Gezza
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Post by Gezza on Feb 21, 2012 20:41:25 GMT 1
1ST APRIL- THE TIME IS NOW- Moloko (1 wk)As the Foo Fighters sang "I got another confession to make", this kinda passed me by at the time, but over the years I have come to LOVE this song. Sublime, sophisticated piece of pop, full of longing and latent desire with a lush piece of orchestration bubbling beneath the surface which erupts at regular intervals, serving only to re-inforce its lyrical theme. The overplayed "Sing It Back" from 1999 was probably a victim of timing, I recall it being played for a good 2 months before it bacame available and it had it been released a month earlier I'm convinced it would probably gone to No 1, but not to worry I get to review this song instead. Murphy's vocals are touch helium- esque on this but it's all so beautifully delivered we can glaze over that, in fact it reflects the songs emotional core to a tee, fragile, filled with thrill and excitement. Themes of carpe diem, emotional exhaustion, and obsession abound, it's a song that attempts to leap through the boundaries of ordinary everyday life and almost describe something ethereal, the emotional static that exists before the declaration of love before all is known. Now that all sounds rather grand I grant you but this is really a very rich song in meaning as well as in production, I recommend it without hesitation.
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Gezza
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Post by Gezza on Feb 21, 2012 20:51:27 GMT 1
15TH APRIL- FLOWERS- Sweet Female Attitude (1 wk)From such dizzy heights we come down with a bump with this. The only top 40 hit for this female garage duo. It isn't the worst song recorded but it gets very annoying, very quickly, and in the charts of 2000 which were full of this kind of thing it proved popular but as with all things so typical of a zeitgeist it has aged badly. Full of vocal gimmickery it struggles to rise above the melee whcih is 2000 really and but for nostalgia I can honestly say I haven't listened to this since it was in the charts, listen if you will but I can promise you it won't be worth you're while.
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borneoman
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Post by borneoman on Feb 21, 2012 21:31:40 GMT 1
love Moloko, prefer Sing it Back but The Time is Now is class too!!!!
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TheThorne
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Post by TheThorne on Feb 21, 2012 21:34:53 GMT 1
Sweet F A describes the number of people who remember them!!! yeh and what Borneo said
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Feb 21, 2012 21:51:53 GMT 1
That's ironic given that SFA are only about the third song in this thread I remember. Good vocalists.
Don't remember Moloko getting that high. "Sing It Back" was far better - and their earlier noirish stuff exponentially so.
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borneoman
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love is tough, when enough is not enough
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Post by borneoman on Feb 21, 2012 21:55:16 GMT 1
Moloko got a bit 'tame' cos their earlier stuff was more experimental, loved their debut album and songs like Fun For Me.
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Post by Earl Purple on Feb 23, 2012 1:22:17 GMT 1
Just looked up Moloko and see it got into my chart but am not sure how high, as I looked it up in the chart of the decade, where it finished in the 4000s so it probably wasn't a particularly big hit in my chart. Of course that one interests me because it entered the chart on 26 March 2000. I have no idea, by the way, what kept it out of #1.
I know it's a bit silly but I was a bit p*ssed off at the time that the only SFA to get a top 10 hit was the one in this topic, and not the Welsh band who had lots of hits.
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Post by andrew07 on Feb 23, 2012 2:40:09 GMT 1
I know it's a bit silly but I was a bit p*ssed off at the time that the only SFA to get a top 10 hit was the one in this topic, and not the Welsh band who had lots of hits. Yeah, I know how you feel, I even bought both the Furries "Northern Lites" (#11, 1999) and "Juxtapozed With U" (#14, 2001) singles in the weeks that they came out, and I was convinced either would give them a top ten hit, especially the latter as it had more airplay than anything else they put out but was stunned that it missed out. Definitely one of my fave bands ever, and I really liked Gruff's most recent album too.
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Gezza
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Post by Gezza on Feb 23, 2012 21:34:27 GMT 1
3RD JUNE- REACH- S Club 7 (3 Wks)EVERYTHING about this record should make me love it, and I can't. "Reach" to me seems rather a shallow creation, hammy, and cheap in places with rather flat vocals, and I know lots of people love it, hey it hung around at No 2 for three weeks in the summer of 2000 (no mean feat given the high turnover) and was a big hit on both radio and a million gay clubs (approx figure) but it still leaves me cold. Prior efforts like "Bring It All Back" were supurb and dazzling bits of pop (albeit manufactured) but here they sound like they are singing and smiling through the almost unbareable pain of the song. Maybe that's it- I just don't believe that they believe in the song, it's a catchy song no doubt, and smoothly produced it's like all the technical angles of the pop single are there and the marketing is excellent, but the product is just unloved by the band. I've always felt this way about the song and it does actually make me quite sad, even the fair hand of Cathy Dennis can't save it and normally she could do no wrong certainly in the early 00s....hey ho.
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Gezza
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Post by Gezza on Feb 23, 2012 22:07:04 GMT 1
8TH JULY- GOTTA TELL YOU- Samantha Mumba (1 wk)Now I loved this back in the day (yes I bought it), I recall my excitement when I discovered thanks to teletext that it was midweek No 1, and my surprise when the charts were announced on Sunday that it had failed. Sad times. There's nothing that remarkable about the song, girl declairing her love for a guy, but it's quite an innocent pop song, one that you suspect just 12 years later would be out of place and almost niave in today's climate and that's the charm. Sometimes pop tries to be too clever for it's own good and to produce a good solid piece of pop lasts longer than most of the "trendier" hits of the day- a few of which we'll see later on in the thread- hats off to Mumba, god bless her!
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borneoman
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Post by borneoman on Feb 23, 2012 22:14:36 GMT 1
I also bought the Samantha Mumba song!!! Was pretty catchy where did she go??
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Paul
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Post by Paul on Feb 26, 2012 11:03:10 GMT 1
I also bought the Samantha Mumba song!!! Was pretty catchy where did she go?? Now, the answer to that question is definitely something to do with heroin
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borneoman
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Post by borneoman on Feb 27, 2012 13:30:04 GMT 1
really? she went into drugs and all??? sad face
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Gezza
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Post by Gezza on Feb 28, 2012 18:48:17 GMT 1
really? she went into drugs and all??? sad face I dunno about that but she tried to revive her music career, did some modelling (not that kind!) and went on "dancing on ice"- she's married now and lives in the states.
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Gezza
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Post by Gezza on Feb 28, 2012 19:14:37 GMT 1
5TH AUGUST- FREESTYLER- Bomfunk MC's (1 wk)Believe it or not, Finland had been a country not represented on a top 10 hit before 2000! It wasn't actually Bomfunk Mc's who broke that record but Darude some weeks before, but here we are with the first Finnish No 2 hit ever! Most chart followers would struggle to recall anything by this lot other than "Freestyler" which seems to be much more fondly recalled now that it ever was for a long time after its release, yet I suppose its easier to be kinder about acts that never outstayed their welcome. In a summer of Craig David (who held this off No 1) 2000 proved to be a golden year for dance and urban music, or at least it seems like it now, this song however I never classed as a favourite and personally nothing takes me back to 2k better than Spiller or Fragma for my sins. Yes I was a skint student who literally down to the last £15 of my overdraft when I landed my first full time job (I worked before but always in the knowledge I'd return to studentdom sooner or later) and with earnt money I pretty much spent at least 3 or 4 nights a week out boozing in Brighton (one of the best places to be in the summer I can assure you), anyway I know I'm rambling but the point is that the hits of 2000 always take me back to a great time in my life even if I wasn't that big a fan of them, so I can't be too harsh of Bomfunk Mc's- they got lucky with timing!
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Gezza
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Post by Gezza on Feb 28, 2012 19:33:37 GMT 1
26TH AUGUST- OUT OF YOUR MIND- Truesteppers and Dane Bowers Featuring Victoria Beckham (1 wk)Where to start with this one? Well she's only credited as a featured artist but let's be honest this is only in this thread as it featured Beckham. With a blaze of publicity not seen since the launch of Halliwell's solo career Beckham literally appeared everywhere in the weeks preceeding the release of this song, including a high profile performance with a clip-on lip ring and mimed track at the Radio One roadshow the week this song came out. All in all you can't fault her for trying, stories even circulated that she and David were snapping up copies themselves. True or not the track sold over 180k in its first 6 days comfortably the biggest sale of any No 2 hit that year outside of the Christmas weeks. Though leading all the way right up until Saturday it failed to pip Spiller to No 1, she was even announced as No 1 on "CD:UK" the most famous instance of the programme being wrong on that front. What undid Beckham was the love-hate relationship she had with the press, whilst fascinated by the couple the coverage had been reported in such a way as to infere an air of desperation about the whole affair, Posh sitting at home constantly thinking of ways to get herself exposure to get a chart topping single, it was all quite, well, not British! Only by 2000 (chartwise) that's exactly what it had become about, top 10 hits were seen as failures and record companies seemed to be in cahoots about release schedules so that they could effectively "manage" the No 1 single between them, perhaps that's why, as the week wore on, more and more of us seemed to go to "team Spiller". Anyway the record isn't the worst ever made and neither is it the best, it wouldn't have looked out of place in the pantheon of chart toppers for that year fusing dance and garage together at the hands of the Trusteppers who had scored their first top 10 hit earlier that year with Dane Bowers (again) who was fresh from Another Level, but as we've said they aren't the star here. Take the fact that this IS Victoria Beckham out of the occasion and it's a reasonable low top 10 hit probably which would be largely forgotten by now, so perhaps fame (or notoriety) really is enough to get yourself remembered, well this is the decade of "Heat" after all.
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Gezza
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Post by Gezza on Feb 29, 2012 19:56:11 GMT 1
16TH SEPTEMBER- SKY- Sonique (1 wk)Sometimes you have to go abroad before the homeland finally gives you some recognition, that's the story here. "It Feels So Good" had barely scraped the top 40 back in 1998 when it was released and barely registered on the public consciousness for the former S Express member, but US success was around the corner as the track emerged from the clubs to make No 8 in early 2000. That was enough to prompt to a re-release and the single became the 3rd best seller of the year, and this is naturally the follow up. With some penmanship from Rick Nowels ("Heaven Is A Place On Earth", "White Flag", "Life Is A Rollercoaster") she seems hell bent on that second chart topper and basically rehashed her previous hit into this one. It isn't bad but I suspect the great majority of the UK public would struggle to hum the tune to this and it plummeted quite quickly out of the charts. It's interesting however that whilst the tally of No 1's in 2000 was famously the highest ever (42) this is only the 12th No 2 of the year and we're in September already, explained obviously by the amount fo records that were falling to the position.
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Gezza
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Post by Gezza on Feb 29, 2012 20:19:47 GMT 1
23RD SEPTEMBER- ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS- Kylie Minogue (1 wk)Part of being the kind of popstar that Minogue is is to look constantly on trend, to always be NOW. She'd been slipping for most of the late 90s, as she went indie in the wake of Britpop, teh charts went pure pop, by rights her natural stomping ground. She should have been back in this thread by 98/99 at the latest but the discovery of some gold lame hotpants had turned her career around and in the camp disco of "Spinning Around" she finally gave the public what the public wanted from a Kylie Minogue record. Whether she was returning to the fold or accepting the puublic limitations on what they wanted from her is kind of irrelevant now but I recall how nice it was to have Minogue back in 2000 as the Kylie we loved. "On A Night Like This" is a cover of a Pandora record from 1999 that never troubled the charts here but was turned into some sophisticated dance music and was geared at relaunching Kylie as not only a relevant popstar but one that was once again soemthing both exclusive and accessable, the innocent aussie who found herself in a Versace dress driving through Monte Carlo and apeing Sharon Stone's role in "Casino" which the video losely takes as its inspiration. Good as the record is (within the confines of pop circa 2000) the main draw here is the appearance of "Your Disco Needs You" on the CD which was played TO DEATH in the clubs at the time, Minogue ramping up the camp-o-meter to a 10 and delivering a kind of thank you to the gay audience who kept her in sustinance through the lean years. Her relaunch was however was therefore aimed at the teen market/ FHM audience who had either forgotten about her or were too young to remember 10 years ago, this is SEXY Kylie, backless dresses and a touch of nudity, when people talk about successful comebacks they often forget Minogue circa 2000, what's truly remarkable is that she returned with more or less exactly the same thing as she was doing 10 years before. Putting production techniques to one side this could be a track from 1991 sitting nicely with "What Do I Have To Do" or "Shocked"- oh yes it was like she'd never been gone.
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borneoman
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Post by borneoman on Feb 29, 2012 22:35:25 GMT 1
kinda like the last 3!!!!! Would have preferred Out of My Mind with anyone but Victoria but not bad song... I disagree in regards of Sky being unmemorable I loooove the song!!! ok, it's not as good as It Feels So good but I think it charted on merit Didn't know the Kylie song was a cover/rescue of a flop was also very happy to have Kylie back to pop!!!!
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vastar iner
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Post by vastar iner on Feb 29, 2012 23:15:37 GMT 1
Don't remember either record, "Sky" sounds like it started in 1978 and then moved into 1992. The sort of record you'd expect to peak at around number 18. Not bad, indeed a lot better than her number one, and exponentially better than most number ones of this millennium.
The Minogue record is basically a formula computer game track with flat as a fart vocals. I'd be embarrassed to put my name to a song in which my only creative input was to make something bad even worse. Then again I'm not a fame whore.
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