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…
