armand van helden

814. ‘You Don’t Know Me’ by Armand Van Helden ft. Duane Harden

/ UK #1s blog / 3 Comments

A fairly unusual rock track is followed on top of the charts by a fairly generic dance track. Standard January fare for the late ‘90s…

You Don’t Know Me, by Armand Van Helden (his 1st of two #1s) ft. Duane Harden

1 week, from 31st January – 7th February 1999

We should though prepare to meet more and more of these one-off dance tracks in the coming months, to the point where there will become commonplace. This is the sound of 1999, really: ATB, Eiffel 65, Mr. Oizo… All kicked off by Armand Van Helden. Whom we have met before in this blog, with his uncredited remix of Tori Amos’ ‘Professional Widow’ (another January number one!)

And unlike some of those dance hits soon to come, ‘You Don’t Know Me’ has a nice retro-house feel, with a disco groove and soulful vocals from Duane Harden. It feels like something that could have been a hit much earlier in the decade. Which might be explained by the fact that this is, naturally, a mish-mash of samples, with strings that date from the seventies and drums from 1992. The eight-minute original version also features a spoken intro from ‘Dexter’s Laboratory’. As in, the cartoon.

Although Duane Arden has an excellent, soulful growl to his voice, the lyrics are standard ‘living my best life’ dance fodder. I’m tired and I’ve had enough, It’s my life and I’m living it now… But really, nobody wants to think too much on the dancefloor. Arden wrote the words by himself, once Van Helden had finished the music, like a dance version of Elton and Bernie.

Like many of the previous dance number ones, I don’t hate it. It’s fine. It washes over me pleasantly enough, and has caused me to do a couple of involuntary shoulder shimmies. But at the same time, like many dance tunes, after the first minute I start to find it a little repetitive. Dance music is not made for a guy sitting at a desk to analyse. Duane Harden’s week at the top was the pinnacle of his pop career; while Armand Van Helden will continue to produce and write hits throughout the 2000s, until his final #1 in a decade’s time.

For a fairly innocuous and forgotten chart-topper, this is a big one for me personally. I turned thirteen on the day this entered at number one (though I am a bit peeved that I just miss out on having the Offspring as a birthday #1). I apologise in advance for all the teenage nostalgia that will inevitable cloud my judgement as we cover the coming seven years’ worth of number ones…

756. ‘Professional Widow (It’s Got to Be Big)’, by Tori Amos

/ UK #1s blog / 11 Comments

1997, then. The late ’90s! And we get off to a banging start…

Professional Widow (It’s Got to Be Big), by Tori Amos (her 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 12th – 19th January 1997

‘Professional Widow’ was a track from singer-songwriter Tori Amos’s third studio album, ‘Boys for Pele’, which had made #2 exactly a year before this. It had been released as the album’s third single, making #20. It’s a woozy, rude, barroom stomper of a song, driven by a harpsichord, and Amos’s Kate Bush like vocals. It’s ear-catching, but it does nothing to prepare you for the remix that would eventually top the chart.

The word ‘remix’ doesn’t feel sufficient here. A remix is a song rearranged, extended, or stretched out over a new beat. This is a song completely reimagined, huge chunks chopped off it, with very little of the original remaining. One line is repeated over and over: Honey bring it close to my lips… while the other line – It’s gotta be big – must be somewhere in the original, even if I can’t quite hear it.

It’s amazing how Armand Van Helden, the DJ responsible, could hear the opening harpsichord riff and reimagine it as a modern disco bassline. Some remixes are fairly lazy, with few changes of any note; but not this. It almost samples the original, the riff and the two lines, and creates a completely different song. Van Helden is American, and the track is more house-influenced than our recent dance #1s, but there’s hints of the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers in the big chunky beats, in the creepy background noises, and the sudden break halfway through.

The ‘Professional Widow’ of the title is apparently a snide reference to Courtney Love, something that Amos has neither confirmed nor outright denied. She had nothing to do with the remix – she was contractually obliged to approve them – but in interviews she has said she enjoys Van Helden’s version. It brought about the biggest hit of her long career, anyway – surpassing the #4 peak of the folksy ‘Cornflake Girl’ from 1994 – and is, to date, Amos’s last visit to the UK Top 10. Armand Van Helden was just getting started, and will go on to be one of the biggest dance producers of all time. He’ll be back at number one, fully credited, fairly soon.

We can’t finish without mentioning the misheard lyric – one of pop’s filthiest mondegreens – where It’s gotta be big becomes… Well, I won’t write it out. Safe to say, once you hear it you can’t unhear it. Misheard or not, it does fit in fairly well with the bawdy original.

You could say that this is a classic January #1 – a fairly random remix sneaking a week at the top in the post-Christmas lull. In fact, January 1997 is one of the best examples the phenomenon, with a run of fun and quirky one-weekers coming up that I’m looking forward to getting into.