does, with so many chart-toppers crammed into its fifty-two weeks – then UK garage would be a strong candidate.

Fill Me In, by Craig David (his 1^st of two #1s)

1 week, from 9^th – 16^th April 2000

These staccato, two-step beats have started to appear more regularly, with Shanks & Bigfoot last year, and to a lesser extent Gabrielle a few weeks ago. I never particularly liked garage at the time – it always felt too light, too airy, too difficult to grab a hold of. It dances around the beat, without ever committing to it. Garage makes me think of a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower, impossible to catch. A strange image for a musical genre, perhaps, but one that works for me.

And eighteen-year-old Craig David, Southampton’s most famous chart-topper, is an equally strong candidate for the year’s breakout star. He has a soft, honeyed voice, and controls this lyric-heavy song despite lacking what I would describe as ‘oomph’. (That’s what garage lacks – oomph!) It tells the story of a young couple trying to get jiggy in the face of her over-protective parents. Calls diverted to answer phone, Red wine bottle half the contents gone, Midnight return, Jacuzzi turned on… Can you fill me in? her folks ask.

Clearly Southampton is a bit posher than where I grew up, as I never knew anyone with a jacuzzi. The Wikipedia entry for ‘Fill Me In’ amusingly claims the song as a commentary on helicopter parenting, though I’m not sure there are many parents, helicopter or otherwise, that would be thrilled upon discovering their teenage daughter had been in a jacuzzi with the next door neighbours’ randy son, guzzling their wine. It is an interesting twist, however, to have a song about teenage lust told from the parents’ point of view.

Listening back to this now, a quarter of a decade later, and I’m more disposed to it than I was at the time. There’s something light, yes, but carefree too; though maybe that’s just nostalgia. As garage goes, this is way over to the poppier side of the genre. It owes as much to American R&B – TLC, Usher, Destiny’s Child and the like – as it does to UK MCs spitting rhymes on council estates.

Craig David had announced himself to the world as the vocalist on Artful Dodger’s ‘Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)’ right at the end of 1999. That is an era-defining single, although it fell just short of appearing in this countdown. (‘Bo Selecta’ is a phrase that will come to haunt David, but more on that later.) His second #1 is also a real cultural moment, leaving ‘Fill Me In’ in the strange position of being Craig David’s first chart-topper, but not one of the two songs everyone remembers him for.