After partying all night on ‘Flava’, Peter Andre aims for the flip-side of ‘90s R&B: a sickly slow-jam…
I Feel You, by Peter Andre (his 2nd of three #1s)
1 week, from 1st – 8th December 1996
I assumed that by late-1996, as we near my eleventh birthday, there wouldn’t be any number ones that I’d never heard before. But I reckoned against the fact that, as chart-topping turnover increases, there will be lots of one-week wonders to contend with. Like this.
‘I Feel You’ has some nice Boyz II Men style chord changes, a funky bassline and, if you squint your ears (you know what I mean…) you could just about mistake Andre for Michael Jackson. It also has, as most songs of this ilk do, some unintentionally stomach-turning lyrics: I’m thinking about the bedroom, baby, We’d be making love…Making love! As well as a very steamy video featuring, naturally, Andre’s six-pack as one of the main characters.
By and large, though, this song is dull. Spotify only hosts an extended five-minute mix, which is a slog when it comes to a song of this quality. And it’s sexiness is so forced, that anyone who isn’t Pepe Le Pew will be turned off. It’s custom made for horny teenagers to put on their make-out mixtapes, and they were presumably one of the song’s main customer bases in getting it to the top.
This should have been the last we hear from Peter Andre. His star shone brightly, but briefly: seven Top 10 hits between 1996 and 1998. Fate had different ideas, however. It does mean that, in seven years or so, he will reappear, and his best single will belatedly make #1… But at what cost?
Since this is looking like being a very short write-up, I’ll mention something that I’ve hinted at in earlier posts. Late-’96 is the moment that the singles chart became the chart I grew up with – not just in terms of the songs sounding like modern pop, as I’ve discussed before, but in the way they started entering at #1, and staying there for just seven days at a time. As I said above: ‘one-week wonders’, like this one, and the next song we’ll be featuring…