mash ups

1022. ‘Hung Up’, by Madonna

/ UK #1s blog / 7 Comments

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…

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924. ‘Freak Like Me’, by Sugababes

/ UK #1s blog / 8 Comments

Back in my post on All Saints’ ‘Pure Shores’, I crowned the ‘00s as the decade of the girl group. All Saints, as great as they were, were a bit of a false start (and they were technically a ‘90s group, anyway) but we’re finally off and away. Forget Destiny’s Child, forget Atomic Kitten. The two greatest girl groups of the decade (of all time?) score their first #1s in 2002, starting with…

Freak Like Me, by Sugababes (their 1st of six #1s)

1 week, from 28th April – 5th May 2002

No more covers of ‘Eternal Flame’, or songs about well you’re ‘surviving’. The Sugababes grab a sample from Tubeway Army and have their wicked way with it, whipping it into a whirlpool of echo, churn and industrial synths, while singing about how they want it every which way with a bad boy. This is what I want from my girl groups. Filth!

I wanna freak in the morning, freak in the evening… I need a roughneck brother who can satisfy me… The lyrics are nothing revolutionary, even if they are a world away from the kid-friendly Spice Girls. Though the Spiceys are there in spirit, in terms of their Girl Power message. This is girl group pop for the 21st century, in which the women are in charge, and parading their men around like dogs, apparently. Come on and I’ll take you around the hood, On a gangsta lead…

As fresh as All Saints’ hits sounded, I don’t think we’ve heard anything like this on top of the charts before. I’m going to use the word ‘original’, despite the fact that the Gary Numan sample is so front and centre. And despite the fact that the song itself is a cover of a US #2 hit from 1995, by Adina Howard, which itself samples and interpolates snatches from Sly & the Family Stone and Bootsy Collins. DJ Richard X had created a mash-up of Howard’s version and ‘Are “Friends” Electric’, but couldn’t secure Howard’s permission to use her vocals. Instead, he turned to desperate-for-a-hit Sugababes, who had been dropped by their label following an underperforming debut album, and who had lost founding member Siobhán Donaghy a few months earlier. For what it’s worth, Gary Numan claims that this song is better than his original.

So, a girl group. A DJ. A bootleg mash-up. Is this the #1 which officially announces the ‘00s as up and running? I probably claimed the same thing when Hear’Say became the first reality TV winning group, but I much prefer this version of the noughties. This reminds me of university, of the decade’s indie revival where pop and guitars collided, of the hits to come, of the days when I’d go out four nights a week… (nowadays, four nights a year is more likely…)

How much my coming-of-age influences my opinion of this record, and pretty much every #1 between now and 2008, is a good point to raise. But also, it’s a pointless question. Music is memory. The charts are one way of recording the soundtrack to our lives. Had I been born a decade earlier and I might have dismissed this as a gimmicky nothing, but I hope not. I hope the quality of this record can exist beyond my nostalgia.

Like Atomic Kitten with ‘Whole Again’, Sugababes were in danger of being consigned to the dustbin had ‘Freak Like Me’ not been a hit. Thankfully it was, and it set the MK II (and III, and IV) versions of the group up for sixteen further Top 10 hits between now and 2010, five more of which will make #1. And, as good as this record is, I think at least one of their later chart-toppers is better.