Into 2001 we go… Picture the scene: it’s January, the Christmas decorations are down, the weather’s shit… Time for some Random Dance.

Touch Me, by Rui da Silva ft. Cassandra (their 1^st and only #1s)

1 week, from 7^th – 14^th January 2001

I mean, why not? Now’s as good a time as any, and ‘Touch Me’ does have a cold, wintry feel to it. This is moody dance, made for mixing deep into a set at around two thirty in the morning. It’s not a grab-your-handbags floor-filler. I remembered the hook – Touch me in the morning, And last thing at night… – but little else about it.

What this reminds me of is that around the time this charted I was preparing for my Standard Grades (GCSEs to the rest of Britain), and in our art class we were allowed to have the radio on as we worked on our final projects. I can’t say for sure if ‘Touch Me’ was played often, but it’s the sort of thing that would have done. (We were also allowed to bring in snacks, which was even more of a treat than the radio).

I’m taking detours down memory lane not only because it’s fun, but because I can’t think of much to write about this record. It’s alright for what it is, which is not my type of thing. There’s not much to get your teeth into, really (unlike the fruit pastilles I was launching down my gullet in art class). It’s more of a vibe, a mood, than a melody and a hook. It’s technically ‘progressive house’, the first record of its kind to be a number one single, and I can see that. It’s more layered, more cerebral perhaps, than most dance records.

It’s also the first ever UK chart-topper by a Portuguese act, DJ Rui da Silva hailing from Lisbon. Vocalist Cassandra Fox, meanwhile, wrote the lyrics and became the third youngest woman to debut at #1, after Billie Piper and Britney Spears. Her voice has a nice throaty rasp well beyond her eighteen years. And actually, if we’re being pernickety, it this song, and not ‘The Masses Against the Classes’, which is technically the first number one of the new millennium.

So there are some stories here, just not necessarily within the song itself. Still, ‘Touch Me’ still seems to be well-respected in dance music circles. Meanwhile, the Guardian has claimed it to be both the ‘most forgotten number one of the decade’, and the 70^th greatest UK number one single of all time.

Either an official video was never made, or has never been uploaded to YouTube.