number one singles

867. ‘We Will Rock You’, by Five & Queen

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First of all, let’s get some things straight. I love Queen (who doesn’t?) I like Five (a fun boyband who tended to avoid ballads). I – and I hope my posts on the previous eight hundred and sixty-six number ones have proven this – am no purist. So why does this collaboration annoy me so…?

We Will Rock You, by Five (their 2nd of three #1s) & Queen (their 6th and final #1)

1 week, from 23rd – 30th July 2000

I don’t think it annoys me musically, as it is big, and beefy, and features a nice crunchy guitar solo. Plus, it begins and ends with a massive thunderclap, and has piped in crowd noise. It is not a song which holds back, or is interested in subtlety, and I appreciate that. I think it keeps the energy of the original, but updates it for the early noughties. As Abs so succinctly puts it in his rap: Five bring the funk, Queen bring the rock…

What annoys me is the fact that both acts had far better songs than this which failed to make number one. Five released a great run of hip-pop hits in the late nineties that fell short. Queen have a multitude of huge, household classics that never made #1. It feels that this record made it on novelty value, rather than merit (and it wouldn’t have made number one at all had Ronan Keating not released his dodgy enhanced CDs).

What also annoys me is the fact that Queen are featured and credited. If this was a sample – as Five did very well when using ‘I Love Rock n Roll’ on ‘Everybody Get Up’ – I might view it more favourably. But Brian May and Roger Taylor play their guitar and their drums, scoring Queen a number one to rank alongside ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Under Pressure’, and it just feels a little cheap, a little tawdry. This is how one of Britain’s most legendary rock acts end their chart-topping career: whoring themselves out as a backing band. It may be wishful thinking, but I wonder if Freddie Mercury would have allowed this, had he been around? And given John Deacon’s retirement from the band, and his subsequent comments on their later work, we can assume he wasn’t overly impressed either.

But what annoys me more than anything, really, is the fact that I can’t now listen to the original ‘We Will Rock You’ without wanting to add the moronically catchy We’re gonna rock ya baby! line to the chorus…

Anyway, whatever my objections, this did make number one. The two groups had performed the track together a few months earlier at the Brit Awards, too. Amazingly, Queen now have as many chart-toppers without Freddie as they managed with him. Plus, since we were keeping track of Kylie’s three chart-topping decades, we should mention that this record’s success meant that Queen joined Cliff Richard in having made top spot in four different decades.

866. ‘Life Is a Rollercoaster’, by Ronan Keating

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Straight on from the Corrs, it’s more Irish joy at the top of the charts. In fact, 2000 might just be the best year on record for Irish number ones, with Ronan Keating becoming the year’s third, with three more yet to go…

Life Is a Rollercoaster, by Ronan Keating (his 2nd of three solo #1s)

1 week, from 16th – 23rd July 2000

And while, yes, this is already Groanin’ Ronan’s eighth appearance in less than four years, I’m not feeling too apprehensive about this record. For, finally, Ronan is going upbeat. Strap yourselves in folks, because This. Is. Not. A. Ballad!

Like the Corr’s ‘Breathless’, ‘Life Is a Rollercoaster’ was a song impossible to escape when it came out. Radios nationwide blasted Ronan’s dulcet tones from dawn to dusk, all summer long, or so it seemed. So on one hand, it’s easy to groan when you think of how over-exposed this song became. But on the other, we should admit that this is actually quite a good pop tune. Nothing amazing, nothing revolutionary; but given the singer, it’s a welcome change of direction.

Strangely, I’d always remembered it being faster-paced. I thought it was more of a rollicking pop number, much like an actual rollercoaster. Listening to it now it feels slower, with a dreamy quality in the way Keating’s voice echoes against a wall of sound in the chorus. It’s somehow otherworldly, to the extent that I had to check I wasn’t listening to a remix, and ‘otherworldly’ is not a word you often associate with Ronan Keating. (Any otherworldliness, though, is undone by the fairly trite lyrics. Life as a rollercoaster. Because of all the ups and downs. Duh.)

Also, because it’s not a ballad, he doesn’t feel the need to chew every single syllable like tough steak in an attempt to convey ‘emotion’. He just sings the words, doesn’t overthink it, and produces what is by far the best vocal performance of any of his, or Boyzone’s, number ones. He even lets loose at the end, adding a semi-saucy adlib: Life is a rollercoaster, Just gotta ride it… (All night long!) I’m sure it had grannies across the land reaching for the smelling salts.

In writing this post, I’ve just realised that this song owes a big debt to George Michael’s ‘Fastlove’, with its Hey baby! refrain, and its similar tempo. I’m sure I’m not the first to notice, but it doesn’t seem to have caused a fuss at the time. Where there was controversy was in the fact that one hundred thousand copies of ‘Life is a Rollercoaster’s enhanced CD single were deemed ineligible to chart, due to an obscure chart rule about what an ‘enhanced CD single’ had to include. This didn’t stop the song from entering at number one, but it did cost it a fortnight on top when a further fourteen thousand copies were discarded the week after. And as we’ll soon find out when we hear the next #1, this was a costly error…

And B-sides… ‘Space Oddity’, by David Bowie

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It’s time for part two of our semi-regular B-sides feature. My first was on Oasis, the band perhaps most famous for the quality of their B-sides. For my second I’m turning to one of the great chart-topping singles…

‘Space Oddity’ was David Bowie’s first chart hit, and his first number one. Not at the same time, however. It made #5 on its first release in 1969, tying in with the Apollo 11 moon landing, before belatedly making #1 six years later, after a re-release. (Read my original post here.)

For the 1975 rerelease, another old tune was chosen as the first B-side. ‘Changes’ had featured on Bowie’s 1971 album ‘Hunky Dory’, but had flopped completely as a single in early 1972. (Amazingly, Bowie had been looking like a one-hit wonder following the original ‘Space Oddity’, and had to wait until his Ziggy Stardust era for another hit.)

Despite now being one of his signature songs, you can kind of see why ‘Changes’ failed to catch on at the time. What exactly is it? Is it glam? Is it jazz? The chorus and the middle-eight are great power pop. It’s listed as ‘Art-pop’, but then that sounds like the sort of genre given to songs that nobody can quite place.

The second 1975 B-side was an offcut from the Ziggy Stardust sessions, ‘Velvet Goldmine’. Testament to the depth of Bowie’s career, this is another now-classic that went unnoticed at the time. Bouncy, theatrical and fruity, with a brilliant humming-slash-whistling outro that reminds me of Lee Marvin’s ‘Wand’rin Star’. Unlike ‘Wand’rin Star’, however, this is an ode to blowjobs: I had to ravish your capsule, Suck you dry… The song is now so well-respected in the annals of glam that it lent its name to the 1998 movie ‘Velvet Goldmine’, about a fictional glam-rock star.

A bonus for you here, as ‘Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud’ was the B-side to the original 1969 release of ‘Space Oddity’. It’s an epic tale about… something. When I reluctantly admit that I’m not a fully paid up member of the Bowie fanclub, it’s songs like this that have put me off. This single version is quite sparse – just a guitar and some trings – but he re-recorded it for his eponymous second album, with an orchestra, and that version has an appealing grandeur about it. (I’m still not sure what it’s about, though…)

865. ‘Breathless’, by The Corrs

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Our next number one feels very much of its time – the Corrs were probably playing on at least one British radio station at any given moment between 1998 and 2000 – but also a bit of an outlier among the chart toppers we’ve been working our way slowly through.

Breathless, by The Corrs (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 9th – 16th July 2000

‘Breathless’ isn’t dance. It’s not hip-hop. It’s not bubblegum. Instead, we’ve got some good old-fashioned MOR pop-rock. With actual guitars! And it’s a welcome sound!

At the time, as an unsufferable teen, I thought this track was a bit naff. And yes, it has lots of unfashionable touches. There are some cheesy synth fills, revving guitars, and that naggingly catchy (but also pretty annoying) Go-ooh on! Go-ooh on! hook. But the driving riff, and the sheer breeziness of the song wins me over, belatedly. I’m just disappointed that I’d written it off for a quarter of a century!

The fact that I wrote it off, and didn’t pay much attention to it, is probably tied to the fact that, despite being chart-obsessed from the age of eleven, and despite owning every ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ album between… I think… Now 35 and Now 44; by my mid-teens I’d lost interest. I went from taping the charts from the radio and writing them out in notebooks every week to not really knowing who was who in the Top 10. I knew the big songs, from the radio and from classmates, but couldn’t have told you who was #1 on any given week. This lasted until around late-2002, when my interest in the charts suddenly burst back into life, and has never left!

Anyway, back to the song at hand. It also has some vaguely Celtic touches, which every Irish act had to have at this time, but these are dialled well back from some of the Corrs’ earlier hits. What it reminds me of is Shania Twain’s huge ‘Come On Over’ album from around the same time (now she really should have had a couple of number ones out of that…) It’s no surprise then to learn that this was produced by ‘Mutt’ Lange, producer of, and husband to, Shania. And thanks, presumably to Lange, we are treated to a guitar solo! When was the last time we heard one of those?? (Oasis, a couple of months ago, but you get my point…)

The Corrs are a family group, consisting of siblings Andrea, Sharon, Caroline, and Jim. The three women are raven-haired Irish beauties, which meant the jokes in the playground at the time were mainly at Jim’s expense… ‘Breathless’ was the lead single from the follow-up to the hugely popular ‘Talk On Corners’ album, and so was always positioned to do well. I’m glad it did this well, though, as I’ve been able to rediscover a fine slice of power pop. It represents the pinnacle of the Corrs’ chart fortunes too, as they only managed one further Top 10 hit. They split in 2005, but reformed a decade later and remain a touring and recording concern.

864. ‘The Real Slim Shady’, by Eminem

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May we have your attention please? May we have your attention please? Won’t the highest selling male artist of the 21st century please stand up?

The Real Slim Shady, by Eminem (his 1st of eleven #1s)

1 week, from 2nd – 9th July 2000

Whatever your opinion of rap as a genre, or on the talents of Marshall Mathers III, it’s hard to deny that we’re introducing a massive cultural phenomenon with this next chart-topper. And for the record, I will not deny Eminem’s skills as a rapper, which are well on display here. This is hip-hop for the new millennium – sharp, slick and rapid-fire – making much of the rap that we covered in the eighties and nineties sound slow and antiquated.

And, even though this wasn’t his first chart hit, ‘The Real Slim Shady’ acts as the perfect introduction to Eminem. The beat is robust, if simple and repetitive, starting as the theme to a kid’s TV show gone wrong, ending with a slightly out-of-tune recorder coda, and peppered with lots of fairly juvenile sound effects. While the lyrics – which are what we’re all here for – are spat out with precision, and venom. Not a beat or a syllable is wasted, as this sleek, modern rap-bot veers from vulgar, to profound, to problematic, to funny, quickly marking off all the boxes in Eminem Bingo.

We’ll deal with the vulgarity first, as this is the most explicit number one single we’ve met yet. Aside from the actual swear words, we’ve got reference to clitorises, VD, Viagra and jerking off, and whom Christina Aguilera may or may not have given head to. Some of the cultural references haven’t aged too well, though: for example I don’t remember why or when Tom Green humped a dead moose. Profundity (of sorts) comes from the fact that Eminem anticipates the controversy that this song will cause, positions himself as a voice of the disenfranchised (the little guy at Burger King spitting on your onion rings), and encourages everyone to raise their middle fingers to the world.

The problematic bits, for me at least, are his making light of Tommy Lee’s domestic violence against Pamela Anderson, and his comparison of homosexuality to bestiality. Yes Eminem duetted with Elton John shortly after this, and has gone on to show that he’s probably not homophobic; but the lyrics are still there, ringing in this gay man’s ears as loudly as they did when he was a closeted fourteen-year-old. But then other parts of this record are undeniably funny, and the Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records, But I do, So fuck him, And fuck you too… line ranks as one of my all-time favourite chart-topping lyrics.

We have ten more of his number ones to get through, so plenty of time to dissect the many guises of Eminem. His music can be extremely unpleasant; but at the same time, to react to it with outrage is to give him exactly what he wants. This isn’t his best chart-topper, and I think its impact is now marred by the fact that we’ve had twenty-five years of similar schtick, and several (far less funny) comedy singles, from him down the years. But it does represent a moment in time when Slim Shady was becoming both the biggest star on the planet, and public enemy number one.

863. ‘Spinning Around’, by Kylie Minogue

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And she’s back. Forget Billie Piper, this is the pop comeback of the year 2000. Surely one of the biggest pop comebacks of all time?

Spinning Around, by Kylie Minogue (her 5th of seven #1s)

1 week, from 25th June – 2nd July 2000

Amazingly, it has been over a decade since Kylie’s last number one (‘Tears on My Pillow’ in January 1990), and almost six years six since her last Top 10 hit (1994’s ‘Confide in Me’). Since her debut in 1988, we’ve had ‘Neighbours’ Kylie, Pop Puppet Kylie, Creative Control Kylie, Indie Kylie… and then a couple of years of silence. Was that, everyone wondered, that?

As an unashamed Kylie fan, I’m glad about what ‘Spinning Around’ did for the Princess of Pop. It brought her back, set her up for a glorious, and so far never-ending, second act. She was still only in her early-thirties here, but quite often early-thirties might as well be early-eighties for a female pop star. It was truly impressive the way she returned, with an updated yet familiar, utterly-commercial-but-critically-respected sound, as if she’d never been away. But…

As far as ‘Spinning Around’ is concerned, I’ve always found it a bit basic. A bit Radio 2. A bit hen-night in a provincial town. It’s catchy, for sure, and it’s funky bassline and sparkly synths are more proof that we’re in the midst of a disco revival. I like the middle-eight – the Baby, baby, baby… bit – but the rest of the lyrics are a whole lot of nothing, vaguely themed around this song as a comeback. I’m spinning around, Move out of my way, I know you’re feelin’ me cause you like it like this…

And let’s be honest, as reluctant as I am to reduce Queen Kylie to a mere sexual object, the one thing everyone remembers about this record are the gold hotpants she wore while writhing around on a bar top in the video. (Hotpants that were allegedly bought for fifty pence in a market, and which have since been displayed at the V&A museum.)

So the best I’ll say for ‘Spinning Around’ is that it’s a perfectly serviceable pop song which did what it had to do. Kylie was back, back, back, and free to release better songs in the coming years. Of course there’s the colossal lead single from her next album, but even the Latin-tinged ‘Please Stay’ was a better track from later in 2000, while there’s also the industrial camp of ‘Your Disco Needs You’, which really should have been a single. Still, maybe it’s just me. ‘Spinning Around’ seems to be remembered fondly, and was the first in a run of sixteen straight Top 10 hits for Australia’s highest-selling act, lasting right through until 2008. It also earned Kylie enty to a very exclusive club – the #1s in three decades club, which at the time consisted only of Elvis, Cliff, the Bee Gees, Queen, Blondie and Madonna.

Cover Versions of #1s – Suede and Manic Street Preachers

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In 1992, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the UK Singles Chart, the NME released ‘Ruby Trax’: an album of forty cover versions of number one singles. It featured acts as diverse as Billy Bragg, Dannii Minogue, and the Jesus and Mary Chain, and it is a wonder. And something I shall be mining for all my upcoming ‘Cover Versions of #1s…’ posts.

Starting with two covers by two of the early nineties’ biggest alternative bands. November 1992 saw British rock on the verge of a big shift. The following May, Blur would release the first of their Britpop trilogy, ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’, shortly after the arrival of the eponymous debut LP from Suede.

Suede had only released two singles when they contributed this cover of the Pretenders’ ‘Brass in Pocket’ to ‘Ruby Trax’, but they were already darlings of the music press. ‘The Best New Band in Britain’ according to Melody Maker upon the release of their first single (and, in hindsight, probably the very first ‘Britpop’ single) ‘The Drowners’.

Their cover of ‘Brass in Pocket’, is a slow-burn, adding a layer of menace that the more upbeat, seize-the-day feel of the original lacks. Brett Anderson’s voice, though, has persuasive charm like Chrissie Hynde, albeit the persuasive charm of someone begging you for drugs at a party (note also the subtle lyrics changes that add some early-nineties edge). This cover wasn’t released as a single, but was included on a 2018 re-issue of Suede’s debut album.

The only single released from ‘Ruby Trax’ was by perhaps the hottest band in Britain in 1992: Manic Street Preachers. Their take on ‘Suicide is Painless’, AKA the theme from ‘M*A*S*H’, became the band’s first Top 10 hit, peaking at #7.

I’m reluctant to ever claim a cover version as ‘better’ than an original – can you ‘better’ something that isn’t your original work? – but I will say that the Manics’ version sounds much more how I imagine a song titled ‘Suicide Is Painless’ should sound. Despite the sombre topic, the light arrangment and the choral voices of the original theme mean it can’t help sounding like a TV show theme. Which, I’ll admit, was probably the point.

In the Manics’ hands, overwrought lyrics like The game of life is hard to play, I’m gonna lose it anyway… hit home. Even the clunky title line Suicide is painless, It brings on many changes… works. Just about. Of course, knowing now the widely-believed fate of Richey Edwards adds a very sad edge to the Manics singing a song about suicide. Here though, Edwards joins the band in bringing the song to a garage rock crescendo.

I hope you enjoyed these two covers, especially if they’re new to you. If anything, it’s been nice to break up the relentless pop and dance of the year 2000’s chart-toppers for a moment… A very brief moment. I’ll feature some more covers from ‘Ruby Trax’ later in the year.

862. ‘You See the Trouble With Me’, by Black Legend

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Our slow meander around the year 2000’s many, many chart-toppers continues, and we find another interesting stop along the road: the lost Barry White number one.

You See the Trouble With Me, by Black Legend (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 18th – 25th June 2000

First, we do have to state that it is not Barry White’s voice on this record, though vocalist Elroy ‘Spoonface’ Powell does a mighty fine impersonation. He even manages to make this sound like a live sample, introducing it with a spoken In 1975, we brought you an album, With a song… backed with lots of crowd noise.

Is it too early to suggest a mini disco revival, after Geri, Madison Avenue, and now this? (I’m also sneaking a peek at the record which replaced Black Legend at the top.) Though what dominates this record is not so much disco strings, but a naggingly insistent, thoroughly modern, house beat. On the radio edit the producers toy with us for the opening two minutes, teasing snatches of ‘You See the Trouble With Me’ (a #2 hit in 1976) that cut in and out, before finally letting ‘Barry White’ loose. For a bit. When the house beat kicks back in for the third or fourth time, it officially becomes annoying.

Barry White had refused the use of his original vocals for this remix, as he felt it ‘was cheap and had no soul’. I can understand his point, as the song uses the sample as bait, almost, to lure you to the dancefloor. The choppy nature of this song, the insistence on falling back on that irritating beat, means that there’s no release, no climax. You’re left with blue (disco) balls…

Black Legend were a very short-lived Italian production duo, with the aforementioned Powell on singing duties. They were together for three singles, and their only other appearance on the UK singles chart is with the #37 peaking ‘Somebody’. They fall agonisingly short of verified one-hit wonder status.

While I don’t much care for this remix, I am being won over by the year 2000’s fast turnover, which allowed curios like this to make number one, records that may not have made the top at any other period in chart history. Speaking of which, Black Legend are the first chart-toppers in a run of twelve one-weekers, from mid-June to mid-September 2000: a record-breaking stretch. Let the frantic fun begin!

861. ‘It Feels So Good’, by Sonique

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In a year packed with dance hits, here’s one of the best…

It Feels So Good, by Sonique (her 1st and only #1)

3 weeks, from 28th May – 18th June 2000

The strings; the husky, ominous vocals; the garage beat. It’s of its time, but also one of those hits that transcends its moment. Maybe it’s a sign of how pop music has lost its forward movement in the early years of this century, but ‘It Feels So Good’ sounds like it could be a hit from 2025. Plus, lines like You give me such a vibe, It’s totally bona fide… feel very much like how the young folk speak these days.

In my mind, I always imagined the chorus was autotuned, especially the It’s you I’m always thinking of… line. But listening now, I don’t think it is. It’s just very distinctively sung, in a very high key, oddly far back in Sonique’s throat. Hey, every hit needs a hook, even one that makes it sound like you’ve got a bad cold.

As with many dance tracks, my attention starts to wander in the second verse, which is more of the same. But I do like the lasering synths that become more prominent as the song progresses. Having said that it sounds very much of the year 2000, it turns out that ‘It Feels So Good’ was almost two years old by the time it made #1, having reached #24 on its original release in December 1998. Interestingly, given that the US is usually quite resistant to European EDM, it was the song’s success stateside (where it eventually made #8) that prompted the re-release.

Sonia Marina Clarke, AKA Sonique, had been active in the music biz since the early eighties, when she had formed a reggae band, and had released her debut solo single in 1985. She had also worked with S’Express, though joined after ‘Theme from S’Express’ had topped the charts. She had two other Top 10s – ‘Sky’ and ‘I Put a Spell on You’ – which tread much the same territory as this single without being as good. She still records, and DJs, and played Glastonbury just last year.

‘It Feels So Good’ is also noteworthy due to being the joint longest-running number one of 2000, with a grand total of three weeks at the top. I feel I should also note how darn basic the title is. ‘It Feels So Good’ rivals ‘I Love You’ (#1 for Cliff and the Shadows in 1961, chart fans) for simplicity. Just drop the ‘It’, I think, and things become much cooler. But what do I know? It’s not as if proper sentence structure hampered this record’s success…

860. ‘Day and Night’, by Billie Piper

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The biggest pop comeback of the new millennium. Step aside Madonna, All Saints, Oasis, and Britney… It’s Billie. Piper.

Day and Night, by Billie Piper (her 3rd and final #1)

1 week, from 21st – 28th May 2000

She’s added a surname, as well as beefing up her sound. While her team may, just may, have been listening to Ms Spears. And perhaps a bit of Backstreet Boys too… Okay, in fairness this is a pretty wholesale ripping off of that big-chords, big-chorus Max Martin sound. It is the female version of ‘Backstreet’s Back’. I did check to see if Martin had been involved here, but no. ‘Day and Night’ was written by English songwriter Eliot Kennedy, as well as two members of Dead or Alive, and produced by Stargate, who will become one of the biggest names in ‘00s pop. (And who are from Norway, so there is a Scandinavian influence after all…)

So, yes, this is a lot more muscular, a lot more mature, a lot more internationally appealing, than Billie’s two teeny bopping hits from 1998. The beat is chunky, the production slick, and the chorus lands like a big slab of granite. But despite all this I’m finding it fairly forgettable. Twenty-five years on I vaguely remembered the chorus; and after listening to it three times in succession I still only vaguely remember it. Compare it with ‘Oops!… I Did It Again’, a song it longs to be but that it falls far short of matching.

This track is also, inadvertently, evidence for the defence in the ‘Britney can’t sing’ case. Billie performs this competently, but her voice also sounds a little stretched. Brit could have sung this in her sleep. It also goes to show that while people may write off all pop music like this as disposable, it’s actually quite hard to locate that hidden ingredient which promotes a song from ‘decently catchy’ to ‘proper classic’.

The video is going for an ‘all grown up’ message (bear in mind she was still just seventeen when this made #1), with Billie and her friends partying in some sort of damp, underground garage. And a laundrette. This video debuted, according to Wikipedia, on 9th March, well over two months before the single was actually released, which gives another glimpse into why the turn-of-the-century charts were so fast-moving.            

Billie released two further singles from this, her second LP. By the summer of 2001 she had announced her retirement from music in order to focus on her acting career. And a pretty successful acting career it has been, twenty years in. She’s most famous for her role as Rose Tyler on ‘Doctor Who’, but has starred on both stage and screen without ever being tempted back into the recording studio. No matter, to a generation of Brits rapidly approaching their forties, the name Billie Piper will always bring to mind ‘Because We Want To’s chanty chorus, and some low cut jeans.