The first thing that hits your ears with our next number one is the pre-set drumbeat, and synthy organs. It sounds cheap. And ‘cheap’ sets the perfect tone for one of the new millennium’s biggest ballads, and one of its biggest girl groups.

Whole Again, by Atomic Kitten (their 1^st of three #1s)

4 weeks, from 4^th February – 4^th March 2001

If the Spice Girls were the group you’d like to have hung out with, and All Saints were the group you were terrified of running into in the corridor; Atomic Kitten were the group that would happily nick you a packet of fags from the Spar as long as you let them keep a couple. Kerry, Liz, and Tash, three likely scouse lasses.

If that sounds a bit snobby; I don’t mean it to. I imagine it was a big part of their appeal, and their success. They genuinely looked like girls from your school. They weren’t the best singers, they weren’t glamour models, and the production on their songs was largely cheap and largely cheerful. You could argue that they were to pop music what Limp Bizkit, the act they knocked off top spot, were to rock. (Though both acts, I will argue, do have brilliant names.)

I will also contest that ‘Whole Again’ is a great pop ballad, with an almost cynically heart-tugging chord progression, and a retro feel (especially in the spoken word middle-eight). If it had had a bit more money thrown at it, if it had come within five hundred metres of an actual musical instrument, and been sung by someone like Gabrielle, it would be regarded as a true classic. But it is let down by not having all of the above, and is now just a nostalgic classic, and not a song you hear all that often anymore. (Unless of course when it’s being re-written in tribute to Gareth Southgate…)

Yet, it managed to become huge. It stayed at number one for a full month, the longest stay of the millennium so far, increasing in sales for each of those four weeks. It became the 2000’s 13^th highest-selling single, and Britain’s 4^th biggest girl group single of all time, behind ‘Wannabe’, ‘2 Become 1’, and ‘Never Ever’. And maybe this success was exactly because it sounds so of its time: the ballad that came along in the right place, at the right time, and will forever be rooted in the winter of 2000-2001.

I actually remember hearing ‘Whole Again’ for the first time, probably the week before it went to number one. We were snowed in from school, and I saw the video on GMTV or something. And I remember thinking that it sounded like a massive hit. (I also remember the first time I heard one other #1 from 2001, and it is one of the three songs from this year to outsell ‘Whole Again’…)

This was actually Atomic Kitten’s last roll of the dice, as they were on the verge of being dropped from their record label and consigned to the girl group dustbin had ‘Whole Again’ not been a hit. Adding to their difficulties was the fact that Kerry Katona had quit the group a couple of weeks before this was released, and her parts hastily re-recorded by replacement Jenny Frost.

Still, it mattered not. The record was huge, launching Atomic Kitten Mk II, and bringing about several years’ worth of hits, including two more number ones that we we’ll get to in due course. Without giving too much away, both those chart-toppers are fairly crap, but I would argue for the quality of their earlier Mk I hits, ‘See Ya’ and ‘I Want Your Love’: catchy and experimental, the kooky brainchildren of OMD’s Andy McCluskey and Stuart Kershaw, who had created the group.