dance music

685. ‘No Limit’, by 2 Unlimited

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I know that, in the real world, people don’t usually buy records just to get rid of the previous number one. They buy them because they like the song, or they like the singer, or because they found them in the Woolies’ bargain bin… But, after Whitney Houston had set up camp at the summit for the entire winter of 1992-93, the record that finally replaced it feels refreshingly… different.

No Limit, by 2 Unlimited (their 1st and only #1)

5 weeks, from 7th February – 14th March 1993

Let me hear you say yeah! Booting Whitney out the way is a proper slab of early nineties techno (or should that be ‘techno, techno, techno, techno’?) A sledgehammer synth riff, a breakneck tempo, minimalist lyrics, and a rap. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Job’s a good ‘un.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, There’s no limit… I may have claimed in my post on Snap!’s ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’ that dance tunes don’t need deep lyrics. But the lyrics to ‘No Limit’ make most dance tunes sound like ‘American Pie’. Lots of ‘no no’s, and a bit about reaching for the sky. The UK release even deleted the rap – a bit too wordy – and replaced it with some more ‘oh’s, and some ‘techno’s.

Is it wrong that I like this more than some (most…) of the earlier dance number ones? Records like ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’, ‘Killer’, and ‘Ride on Time’ are lauded as classics, while ‘No Limit’ is hidden under the carpet like an embarrassing stain. Well I’m here to reclaim this song. Yes, it’s simplistic, bordering on moronic – three notes and a lot of shouting – but, damn it, it’s fun. I like dance music best when it has the aggression and energy of rock ‘n’ roll and, replace the synths with scuzzy guitars here and you’ve got yourself something pretty punk.

And I admit, I have a soft spot for this tune, because it’s one of the first pop songs that I was aware of at the time. I have distinct memories of this being sung, over and over, in my school playground. 1993 was the year I turned seven, and the songs that made number one started becoming more and more relevant to me. I apologise in advance for any self-indulgence as we head on through the tunes of my childhood, and will try to keep the reminiscing to a minimum…

I’d have put good money on 2 Unlimited being German. Something about the sheer relentlessness of the beat, the ruthless efficiency of the lyrics… National stereotypes aside, most of the finest Europop (think Boney M, Falco and Snap!) has also been of Germanic origin. And I was close! They were Dutch/Belgian, and followed the Snap! formula of a male rapper and a female singer. Between 1991 and 1994 they scored eight UK Top 10s. I’m not sure any are better than ‘No Limit’ – they certainly had a formula, and stuck to it – so it feels right that this was their one and only chart-topper.

680. ‘Ebeneezer Goode’, by The Shamen

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Hot on the heels of ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’ comes another ‘90s dance classic…

Ebeneezer Goode, by The Shamen (their 1st and only #1)

4 weeks, from 13th September – 11th October 1992

And as magisterial as Snap!’s track was, ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ represents the flip-side of dance music in the early years of the decade. Aggressive and in-your-face, the opening voiceover sets the tone: A great philosopher once wrote… Naughty, naughty, Very naughty…. And off we go, cackling like Sid James…

Since forever, pop music and drugs have gone together. Sex and drugs and rock and roll, and all that. But no genre has ever been quite so entwined with illegal substances as electronic dance, and with one Class-A substance in particular. So when a track comes along by one of the big dance acts of the day, shamelessly celebrating said drug, and getting all the grown-ups’ knickers in a twist at the same time, you know it’s going to be a big old hit.

The clever bit here (I was going to use the word ‘genius’, but I think that would be stretching it slightly) is that the drug reference isn’t immediately obvious. ‘Ebeneezer Goode’, you might think, sounds like a character invented by Charles Dickens. Eezer good, Eezer good, He’s Ebeneezer Goode… A silly novelty song, parents around the country might have thought, as they heard it blaring from their teenagers’ bedrooms. Harmless nonsense. But, wait…

And like the teacher who’s twigged on far too late that the class is having a joke at their expense, the parents realise that the chorus could just as well be saying ‘E’s are good, ‘E’s are good… ‘E’s as in Ecstasy… And look, the song’s at number one already. It’s not big, and it’s not clever, but it is pretty amusing. Very naughty indeed…

But amid all the innuendo, the guffawing and the gurning, this is still a banger. The joke would have worn very thin, very quickly, if this wasn’t a good pop tune. I don’t think it’s quite up there with ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’, and I don’t think you’d want to hear it all that often, but it’s a lot of fun. And it’s a significant number one because rave culture isn’t really represented at the top of the charts, despite being one of the big musical movements of the day, and while this is diluted, poppy rave, and it lost the Shamen a lot of ‘hardcore’ fans, it still counts.

It’s also, despite the modern sound, a treasure trove of peculiarly British references. We’ve got rhyming slang, and a shout-out to Vera Lynn, of all people: Anybody got any Vera’s…? Lovely… (‘Vera Lynns’ being rhyming slang for ‘skins’, which people used to mix cannabis and ecstasy) and a reference to ‘Mr Punchinella’ AKA Mr Punch from ‘Punch & Judy’. While  in the second verse there’s even a bit of sensible advice: But go easy on old ‘Eezer, ‘E’s the love you could lose… Pop pills responsibly, kids.

The BBC, always up for a good banning, initially refused to air the song, but relinquished when it became a huge hit. Hilariously, the week that ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ climbed to number one was the Corporation’s ‘drug awareness week’. On TOTP the band changed some of the lyrics, including adding a reference to ‘underlay’, which they explained as a ‘gratuitous rug reference’. Boom and indeed tish. It was far from the first hit song to reference an illegal substance – The Beatles were doing it twenty-five years earlier – but few had done it quite so shamelessly.

The Shamen were a Scottish band, formed in Aberdeen in 1985, and had been around since the very earliest days of house music. They started out making psychedelic pop, before moving to a more electronic sound. This wasn’t their first Top 10 hit, but it was so unexpectedly huge that the band decided to delete it while it was still on top of the charts, so that it wouldn’t come to define them. Sadly, though, it still did, and their hits grew smaller and smaller until they split in 1999. But, as founding member Colin Angus says, ‘Uncle Ebeneezer is still looking after me to this day.’ Whether he’s still dropping MDMA, or he’s talking about royalties, I do not know, but it seems fitting to end this post on a double-entendre.

679. ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’, by Snap!

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I’m not a huge dance music fan – I feel I should have that phrase on permanent ‘copy paste’, given how many times I’ve said/will say it – but when a dance song clicks…

Rhythm Is a Dancer, by Snap! (their 2nd and final #1)

6 weeks, from 2nd August – 13th September 1992

‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’ is one of those that just clicks. And it clicks immediately, grabbing you as the atmospheric intro builds, from the three intertwining synth lines, to the drums, to the backing vocals. When the main vocals and the bass eventually kick in together, I’m inspired to compare it with the ultimate slow-build intro, ‘Smoke on the Water’. Yes, rock snobs, I went there…

The song as a whole is slick and streamlined, much more grown-up than Snap’s first chart-topper, ‘The Power’, which I found harsh and gimmicky. The lyrics are very generic – the title itself is nonsense, if you’ve ever stopped to think about it – but no dance tune needs deep lyrics. Rhythm is a dancer, It’s a soul’s companion… Lift your hands and voices, Free your mind and join us, You can feel it in the air… Complete waffle. But when you’re topless in a sweaty club, choking on the dry ice, it might sound like the dance equivalent of a hymn.

What ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’ is best remembered for today, though – as well as being a 1990s club classic – is for its rapped verse. The fact that there’s a rap in the first place is still worth noting. Today it feels standard, but as I mentioned in my post on ‘Black or White’ the idea of sticking a rapped verse in your dance/pop song was a pretty new one in 1992. (‘The Power’ was one of the very first, in fact.) And this is one of the first raps that doesn’t feel tacked on, or gimmicky, bearing in mind that some previous hip-hop chart-toppers have involved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons, and Vanilla Ice.

Let the rhythm ride you, Guide you, Sneak inside you… raps Turbo B, sounding like he’s spent the past two years practising. It’s fine, until he reaches the final line, and spoils it: I’m serious as cancer, When I say rhythm is a dancer… In fairness to Turbo, his first reaction was supposedly ‘No way am I singing that shit’. But sing it he did, to a mixed reaction. In my opinion, it’s so crass and so unexpected that it somehow works, and anyway Snap! didn’t invent it – it was a phrase that had been used in hip-hop tracks for years.

My only complaint about this majestic track is that it just glides to a finish. It’s a bit of a flat ending, but then the rest of the song is so cool and icily confident that to finish with something showy might have spoiled it. ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’ has placed on all sorts of ‘Best Songs of the 90s’ and ‘Greatest Dance Tunes Ever’ sorts of lists, and has been re-recorded and/or re-leased by Snap! three times since this original release.

Despite being remembered now mainly for their two number ones, Snap! were genuinely huge in the first half of the 1990s, scoring nine Top 10 hits between 1990 and 1994. None were bigger than this, however – the second-highest seller of 1992. They remain active today, with original vocalist Penny Ford back on board, though sadly no more Turbo B.

676. ‘Please Don’t Go’ / ‘Game Boy’, by KWS

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Do my ears deceive me, or are we entering yet another new phase in dance? As someone who isn’t that into dance music, the way in which I’ve been noticing new trends in the genre has surprised me… From house in the mid-80s, to sampling, to the rave influenced early nineties hits… And now we enter the ‘golden age of dance’.

Please Don’t Go / Game Boy, by KWS (their 1st and only #1)

5 weeks, from 3rd May – 7th June 1992

I don’t think people actually call it that. But between 1992 and 1997, even though Britpop is what the 1990s are remembered for, it was dance music that ruled the charts. And I’d say it starts here, with what is a fairly lacklustre remake of a KC & The Sunshine Band hit from a decade or so earlier…

Even as someone who doesn’t love dance music, I’m excited at the prospect of covering some of the dance number ones on the horizon: the Prodigy, Chemical Brothers… 2 Unlimited. But for every fun and fresh electronic #1, there are lazy remakes like this. It’s got a fairly low beats-per-minute – though not slow enough to be ‘chillout’ – it’s got elements of house, a hint of trance… It dabbles in different styles, but doesn’t commit to any, and ends up quite dull. (To be fair, the original is also fairly pedestrian, compared to KC’s more famous hits. It made #3 in 1980, and was also the first Billboard chart-topper of the ‘80s.)

And yet, this fairly forgettable tune was number one for five weeks… Perhaps now is as good a time as any to address the elephant in the room. We’re almost halfway through 1992, and we’ve only had four number ones. As I mentioned in an earlier post, 1992’s turnover is the slowest for thirty years, and it’s down to two things. We’re in one of those slumps that come along every decade or so: think the early sixties, between rock ‘n’ roll and the Beatles, or the mid-seventies, between glam and new wave. Currently we’re puttering around lost between the SAW-led late-‘80s and Britpop.

In addition, the way people were buying music was changing. After decades as the main format, vinyl ‘45s were slowly being phased out in favour of CD singles. At the peak of vinyl’s popularity, in the late 1970s, an act had to sell an average of 150k copies to make number one; in 1992 it was taking only 60-70k. By the end of this decade, the CD will be at its peak, and the turnover of #1s will be at record-breaking levels (1992 has twelve #1s, 2000 has forty-two!) There will be a similar slow-down in the mid-00s, as CDs die and downloads take over, and then again in the late 2010s as streaming becomes the default for how we consume music.

Anyway, after that detour into chart logistics, we mustn’t forget that this was a double-‘A’ side, and we have another song to write about. A song that is bloody hard to track down. Nothing on Spotify, and one trippy YouTube video, which leads me to assume that ‘Game Boy’ didn’t get much airtime when ‘Please Don’t Go’ was riding high in the charts. And when I listen to it, my doubts are confirmed. It’s probably the closest we’ll ever come to a happy hardcore #1. It’s an instrumental – been a while since we featured one of those – and it feels almost retro in the way it appears to be a bunch of samples strung together to make a hot mess of a tune.

I like it, more than its flip-side, for about a minute. Then it outstays its welcome. Who decides when a ‘B’-side becomes a double-‘A’? Record companies? The band? The charts themselves? Because I’d file this with ‘Girls’ School’ and ‘Anitina’ as an ‘A’-side that is much less well-known than many ‘B’-sides. But it’s there, in the record books, and we have to cover it. And it is, like I said, an aggressive style of dance that wouldn’t have otherwise featured at #1. Plus, it references the classic game console of the age in its title, which is nice.

KWS were a trio from Nottingham, named in ABBA-style as an acronym of the members’ surnames, and this was their first ever chart hit. They owed their chart fortunes to the fact that an Italian group called Double You had covered ‘Please Don’t Go’, but their record company had failed to secure UK distribution. KWS stepped in to record a remarkably similar sounding version, resulting in three years of legal action. By the time the record labels had settled up, KWS had long since ceased to be a chart concern. Their only other Top 10 hit was another remake of a much older dance tune, George McCrae’s early disco hit ‘Rock Your Baby’.

659. ‘3A.M. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)’, by The KLF

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I’m going to stick my neck out here, and claim that we’re in the midst of what is the strangest run of number one singles. From ‘Unchained Melody’, past Vanilla Ice and Christian Cliff, Iron Maiden bringing our daughters to the slaughter, Enigma’s Gregorian chanting, and Queen’s ‘other’ epic single… to the KLF.

3A.M. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.), by The KLF (their 1st and only #1)

2 weeks, from 27th January – 10th February 1991

And on the face of it, ‘3A.M. Eternal’ is a return to the dance music that’s shaped the early ‘90s. If you were being harsh, you could claim it to be a rehash of Snap!’s ‘The Power’, with its Russian radio intro, and its mix of a male rapper with a big-voiced female (the singer belting it out at the start is soul legend P.P. Arnold). But this is The KLF, and with them nothing is what it seems.

For a start, the sound that immediately follows the radio intro is a machine gun, strafing the listener into pieces. There’s all the chanting about the ‘Ancients of Mu Mu’ (the band’s former name). And then there’s the crowd noise, and the announcement at the end that KLF have now left the building… It’s all fake, the S.S.L. in the title refers to a Solid State Logic mixing desk. And there’s the fact that this is actually a remix of a 1989 release of the same name: a deep trance track that failed to chart and that sounds unrecognisable from this much poppier version.

But above all that, one fact remains: it’s a banger. All my talk of comparing it to ‘The Power’ fades away because this, in my opinion, is the far better song. It’s dance music with rock chords, and with about three different hooks: the KLF is gonna rock you chant, the uh-huh-uh-huhs, and the Ancients of Mu Mu. And as fake as it may be, the soaring crowd noise adds an epic, stadium quality to the track. (This was #1 on my fifth birthday, and it’s one of my very favourite birthday chart-toppers.)

This being the KLF, you do wonder if this remix was done with the aim of aping the big dance hits of the age – all the ingredients are there – and in the end making a song that betters them all. They’d done it once before, as The Timelords (they’ve gone under quite a few names over the years…) and the ridiculously catchy, sample-heavy ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ from three years earlier. And they weren’t done remixing ‘3AM Eternal’, as a year later they recorded a thrash metal version with crust punk group Extreme Noise Terror, with whom they duetted at the Brit awards, and pretended to machine gun the audience (the original plan had been to disembowel a dead sheep live on stage, before the lawyers stepped in…) The performance is on YouTube, and it’s amazing to think that it was broadcast on primetime BBC.

You’d need an entirely separate blog post to go into sufficient detail on the KLF, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, their many guises and their many moments of notoriety. Aside from their Brits performance, shout outs need to be made to their duet with Tammy Wynette on ‘Justified and Ancient’, which made #2 later in 1991, in shades of the Pet Shop Boys and Dusty. And their retirement, when they deleted their entire back catalogue (it was only restored a couple of years ago) and set fire to their remaining one million pounds in royalties on a remote Scottish island.

So there you go. As talented as they were tasteless, and responsible for yet another weird and wonderful number one. You’ll be glad to hear that things aren’t getting any less bizarre either, for up next is the most famous pop star of the age, with the most famous animated family of all time…

657. ‘Sadeness Part 1’, by Enigma

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If we thought that Iron Maiden scoring a heavy metal #1 was unexpected, then it seems positively mainstream compared with the intro of our next chart-topper.

Sadeness Part I, by Enigma (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 13th – 20th January 1991

For how about some Gregorian chanting (in Latin, of course) to kick off 1991? Chanting that is mixed with a chilled-out dance beat, and then replaced by some electronic pan pipes. It’s the culmination of the new-age vibe that’s been infiltrating pop music over the past few years – think Enya, Simple Minds, even recent Cliff – and it means that this record sounds highly innovative and unusual; and yet truly dated.

A bit later a crunchy guitar comes in, while a woman mutters breathily in French, reminding me of Serge & Jane. These are the moments that lift this record above being something you’d hear in the background as someone performs an aromatherapy massage. I do like the drop, the do-doop-de-doo fill, too. It’s way beyond my usual wheelhouse – I have a deep distrust of anything that could feature in a ‘chillout’ playlist – but there’s enough going on here, a lot even, to keep things interesting.

The lyrics, such as they are, appear in Latin and in French. And if you were thinking a song this weird couldn’t possibly have banal lyrics about love and laughter then you’d be correct. It’s written in the form of an address to the Marquis de Sade (hence the title), the notorious 18th century French author and libertine responsible for some of the most outrageously explicit writing in history. (As an aside, I studied literature at university, and the only time we received a content warning, and were allowed to skip a text if we felt uncomfortable, was as we were about to read Sade’s ‘Justine’. There’s a reason the man gave his name to the term ‘Sadism’…) Anyway. Sade tell me, What are you looking for…? the song asks. Sade, are you evil or divine…?

I’m loath to label this as ‘not good’. When it comes to writing these posts, a record featuring chanting monks and pan-pipes, about a notorious sex-offender, is certainly more interesting to write about than your average dance hit. And it’s amazing how sophisticated dance music has become in the past couple of years, since the Hi-NRG heyday of SAW, and how quickly things have chilled out. But at the same time. ‘Sadeness Part 1’ isn’t something I’d ever incorporate into my daily playlists.

Enigma were a German ‘musical project’, helmed by German-Romanian producer Michael Cretu, and this was their breakthrough hit. And what a hit: number one across Europe, and Top 5 in the US. They struggled to match this success until the lead single from their second album, ‘Return to Innocence’, made #3 three years later. That record ditched the monks and went for more ethnic, tribal chanting.

Since then, Enigma have continued to record without particularly bothering the charts, including a 2006 concept album based on an imagined collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Because why not? Cretu’s greatest moment may have come long before Enigma and his championing of world music, though: he played keyboards on Boney M’s 1978 #1 ‘Rivers of Babylon’…

Should Have Been a #1…? ‘Groove Is in the Heart’, by Deee-Lite

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In this intermittent series on songs that should have been number ones, we’ve met songs that were classics, deserving of chart glory; songs that may well have been secretly denied top spot; and songs that topped the wrong chart…

But the record I’m featuring today may well have the strongest case to argue in the ‘should have been a #1’ stakes. For no song has ever gone closer…

‘Groove Is in the Heart’, by Deee-Lite – reached #2 in September 1990, behind ‘The Joker’

First up, the song itself. And it’s a classic. Is it disco? Funk? Hip-hop? All of the above? Or does anyone really care, when it makes you move like it does? Linked in spirit to the big dance hits of the time, but a world away from them, there are few songs that sound this fun, so full of a joie de vivre that you wish you could bottle and use to live forever. The little touches – the bubble popping, the horns, the looped intro – add to its appeal, and never grate. Deee-Lite were from NYC, and comprised an American singer, a Ukrainian DJ and a Japanese producer (as unusual a mish-mash as their genre-bending hit) plus contributions from rapper Q-Tip and legendary bassist Bootsy Collins.

So, ‘Groove Is in the Heart’ should have been a number one on merit, because it’s great and I said so. And, for the week beginning 9th September 1990, it was. At least, it was in a tie for number one with the Steve Miller Band’s re-released ‘The Joker’. In the 1950s, when sales data was pretty patchy, tied chart positions were commonplace. Since 1973, however, a rule had been in place which stated that the record with the bigger increase in sales week-on-week would ‘win’. Both records had climbed that week, but ‘The Joker’ had done so with a 57% increase. Deee-lite had only improved their sales by 37%. Steve Miller took the #1.

There was consternation, not least from Deee-Lite’s record label, who felt that the new, up-and-coming act (this was their first ever chart hit) should get preference. ‘The Joker’, as fun as it is, was just so 1973. ‘Groove Is in the Heart’ was fresh and funky, and the future. Except, that’s sadly not how the charts work. They’re all about cold, hard sales figures. And The Steve Miller Band’s victory was confirmed once and for all when it turned that the tied position had been down to a rounding error, and that ‘The Joker’ had sold a whopping eight more copies than ‘Groove…’

The next week, ‘The Joker’ remained at #1 fair and square, and ‘Groove…’ started to slip down the chart. Deee-Lite never made it back into the Top 20, and split up in the mid-90s. Still, they leave quiet the legacy: one of the classic wedding disco floor-fillers, and the unluckiest #2 single of all time…

649. ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’, by Bombalurina

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As with our last chart-topper, ‘Turtle Power’, I am fully convinced that I will hate this next #1 single…

Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, by Bombalurina (their 1st and only #1)

3 weeks, from 19th August – 9th September 1990

But wait. As with the Turtles, I might have misjudged… This starts off like a proper, early-nineties dance track. There’s a looped female vocal – Go on girl-go-go-go on girl – and a fairly shameless cribbing of ‘Theme From S-Express’ in the Spanish countdown. This is not the song I vaguely remember from school discos of yore…

Oh wait. No. It is. In comes Timmy Mallett, with a cover of Brian Hyland’s #8 hit from 1960, all about a racy swimwear item, and suddenly it is novelty trash of the calibre of ‘Agadoo’ and ‘The Chicken Song’. As with the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, Mallett was another part of my childhood, although less so, because he was on ITV and my mum kept things strictly BBC whenever she could. (Years later, a former backing singer claimed that the vocals on the record were in fact his, and that Mallett couldn’t hit a single good note…)

Except, even at its cheesiest, it still sounds like someone with a working knowledge of dance music was present in the studio as this was being recorded. It never tips over into truly unlistenable territory, with lots of knowing touches and pastiches. (Imagine my surprise to find that one of said people in the studio was Andrew Lloyd-Webber (!), who produced the record in a bet with his wife. Bombalurina is a character from ‘Cats’…) The video too does a decent, if knowing, impression of a real dance track, with buff dancers cutting shapes on a fake beach. It’s nowhere near as creepy as a video featuring Timmy Mallett and a woman in a bikini could have been…

This is the second cover of a Brian Hyland original to make #1 in just over a year. He’s a fairly unlikely figure to have had a rediscovery, but there you go. And I’m not going to go as far as to claim that this is better than Jason Donovan’s ‘Sealed With a Kiss’, but I have enjoyed it more. Which is ultimately all that matters, I suppose.

This record is more than just a summer novelty, for me at least, as I believe it to have been at number one when I started school. I can’t be sure, and it would be much more fitting for it to have been ‘Turtle Power’, but dates-wise I assume it’s this. The big question is, though: do I hate it as much as I was expecting to…? Well, the last few paragraphs have probably given it away, but no. I don’t. It’s cheese, to be filed alongside the likes of ‘Long Haired Lover from Liverpool’, and Renee and Renato’s ‘Save Your Love’. Pure drivel; but far too silly, and catchy, and most importantly tongue-in-cheek, to deny.

645. ‘Killer’, by Adamski

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The first word that comes to mind as this next number one begins is ‘lumbering’. Like Godzilla trampling Tokyo underfoot, the beat here is heavy, and relentless…

Killer, by Adamski (his 1st and only #1)

4 weeks, from 6th May – 3rd June 1990

It’s a fourth consecutive dance #1, and each one has done something slightly different within the genre’s confines. ‘Dub Be Good to Me’, ‘The Power’, ‘Vogue’, this. They’ve all had one thing in common, though: pretty low bpm. There have been moments, while listening to each one, in which I’ve wondered whether you could do much dancing to them. The early ‘90s was the height of rave culture in the UK, of people off their tits and mad for it in a field in Hampshire, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it by listening to the most popular dance tracks of the time.

While ‘Vogue’ well and truly warmed up after a slow start, I’m not sure if ‘Killer’ ever quite rises above its plodding beat, decorated with creepy synth effects that sound like aliens trying to broadcast to the mothership. There’s a moment in the middle where some choppy trickery with the vocals turns them into a sort of dance Morse Code, and this kicks things into life. There’s a more traditionally ‘dancey’ piano riff after that, and a moment where you think this might be turning into a banger. But it doesn’t quite manage it.

Solitary brother… I like this line… Is there still a part of you that wants to live…? Again, not your run-of-the-mill dance lyrics. And while we should applaud strangeness, and creativity, and so on; it doesn’t mean that I particularly enjoy this record. I’d file in under ‘interesting’, rather than ‘fun’.

The vocalist was an at the time unknown bloke called Seal. (So unknown that the Official Charts didn’t credit him on the single, which seems a bit harsh.) He’d been a funk and soul singer in Britain and the Far East, and was sleeping on a friend’s sofa when he met DJ and producer Adamski, handing him a demo tape. The rest is history, though nothing he did after his big breakthrough hit has the same oomph. He went back down the smooth soul route, and along the way recorded one of my least favourite songs of all time: ‘Kiss From a Rose’. (It just gives me goosebumps, and not the good kind…)

What’s ‘Killer’ about, though? The lyrics, written by Seal, are an exhortation to freedom and to transcending whatever holds you back, according to the man himself. That sounds more like M People than this weirdly ominous record, while Adamski meanwhile thinks it sounds like the soundtrack to a movie murder scene. It ends with a message: Racism in amongst future kids can only lead to no good… Which is worthy, but which means the record ends on a strangely sombre note.

Seal released his debut solo album later that year, and has gone on to sell twenty million records around the world, and to marry Heidi Klum. Adamski, meanwhile, scored a #7 with the follow-up, before fading from popular view. He still records though, and tours as a DJ.

Of the past four number ones – the spring of dance, I’ll call it – I’d have ‘Vogue’ as my favourite, closely followed by Beats International. But I’d have ‘Killer’ in third, ahead of Snap! It’s a very odd song, an uncomfortable, edgy record; but there’s greatness there, buried somewhere deep. Up next, an act that are undoubtedly dance music pioneers, the daddies of all this electronic business, and one of the most influential bands of the 1980s… With Peter Beardsley.

644. ‘Vogue’, by Madonna

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What’re you looking at? snaps Madonna at the start of her seventh, and perhaps most iconic number one. You of course, Madge. You.

Vogue, by Madonna (her 7th of thirteen #1s)

4 weeks, from 8th April – 6th May 1990

At this point, Madonna was hitting at a rate of one #1 per year. 1989’s chart-topper, ‘Like a Prayer’, gave us Madonna the shocker, the church baiting provocateuse. 1990’s chart-topper was the other side of her coin: Madonna the trend-setter, the cultural chameleon (or bandwagon jumper, if you’re not a fan…) For she was off to the ballrooms of Harlem…

‘Vogueing’ as a dance movement had grown there during the 1980s, among black and Latino gay communities. The sudden, sharp movements were supposed to be an impersonation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, or of a star changing poses in a photoshoot for, yes, ‘Vogue’. Madonna had been introduced to it by her own dancers and choreographers. (*Insert complaints about Madonna milking the gay community for her own commercial advantage* Not that I’d at all agree: this was perhaps the start of ‘gay’ culture going mainstream, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and Madge has always been open about her support of LGBTs.)

Like ‘The Power’, the record it replaced at the top, ‘Vogue’s slick house rhythm doesn’t sound instantly danceable. But it creeps up on you, until two minutes in you realise that you’re shimmying. The tinny drums that lead up to each verse and chorus are very Hi-NRG (dare we say, very SAW?) and the short sharp horn blasts keep you on your feet. By the time she yells the Get up on the dancefloor! line, you’re there. Meanwhile the lyrics are fairly generic dance: Let your body move to the music… You’re a superstar, That’s what you are… etc. etc.

Of course many people at the time, unfamiliar with gay ballroom culture, would have assumed that the title referred to the fashion magazine. Madonna nods to that too, in the spoken word section, as she lists various women with an attitude and fellas who were in the mood from Hollywood’s golden age, on the cover of a magazine. And, just in case this record wasn’t gay enough, it includes the line: They had style, They had grace, Rita Hayworth, Gave good face…

Unlike ‘Like a Prayer’, ‘Vogue’ isn’t from a classic album. It’s the final track, tacked on to ‘I’m Breathless’: the soundtrack to the prohibition-era movie ‘Dick Tracy’. The follow-up single was the ridiculous ‘Hanky Panky’ (nothing like a good spanky!) But ‘Vogue’ has long-outlasted both album and film, to rank alongside Madonna’s very best songs. Whereas I didn’t enjoy listening to ‘Like a Prayer’ as much as I thought I would; the past hour has brought me to realise just how good ‘Vogue’ really is.

Believe it or not, this is the last we’ll be hearing from Madonna for eight whole years. She only has two #1s in the 1990s (while she has as many in the ‘00s as she managed in the ‘80s). Not that she’s going anywhere: aside from those two #1s, the decade will bring her a staggering twenty-two Top 10 hits, including four #2s. And ‘Vogue’, a number one in thirty countries and to date her biggest-seller worldwide, kicked it all off.