I know very little about dance music. I can just about tell my techno from my chillout, but you may have noticed from my previous posts on dance #1s that I play pretty fast and loose with the terminology. So indulge me while I throw around some ideas that may be complete nonsense…

Let Me Be Your Fantasy, by Baby D (their 1^st and only #1)

2 weeks, from 20^th November – 4^th December 1994

‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ might be the most ‘hardcore’ dance chart-topper yet. The beat is either ‘house’, if we’re looking backwards, or ‘garage’ if we’re looking forwards. Is it maybe even the first ‘drum ‘n’ bass’ number one? I’ll also throw in the suggestion that it also incorporates ‘jungle’, if only because I think it sounds fun.

I could list dance sub-genres all day long (Wikipedia also suggests ‘breakbeat’ and ‘happy hardcore’) but to be honest, they mean little to me and probably mean as much to you. Let me give the quotation marks a rest, and describe what ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ makes me feel… Well, it’s atmospheric – I like what sounds like a robot breathing in the mellow breaks between the verse – and the vocals are impressive. They’re the part of the song that feels the most familiar: a dance hit helmed by a large-lunged diva a la Black Box, or Snap!. Here the singer is Dorothy ‘Dee’ Galdes (presumably the ‘D’ in Baby D) and she has a wonderfully light-yet-full-bodied voice.

It’s another step towards the dance music that was dominating the charts when I came of age in the later part of the decade – dance music that had moved away from samples and novelty raps, dance music that had the confidence to strip things back, to drop the beats per minute, to let things breathe. This record is similar in that way to 1994’s other ‘cool’ dance hit by Tony Di Bart, rather than the more novelty offerings from Doop and Whigfield.

But I’ll also take that word ‘cool’, strengthen it into ‘cold’, and use it to describe how this song leaves me feeling. It’s not my thing, and as much as I try I can’t move past detached admiration as I listen and critique – much like I would an artefact in a museum – and I move on without particularly wanting to hear it again. I will always, sorry to say, enjoy the inane cheesiness of a 2 Unlimited song more…

Baby D had been around since the late eighties, and had scored a handful of minor hits earlier in the nineties. ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ had been around since 1992, when it made #76 and become something of a lost classic. Until it was ‘found’, re-released, and it reached #1. Baby D followed it up with a couple of #3 hits before fading. Their last hit was a remix of this, their biggest hit, that made #16 in 2000. Their keyboard player, Terry Jones, took a slight change in direction and went on to write and produce for the Backstreet Boys, Eternal, and Peter Andre…