Gabrielle - Rise

2 Weeks at #1 [05/02/2000]

Gabrielle was a strange sort of pop star. She already had a #1 single prior to this one; way back in 1993 with her debut single 'Dreams'. After that she scored some other big hits, notable If You Ever, a #2 hit duetting with East 17, and the lovely, understated 'Give Me A Little More Time' which took up semi-permanent position in the top 40 in 1996. But for some reason she never had the profile or album sales of the likes of her contemporary Dina Carroll, who sold millions of albums at around the same time only to vanish competely by the end of the decade. Nor did she have the critical respect of, say, Beverley Knight. She seemed to pop up every few years, score a few mid-table singles coupled with respectable but unexceptional album sales, the vanish.

History looked set to repeat itself when she launched her third album campaign in 1999 with 'Sunshine', the archetypical Gabrielle hit. Sweet, radio friendly and straight in at #9. Around this time she received some unpleasant press attention after her former partner and the father of her child was jailed for life after stabbing his step-father to death with a machete. With Rise Gabrielle addresses the difficulties she has faced with lyrics which are affectingly direct ("Look at my life, look at my heart, I have seen them fall apart..."). Aided by a familiar sample from Bob Dylan's 'Knockin' On Heavens Door', it caught on with the public in a way that no song since her debut really had, and dutifully shot to #1 for a fortnight. Gabrielle finally had her moment, in addition to one of the most graceful hits of the decade. The album of the same title sold millions, and for the next two years she was a seemingly inescapable radio staple. Some of the follow up hits were great (Out Of Reach, the underrated Should I Stay) others have dated terribly (Try listening to 'When A Woman' in the cold light of 2010 without cringing). Her musical style hasn't changed much and with age she's fallen out of Radio 1 fashion and hasn't troubled the singles charts for some years, but she remains a popular live drawer and her albums still sell in decent numbers. Shola Ama and Dina Carroll can only look on and sigh for what might have been.

9

Britney Spears - Born To Make You Happy

1 Week at #1 [29/01/2000]

Britney Spears may well end up as the pop singer who truly defines the 00s, despite her signature hit having been released in 1999. This single was her fourth and final release from the '...Baby One More Time' album and her second UK #1. It's quite unusual for a fourth single from a big-selling pop release to out-chart the singles which preceded it (Sometimes and (You Drive Me) Crazy having peaked at #3 and #5 respectively in 1999). The still-slow January release schedules probably helped this to sneak in a week at #1, but to my mind it's also one of her best early singles.

What really strikes when listening to the early Britney records is how much harder she appears to be trying. She was never much of a singer, and even here she relies heavily on the meaty production and the prominent backing vocals which threaten to drown her out on the chorus. But she sounds reasonably invested in the hallmark-sentiment of the lyric (which surely caused much irritation to pop-culture conscious feminists) and she hasn't yet developed that strange hiccoughing drawl which seems to have replaced the effort of actual singing on her subsequent records.

I like the song a lot. It's fairly typical of the shiny Swedish-produced pop sound of the turn of the century, and by no means the classic that ...Baby One More Time is. But in the canon of Britney's 'lesser' singles it stands out as an immaculately produced little gem. It's one of those songs that would be all but forgotten in her repetoire if it hadn't been a chart topper, so I'm glad it had it's moment.

8

Manic Street Preachers - The Masses Against The Classes

1 Week at #1 [22/01/2000]

An unusual yet strangely portentous record holds the distinction of being the first new chart topper of the 00s. The 90s drew to a close to the underwhelming sound of Westlife and their typically bloodless covers of ABBA's 'I Have A Dream' (Pre-empting the massive ABBA revival which would occur at the end of the decade) and Terry Jacks' maudlin death fantasy 'Seasons In The Sun' which was given a particularly bizarre reading by the Westlife hit machine, they sound so chipper during the key change of this deathbed lyric that one suspects they either have a sly sense of irony, or that they didn't actually understand what they were singing about.

But enough about them, they have more than enough bona-fide 00s number ones for me to grind my axe against later. The Manic Street Preachers kicked off the decade with their second and to date final number one on the UK charts. Unlike the first (1998's If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next) this song does not seem to have endured as one of their most memorable hits. Indeed, as a casual fan of the band and an avowed chart watcher, even I had to remind myself how it actually went before writing this.

The reason for this is that it was released as a limited edition, deleted on the first week of release and not included on any MSP studio album until their Greatest Hits collection was released two years later. As a result their ever-loyal fanbase rushed out and bought it in large numbers and it bowed comfortably at #1, only to plummet out of the top forty within four weeks. (1-4-20-39-57)

The song itself was a bit of a break from the Manics increasingly MOR form, a guitar heavy and aggressive track which definitely didn't have the commercial appeal of their classic hits, but probably appeased their original fanbase who bemoaned their softening with age and multi-platinum record sales. Fanbase number ones were a bit of a rarity at the time, with single sales still fairly bouyant meaning a song needed at fair bit of mainstream appeal to claim the biggest selling CD of the week. Of course as single sales reached their nadir towards the middle of the decade, un-memorable 'fanbase' number ones became increasingly common, so the Manics were a little ahead of their time in that sense. (Although Iron Maiden and U2 are two acts who had managed it previously with similar limited release tactics).

Not a song likely to define the 00s for anybody, unless you were a really hardcore MSPs fan, but a nice enough oddity. Play this to 9/10 people and they won't have a clue what it is, let alone that it was a number one hit. I can't really remember hearing it on the radio much at the time, and I've never involuntarily heard it since.

As for the Manics themselves, this marked the beginning of the end of their multi-platinum heyday. Their 2001 album 'Know Your Enemy' spawned a few top ten hits but was something of a sales disappointment and after that they slipped quietly into middle aged fanbase comfort, typified by high opening chart positions and fast drops out of the top forty. In the dark sales days of 2004 and 2005 they scored a pair of #2 hits which lasted just two top forty weeks apiece! I couldn't hum either of them...
They did however achieve a surprise hit in 2007 with the infectious 'Your Love Alone Is Not Enough', featuring a guest vocal by the gorgeous Nina Persson of Swedish hipsters The Cardigans, although it proved more of a last hoorah than a lasting comeback as nothing they've released subsequently has really done much.

5

Note: The number two record this week was another new entry, 'You Know What's Up' by Donnell Jones. A smooth RnB record, it is probably significantly better remembered than the number one, it lasted on the charts a fair bit longer, although Donnell himself never troubled the upper reaches of the charts again. It featured a rap by Lisa 'Left Eye' Lopes of TLC, one of her final chart entries before her tragic death in a car accident in 2002.

Noughties Nostalgia: A Mission Statement

Hello and welcome to my first attempt at blogging. The purpose of this blog is quite simple. As a twenty-three year old in 2009 I am roughly the perfect age to be able to claim the first decade of the new millenium as the encapsulation of my formative years. I entered the decade as a new teenager and will end it staring into the harsh glare of my mid-twenties and final, irrefutable adulthood.

Throughout this decade pop music and the UK pop charts have been a primary focal point of my life. For much of this decade I bought at least one CD single every week. As we exit the decade the inexorable rise of Itunes and illegal downloading has rendered the plucky little CD single a dead format, apologetically stocked in a dark corner of the few remaining HMV stores hoping to make a profit from the hardcore fanboys and the hopelessly technologically inept. This has not been an overnight process. Some say we are living in the final death throes of the entire music industry as we know it. Certainly, the dearth of quality music television for pop fans since the demise of Top Of The Pops and CD:UK means that fewer people than ever could actually tell you what the number one single is at the moment, let alone recite the entire top ten in order, as I was capable of doing in any given week for the majority of this decade.

So if this is the end of the charts as we know it, let me at least attempt to preserve my own little obituary of the decade of my youth. In this blog I am going to review every number one single from January 2000 until December 2009. From X Factor to Oasis, Bob The Builder to Blu Cantrell, all will be given a nice little write up and my own personal mark out of ten. None of this is definitive, just the meaningless opinion of a dying breed of pop geek.

Hope you're interested. Please do feel free to comment.