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1999 Westlife: I Have A Dream/Seasons In The Sun

I wonder what sort of Christmas they have over at the Westlife place? Is it all day party of food, drink, fun and good times, or do they sit around the table, crackers unpulled and turkey uneaten, stressing about all those worse off and remembering all the low points of the year just gone? Evidence tends toward the latter - there's never much of the easy going about Westlife's singles to date and this Christmas number one double A side isn't bucking any trends on that front.

Originally a number 2 hit for Abba in 1979 , 'I Have A Dream' was never a 'Christmas song' per se, but its sleighride jaunt and lyrics about angels meant there was no need to quibble over small change; it was festive enough. Unfortunately, the light and breezy melody that made it so sounds rather less so after Westlife transfuse a ton of their readymix into its veins. True to form, their heavy handedness creates a Frankenstein's monster of a song that kills, crushes and destroys the fragile delight of the Abba original by replacing its slippers with hobnail boots which it proceeds to stomp around in. By the time the choir of kids appears at the climax, the whole thing has stumbled off the edge of a cliff into the rollers below where, being as indestructible as nuclear waste, it keeps on singing until the tide carries it out of earshot.

'Seasons In The Sun' could never be classed as a 'Christmas song' no matter which way you cut it, and coupling Abba's song of hope with Brel and McKuen's deathbed reminisces makes for an odd pairing at any time of the year, let alone Christmas.* At least now the "Goodbye my friend it's hard to die" gave the boys something suitably grim to sink their serious teeth into, and they do with aplomb, but 'Seasons In The Sun' is a song written for one voice and by breaking it up so that each of the quintet gets a turn then it defuses the 'message' of the lyric until it becomes a Chinese whisper, shorn of its emotional charge by a confidence totally absent from the quivering longing of Terry Jacks' original which made it such a delight/horror (take your pick on that one). But whatever, even Scrooge would think twice about giving this a spin on Christmas morning.


* In order to provide some linking narrative, both tracks are shot through with a good blast of a penny whistle. No doubt it was meant to remind us where these boys hail from, but it's sheen is as authentically Irish as an O'Neils bar in Cardiff.

1999 Cliff Richard: The Millennium Prayer

I've recently bought 'This May Be My Last Time Singing', a compilation of African-American independent gospel singles, released privately between 1957-1982 and performed by non professionals. This won't come as too much of a surprise for regular readers who will be aware of my long standing passion for gospel music, and I'm happy to report that it's marvellous. All of it. A stand out track for me though is 'On The Right Road Now', recorded by the Crump Brothers in 1968 and sees vocalist M Crump (no other name is given) hollering out how he looks forward to the day when every day will be Sunday.

This stands out on two counts; firstly, by virtue of the sheer joy and evangelical desire to spread the good news that fires the man's voice in a way that even manages to inspire a lifelong atheist like me, and secondly by the fact that Mr Crump is able to get me to derive pleasure from a proposal that, in some ways, is one of my worst nightmares. Maybe a song advocating swallowing live spiders would give me more of the creeps, but not that many - you see I simply can't imagine anything much worse than a world where every day is Sunday. Dear me no.

I think a lot of this stems from my childhood where every Sunday afternoon, the local church down the road would ring its single bell at 5pm for fifteen minutes. Ostensibly to call the faithful to prayer, all I heard was the tolling of the end of the weekend and each ring fired a hollow point bullet into the joy that once was Saturday. BONG! Time to come in from playing with my mates. BONG! Time for a bath. BONG! Time for Last Of The Summer Wine on TV. BONG! Time for bed ready for school next day. Brrrrrrrr - that bell sucked lifelessness of the day the way a naked flame burns oxygen and the feeling of inevitable helplessness has never left me, meaning every Sunday since comes with its own black and white tinted minor miseries.

Why am I telling you this? Well, it's mainly because I want to be upfront about my inbuilt prejudices and to show, on one hand, what a fine job those Crump Brothers were doing within the medium to get me to overcome them and to listen to what they're saying - I don't believe in Fascism either, but I can't imagine any act could dress up a song with a message of white supremacy in a way that would let me give it the time of day. On the other hand though, it also demonstrates what a poor job they were doing after all; for all Mr Crump's enthusiasm, he moves me not one step closer to his God. Yet at the same time, and somewhere in the middle of both of these reactions, it can't be said either that his message is falling on deaf ears; I can draw sufficient secular inspiration from his own zeal the same way I can draw it from all the best gospel. It's why I listen to it after all. And further, it neatly illustrates why I don't listen to Cliff and his Millennium Prayer.

Basically is a marriage of the 'lyrics' of The Lord's Prayer to an overcooked rendition of 'Auld Lang Syne' as musical backing ('Living Doll' it ain't), Richard's voice solemnly quivers like a plucked string with the enormity of the lyric he's been called on to deliver. This is no time for any light-hearted banter about mistletoe and wine, this is serious, end of the Millennium territory, and yet rather than recite the message as blank verse, Cliff falls between the stools of song and sermon and goes for the pop bait by trying to force the lines into a tune and rhyme of sorts as they crawl over a rousing drum tattoo to march the Christian soldiers onward into the coming Millennium.

Sincerity isn't the problem here; Cliff is no less sincere than the Crump Brothers were; he's just a whole lot less enjoyable. You see, outside of the already converted, his sincerity is neither infectious nor contagious. It's not inspiring either - Richard wasn't the first to record a version of the Lord's Prayer,* but he surely serves up the worst with his dullard thud of showbiz schmaltz dressed up as populist religiosity covering fascistic evangelism as Cliff in his own way wishes every day of the new Millennium could be Sunday too, whether the rest of us want it or not - this is THE Millennium prayer don't forget.

But in trying to do God's work on earth, he's succeeded only in raising hell in a truly awful concoction that really does not make me wish that everyday was like Sunday** and its success must surely have fed on new Millennium fears and some subliminal desire to appease the gods into not delivering earthquakes, plague, and the catastrophic destruction of the world via the vague notion of a Millennium Bug waiting in the wings to wreck havoc as soon as the clock chimed midnight on New Year's Eve. That's how I rationalise it anyway. But maybe it's simply a logical and fitting (almost) end to a year that, in terms of number ones, has been pretty bloody poor. Cliff's Christmas songs would get a hell of a lot lighter after this, but there would be no more number ones. I'd like to think even God knew when enough was enough.


* For a whistle stop tour, check out the Nina Hagen and Siouxise and the Banshees versions for punky irreverence that aim for controversy but are no less dull in their own way. Mario Lanzo managed to wring some melody from the lines without the need for a sing song tune, but for a showstopping version that has all the inspirational passion of of any gospel song, then check out Mahalia Jackson's paint stripping take at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Cliff was clearly taking no notes.

** Then again, Wizzard never made me wish it was Christmas every day either.

1999 Wamdue Project: King Of My Castle

Wamdue Project was an alias of American producer Chris Brann and 'King Of My Castle' is a house remix of an ambient dance track originally released in 1997. This remix tightens it up to a defined percussive thump and walking bassline to secure its house credentials but all I ever hear is Daft Punk in callipers, an 'Around The World' with a once flexible vertebrae fixed with titanium pins that make it all a lot less fun than it could have been. This was a popular enough track to warrant a re-release and remix in 2009, but whatever caught the clubber's ear back then simply isn't catching mine now.

1999 Robbie Williams: She's The One/It's Only Us

A double A side, 'She's The One' was originally written and recorded by World Party in 1997. On this, Williams takes the unusual step of not only borrowing writer Karl Wallinger's song and arrangement, but of also copying his own style of vocal. But whereas Wallinger's husky strain comes naturally, Williams' attempt at heartfelt means his trademark cheeky persona and charm is banished to the dug out for the duration to leave him sounding like Neil Young on bad news day. And while none of this detracts from the quality of the song underneath, this 'She's The One' is more forgery than bona fide cover and nobody here are earning their biscuits. Flip side 'It's Only Us' is livelier, but its in your face quick thrill rush of The Cars meet Green Day soon wears thin when the quick thrill rush wears off after it's parted from its original FIFA 2000 video game soundtrack setting. Everso quickly in fact.

1999 Geri Halliwell: Lift Me Up

The second number one from Halliwell is a less fussy, lighter ballad affair than the last, but the same problems remain - in delivering her flim flam of a song, Halliwell's thin altitude vocal emotes no further than the roof of her mouth, presumably due to all the unmelted butter clogging up her maw that serves to coats it with a sickly schoolgirl, trying a bit too hard to be liked sweetness. Call me a snob, but I don't really regard 'Lift Me Up' as a 'proper' single; it's simply a vehicle for product placement, with that product being Halliwell herself. Not being anything I can imagine deriving any pleasure from listening to, it serves the same function as a poster hording advertising washing powder (this even comes with a free poster dammit) - it remains in place for the duration of a campaign only to be scraped off and replaced with something else when it's over. And as far as that goes, in sitting proudly at number one for a week, 'Lift Me Up' has succeeded admirably. But in its success in inflating Ms Halliwell's ego it's also devalued the currency of the medium to Weimar-like hyperinflation proportions where you needed a wheelbarrow full of marks just to buy that washing powder. Unfortunately, a wheelbarrow full of Geri Halliwell singles is always going to add up to nothing. I'm not having a good year am I?

1999 Five: Keep On Movin'

It was tempting at this point to pause and ponder my recurring 'are the charts getting worse' shtick to see if I'm any closer to an answer. But do you know what? I've decided I'm not going to. It seems to me that if I'm going to raise this issue every some assembled by audition pop band comes my way then both I myself and you the reader (if I still have any) would be in for a torrid time over the coming years with my cod philosophising. No, I'm just going to focus on the song itself and as far as that goes I can report that 'Keep On Movin' is flat pack furniture of a song; each piece fits logically in its right place to create a whole whose functionality is there for all to see. But like cheap, flatpack furniture it's also homogenous, uninspiring and unmemorable with no hint of charm, personality, character or lastability - there's nothing here to hate beyond railing at the corporate machine behind it (which I've said I'm not going to do) and nothing to like beyond getting in a lather over the five pretty boys shaking their legs in front of it (which doesn't appeal to me on any level). And even there, each of these Five boys manage to recite their lines with the passionless inflect of infants performing at the school nativity, a drab intonation that breathes the kiss of death into a song that, despite its title, never manages to get movin' anywhere. How ironic.

1999 Westlife: Flying Without Wings

'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' as they say, and that's certainly a reliable tenet to live by as far as Westlife are concerned; 'Flying Without Wings' is another chunk of soft rock balladry, though perhaps it's fairer to say it's more refined from the wailing excesses of the past rather than 'fixed'. Too refined maybe - for me, 'Flying Without Wings' is a piece better suited to older lungs. A Joe Cocker or a Bette Midler could bring a certain Rushmore gravitas to the proceedings to take the edge off the song's spiralling and predictable passage from hushed opening to hand wringing finale. In the hands of Westlife, it feels like trying to deal with the policeman who turns up to investigate your burglary when he's thirty years younger than yourself; it doesn't feel 'right' does it? Which means that whilst 'Flying Without Wings' is a decent enough example of what it is, Westlife themselves add nothing to the mix and instead let themselves be carried along by a bluster that's probably best accompanied by a montage of inspirational video clips of tearful people hugging. By itself, it kind of leaves me cold.

1999 Christina Aguilera: Genie In A Bottle

There are those among us old enough to remember when it were all green fields around here. For myself, I'm old enough to remember when Christina Aguilera was marketed as the girl next door type. I guess she still is, as long as you happen to live next door to a strip club, but even if she wasn't parading around in school uniform in 1999, the seeds of her more….liberal…. future were already being sown; 'Genie In A Bottle' is no less sexually suggestive/exploitative in its innuendo-laced painting of the young Aguilera as a virginal bottle fizzing with pent up hormones just waiting for someone to pop her cork. You just have to rub her the right way. Apparently.

But apart from seeing Aguilera all fresh faced and not tarted up in some burlesque/S&M dominatrix outfit and wailing about how ‘Dirrty’ she is, the biggest surprise I now get from 'Genie In A Bottle' is, well, just how dull it sounds. Which isn’t the song’s fault per se - since 2001, I've become far more au-fait with The Strokes Vs Christina Aguilera mash-up creation that pastes Aguilera's original ‘Genie’ vocal directly onto the backing to The Stroke's 'Hard To Explain' to create 'A Stroke Of Genius', an inspired match whose spark and crackle trumps the jaded derivation of its component parts.

Because in giving it the rock setting of The Strokes' guitars, Aguilera's low moan of a vocal gets charged with the mischievous longing of a woman dying for her bottle to be rubbed. The match is so 'right' that Aguilera genuinely sounds like she's singing a different song to the limp pop/R&B stylings that carry this 1999 original and which provide an environment for her not to care less in to the point that it's tempting to think the backing had deliberately been switched by some moral crusaders, intent on protecting her virtue by sabotaging the sexual frission her vocal sparks when it strikes against a harder surface.

And that's a shame, because at least that context gives the lyric a certain 'grown up' legitimacy (instead of fuelling some teen sex male fantasy) and would keep it away from the impressionable young teens that were her audience. 'Genie In A Bottle' remains a solid entry in her back catalogue, but this is pop not so much with an edge as pop spiked with rohypnol and passed to the unwitting. And once the dust from the stockings, bras, basques, high cut pants and low cut tops has settled, it's probably one of the dirrrtiest things she's ever done. But not in a good way.

1999 Eiffel 65: Blue (Da Ba Dee)

If, in some super museum of the future, there should be a need for a single exhibit to epitomise popular Western music in the nineties, they could do worse that stick 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' on a plinth under glass. Which may seem a bold statement, but to my ears it's a mish mash of styles and traits that have dominated the sounds of the last ten years. For a start, it's another Europop single (and we all know by now how popular that genre has been), which means it also ticks the ever popular 'dance' box too, so two birds, one stone.

Crucially though, the nod to dance isn't just token - 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' is more subtle than the overt, crayon bright thump of (for example) 'Barbie Girl' and it threads its pop hook on a credible, trance-like beat and piano loop that would only be unwelcome in the 'cool clubs' through an innate snobbishness. Add in some vocoder treated voices babbling a semi-rapped nonsense lyric that lead into a chorus of monstrous catchiness and you have an artefact that, by summing up everything it ever did or could stand for in three and a half minutes, at a stroke makes ten years of Eurodancebubblegum pop redundant. Which kind of makes it a pity I've had to suffer ten years worth of some awful stepping stone singles when the journey could have been a single simple ladder climb/snake slide (depending on your viewpoint) to get to this point.* Oh, and they're all blokes too and so technically a boyband to boot. See? The nineties in a bottle.


*But apart from that, two other things spoil 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' for me:

1. That it wasn't actually the last number one of the decade (because how fitting would that have been eh?).

2. That Eiffel 65 saw fit to follow it up with the disturbingly similar yet not one tenth as much fun 'Move Your Body' in 2000, a move that, at a stroke, destroyed their aura of fluky, one hit wonder genius.

1999 Vengaboys: We're Going To Ibiza

A re-tooled cover version of Typically Tropical's 197? hit 'Barbados', Vengaboys strip out all the racial stereotyping of the original that furrowed my brow, switch the Caribbean destination for the Balearics and concentrate solely on the arms in the air chorus. Perhaps it concentrates a bit too much - the original at least had a story of sorts underpinning the nonsense (bus driver longs to escape the rain and head home to the sun), but in celebrating Ibiza for itself (i.e. as the clubber's destination of choice) it both underestimates and misunderstands the original to serve up a flattened cover of no discernable personality (though bizarrely, it keeps in the "I don't wanna be a bus driver all my life" line - just how long were they intending to stay?).

Being Europop, then perhaps it doesn't need to do any more to succeed, and to be honest I'd have a lot more time for this had the tune been original. But it's not, and the appropriation of Ibiza (or, as Kim Sasabone sings it, 'Eebitza') as a generic, one stop shop representation of hedonistic dance culture is lazy. Bad enough by itself, but then selling it as such to suburban office workers on a rainy Friday night at their local 'nightspot' is as patronising as Kay Starr taking the piss out of her square parents for trying to dance to the new fangled rock and roll they were clueless about. Cultural gap/generational gap - somebody here doesn't have a clue either, but I fear this time the joke is on the listener. If only they knew it.

1999 Lou Bega: Mambo No. 5

Of course, if we're going to be talking about popular, mainstream Latin music, then they don't come much bigger than Perez Prado, Cuban bandleader and 'King Of The Mambo'. Bega's 'Mambo No 5' takes it's title and central rhythm (via much sampling) from Prado's own 1949 dance tune. It's all credit to Prado that his piece still sounds contemporary, though Bega (who was actually German) helps by coating it with an extra layer of bright Europop and adding a lyric that's equal part nonsense party games ("Jump up and down and move it all around. Shake your head to the sound put your hands an the ground") and equal part a tongue in cheek celebration of his love of the ladies ("A little bit of Monica in my life" etc etc). In Bega's hands, 'Mambo No 5" is a brash burst of colour that maintains enough of its Cuban origins to provide a sheen of authenticity to something that would otherwise be pretty throwaway. But I guess when you have the good fortune to be following Halliwell then anybody would be hard pressed to come up with something less enjoyable.

1999 Geri Halliwell: Mi Chico Latino

Another passenger on that creaking Latin bandwagon, ex Spice Girl Geri takes the soft option with a release sounding not unlike a 'La Isla Bonita' demo, complete with an arthritic grind in place of Madonna's dance swish and a frying pan flat groan of a vocal that rings as genuinely Italian as a Poundstretcher pizza. The Mediterranean flavour gives our Geri excuse enough to writhe around in a bikini on a boat in the video, but honestly, Halliwell and her "I've got a secret, I cannot keep it. It's just a whisper of a distant memory" are about as much fun as stepping barefoot in dogshit.

1999 Westlife: If I Let You Go

When considering boybands, the usual pithy comment/complaint that emerges is that they're interchangeable and 'all sound the same'. I have some sympathy with this, largely because it's true, but to date at least Westlife have bucked the trend by offering up something a bit different than the usual same old. Different for boybands anyway - first number one 'Swear It Again' was a dense slab of Wagnerian handwringing, and though 'If I let You Go' takes a step back from that angsty abyss, it doesn't take a huge one; the choppy indie-like opening gives way to another mini Meat Loaf blast of histrionics as the guys agonise over weighing in the balance whether a long distance relationship or unrequited love from afar is worth the candle. One of those two anyway - the exact meaning of 'If I Let You Go' is obscure save a general idea that there are some tough choices to be made in the name of love. Or maybe even more - does the "And once again I´m thinking about taking the easy way out" refer to suicide I wonder?

Probably not, but it all adds to the weighty pot that's been Westlife's stock in trade to date, the sound of a band walking the line between pop bunnies and rock pigs and unsure of which side of it to fall. 'If I Let You Go' is a mini operetta of a song, one that seems more suited as a linking narrative of a show and it's something I can easily imagine a Bon Jovi or a Bryan Adams cranking out in a stadium. Five more of either of that pair is hardly what the world is waiting for then or now, but what would be predictability personified in their hands becomes a slightly more interesting proposition in West. Only slightly mind - for all its fancy pants production and huge key changes, 'If I Let You Go' is still MOR/AOR fayre that gets dull very, very quickly.

1999 Ronan Keating: When You Say Nothing At All

First solo number one from Keating after the winding up of Boyzone and a cover of a modern country standard (taken from the soundtrack of the inexplicably popular 'Notting Hill'). At the risk of sounding unduly negative before I even start, I can say I have two main beefs with this, the first being the song itself. A typically sentimental eye waterer of love eternal, in its race to say something profound on the state of human relationships, 'When You Say Nothing At All' manages to confuse love with need and even carry an obscure message in it's very title ("You say it best when you say nothing at all") that could equally be taken in a non flattering, patronising way. To make sure it isn't, much of the song's success will depend on it's delivery; a delicate performance (such as, for example, Alison Krauss') can gloss over many of its sins by a reliance on harmony and melody. However, wearing his black and white serious face, Keating intones the lyric as a man at his wits end, a tremulous priest delivering the last rites on the gasping corpse of a song killed off by a tightly wound arrangement that piles on more angst and tension than something advocating communicating through silence really needs. And in this case, far more than I really want to hear. Ever again.

1999 Ricky Martin: Livin' La Vida Loca

I commented back on 'Spice Up Your Life' that there'd be a spate of Latin flavoured pop singles coming our way in the late nineties and I suppose Ricky Martin, being himself Puerto Rican and so no cultural tourist, was the standard bearer of this odd yet short lived phenomenon. And as if to firmly put the music of his birth on the map, Martin goes for broke on his vocal with a performance of wild eyed enthusiasm only to be let down by a fancy dress outfit of a backing that politely smoulders where it should burn like fire. Being (as it was) pieced together backstage entirely using pro-tools doesn't help to pump air into the flatness. Neither does the rather one dimensional tale that Martin is peddling, meaning the effect is one of the music keen to keep its distance from the Latin femme fatale with "devil red " lips and "skin the colour mocha" who's "into superstitions black cats and voodoo dolls". Oh, and drugging men before robbing them blind too.

Oh yes - 'Livin' La Vida Loca' was co-written by soft rock stalwart Desmond Child who knew a thing or two about how women are meant to behave in songs ("She'll make you take your clothes off and go dancing in the rain. She'll make you live her crazy life but she'll take away your pain") and his idealised woman from south of the border on a mission to wring men's hearts dry is as stereotypical as the Beach Boys' 'California Girls'.* But after the recent wave of boy band simper it's refreshing to meet a woman who knows what she wants, even if it is a backhanded male fantasy. So, clichéd business as usual then? Maybe, but come on - give him a break; 1999 has been a white bread kind of year so far and it's not going to get a lot better so it's how nice is it to see a burst of colour from a someone who actually sounds like he's enjoying himself for a change? Very.


* Maybe I'm being a bit harsh here; in the late eighties I worked for a well known Japanese electronics firm where Sarah from accounts was the epitome of Ricky's Latin siren. Sultry pout, olive skin and black coils of hair that all but hissed - she ticked all the right boxes. So much so that her nickname amongst us lads on the shopfloor was 'she-devil', mainly because she looked like she could cause a boy serious harm in the heart department and laugh in his face as she was doing it. Whether this was true or not I was never in a position to find out. None of us were really, which kind of explains a lot.

1999 ATB: 9pm (Till I Come)

A common theme amongst music journos in the nineties was to question whether electronic dance music had finally killed off guitar based rock for good. It's not a theory that's ever troubled me because, frankly, I think it's a load of nonsense, but it makes me smile to wonder what those self same doubters would have made of trance anthem '9pm (Till I Come)' and the plucked steel guitar motif that skips all over it. Basically the work of German producer André Tanneberger (but with a complete absence of Eurocheese), the delight of '9pm (Till I Come)' stems from its knowing when to get busy and when to shut up. The main body of the track is an unremarkable dance pump, but by swinging across it that guitar riff bites chunks out of its hardcore piston thrust to leave acres of space that are filled in with a spiky anticipation and sexually charged female vocal come-ons to create a dance track that manages to be both frantic and calm. Simple yet effective, for me it's the trippy yet hardcore essence of the 'trance' branch of dance (sorry!) and, along with Robert Miles' 'One And One', sums up for me all that was good about the whole of the nineties dance scene in four minutes and makes me yearn for memories of nights at all the Ibiza clubs I never went to when I was young enough not to stand out like a glob of blood in a bottle of milk.

1999 Vengaboys: Boom Boom Boom Boom

Being more Dutch Europop/dance, it would be convenient to report that 'Boom Boom Boom Boom' took up where 'No Limits' left off. Only it doesn't. Quite the opposite in fact. Lead vocalist Kim Sasabone tries to start a fire with her opening "If you're alone and you need a friend. Someone to make you forget your problems. Just come along baby, take my hand" invite of a one night stand, but it's melody is a direct lift from Michael Jackson's 'Beat It' and besides, it's soon washed out by 'Boom' cubed's mallet simple beat, eighties vocoder laced "Vengaboys are back in town" and "Whoa oh whoa oh" interruptions and a wheezy Wurlitzer parp that sounds of an age where keyboards you can plug in to the mains were something of a novelty. But in 1999 they weren't, and 'Boom Boom Boom Boom' manages to reduce itself to a patchwork of the most obviously garish dance motifs to date; I know this kind of crass, overtly good time party pop isn't meant to be taken that seriously, but I at least expect those involved to have made some kind of effort in serving it up - 'Boom Boom Boom Boom' is effortless alright, but in all the wrong ways. And it's not for me.

1999 S Club 7: Bring It On Back

Although my attitudes toward music have changed and widened considerably over the past twenty years or so, it wasn't always the case and I don't need much of an imagination to know what the early teen version of me (had he been an early teen in 1999 that is) would have made of S Club 7 as a whole and 'Bring It All Back' in particular. He'd have hated both. No doubt about that. I can see me now, wound up to a pitch well past fever, loudly dismissing its relentless bounce of juvenile enthusiasm to anyone who'd listen as disposable ephemera that wasn't played on proper instruments by a proper band. And then I'd have probably gone back to my Marillion albums.

That was then anyway, but though the 'actual' 1999 me was far less blinkered in his views, he still looked sideways at S Club 7 and their stage school precocious, overly photogenic and assembled by audition make up (the current version of me still does to be honest - there's literally nothing there beyond a raft of pretty faces), but at least the tunnel vision had broadened as regards the song itself. Essentially modern R&B with all 'r' and 'b' bleached out by S Club 7's perky yet flat vocals and a musical box churn of handclaps and whistles, that relentless bounce of sunshine now becomes a plus point rather than a negative, a clockwork spiral of verse to chorus hook and back again that barely pauses for breath in its celebratory rush of enjoying itself.

And that, I think, adds to my earlier thesis regarding what makes a 'good' pop song - whilst I can pull a dozen acts off the top of my head who'd have done a better job on this than the S Clubbers, the actual band and their method of delivery here are secondary to a song that's too strong for them to ruin (and by taking its positive message on face value with the well meaning enthusiasm of youth, then how could they totally derail it anyway?) But while it is undoubtedly good pop, it's also rebottled pop, a derivative song that chooses to mimic rather than progress the medium. And that's a hard strike against it in my eyes; 'Bring It All Back' borrows a bit too much from the Jackson 5 or The Osmonds template for its inspiration (again, I keep hearing 'One Bad Apple' as a main source here). It might work fine for a new generation (or those with short memories), but this offers up little more than a remould when I'd really rather see some new tread.

1999 Baz Luhrmann: Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

It seems of late that at least once a month a friend or 'acquaintance' will forward me some viral email or Facebook message that sets out a heart-warming story and/or piece of homespun wisdom. The fact they usually end threatening of luck of the worst kind if I don't forward it to ten people in my address book by the next full moon is a bit of a downer but hey, no worries - I'm not the superstitious type so these things go straight in the bin anyway, though I confess that occasionally even a hard nosed cynic like me will read something in them that strikes a chord or two before they're deleted.

Being nothing more than a voice actor reciting journalist Mary Schmich's 1997 'commencement speech' (that appeared in the Chicago Tribune) over the choral version of Rozalla's 'Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)', I tend to regard 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)' as essentially a 1999 version of those emails. Though far less of a novelty in our modern, e-communication overloaded times, it was moreso of one in 1999 and for the want of anything better to say, your reaction to it is going to depend on your own attitude to the content of the spam mails I mentioned above.

Schmich's very American ("Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard"), right leaning ("Don't expect anyone else to support you"), slightly self satisfied recipe for a wholesome life won't be for everyone, but there's nothing that's going to raise too many hackles. The sort of 'common sense' granny used to dispense, for my own part I'd have found more value in a hardcore remix of Renton's 'Choose Life' speech from 'Trainspotting', or the "You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank.You're not the car you drive.You're not the contents of your wallet" speech from Palahniuk's 'Fight Club', but horses for courses I guess.

'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)' stands as a curio from a more technologically backward, less media intrusive era where mail still came through the letterbox and people had to actively go to information instead of it coming to them, unwanted and unasked for. On occasions when it did, like this, then the message took on more inherent 'worth' and 'value' by its sheer 'not heard that before' novelty. Harmless enough I guess, but lifestyle sloganeering belongs on posters, badges and newspaper columns......anywhere really besides at the top of the charts.

1999 Shanks And Bigfoot: Sweet Like Chocolate

And now another of the nineties' trademark handbrake turns from one thing into something quite different - 'Sweet Like Chocolate' is a product of the UK garage scene that managed to top not only the national, but also the dance, indie and R&B charts too. Impressive, but then it IS a tune that watches its own back - garage was an offshoot of dance that was typified by choppy house beats and kick drums, a mix that 'Sweet Like Chocolate' has in spades. But to drag what could have been a niche underground genre blinking into the sunlight, Shanks and Bigfoot (aka producers Steven Meade and Danny Langsman) sweeten (HA!) the urban pill with clear definition of purpose in their tune that the casual/initiated listener could follow no problem and a Sharon Woolf lead vocal that pastes on a welcoming pop edge. Yet in so doing (and despite its clubland kudos), 'Sweet Like Chocolate' veers perilously close to electronic bubblegum to my ears and it sits in this chart like a beached whale longing to return to its natural habitat.

1999 Westlife: Swear It Again/Backstreet Boys: I Want It That Way/Boyzone: You Needed Me

A convenient brace of boyband bounty, there's a nice symmetry here in that, for one, it's going to be the first of many chart toppers, for another it will be their first and last time at the top while for the third it will be the last of their many appearances here. As I say, convenient. First up, 'Swear It Again' is an apocalyptic ballad built on a carpet bombing of emotional drama that even Jim Steinman might regard as a bit heavy handed. "I swore to you my love would remain, and I swear it all over again" - a powerful statement at face value, but "swear" is a strong word and to me its repetition is just a highfalutin way of saying 'I love you lots' with the effect lessened each time its spouted. Which is often.

Not only that, but within the context of the song too it's not clear if this attention is welcome ("Cos in your eyes I see a love that burns eternally") or not ("Sure there'll be times we want to say goodbye. But even if we try there are some things in this life won't be denied"), or whether indeed this love is being sworn out of a sense of guilt ("I'm never gonna say goodbye, cos I never wanna see you cry" "I'm never gonna treat you bad, cos I never wanna see you sad"), and is there any inherent value in swearing anything a second time if the first wasn't believed? And so on.

Maybe I'm being picky again, but 'Swear It Again' boils down to is a patchwork of convenient rhymes and platitudes cynically stitched together with a vague 'I'll always love you' theme and the laziness of the writing (and that repetition) undermines the punch to the gut effect the song strives for, even if it does literally howl in your face in delivering it. 'Swear It Again' is a show song, and a show stopper at that - engineered for a gurn of drama and a lighter held aloft, it puts too many vague eggs into too few vague baskets to seduce and just relies on a slap in the face to get your attention. Which it does I'll grant you, but with little holding the centre together save its bawling abandon and cheap film score string arrangement, then 'Swear It Again' is a cardboard wedding cake on display in a shop window; it looks fancy and inviting but try and take a good bite and you're left chewing air.

Next up, 'I Want It That Way' is the first (and last) number one after eight attempts for Backstreet Boys, a long standing American boyband. The first time I heard this I dismissed it as just another by the numbers cover version - I'd have sworn I'd heard it before. Maybe I had (I can't remember when I first heard it), but not by anybody other than the Backstreet Boys. Which, I guess, is a roundabout way of saying that 'I Want It That Way' stands or falls on the quality of the song itself without being coloured by whatever image the boys were fronting.

And that's refreshing - there's only so much hip hop styling and faux street jive I can take from a bunch of white American guys grabbing their collective crotches through baggy pants and 'I Want It That Way' is a model of no fat brevity that marries soul and pop with a direct honesty of presentation that, unlike 'Swear It Again', doesn't ladle on the angsty, over sincere intensity to get a reaction. It all harks back to my earlier musing on what makes a good pop song, but then as '.....Baby One More Time' writer Max Miller also wrote this, then maybe I'm a little biased.

In comparison to these other kids on the boyband block, Boyzone's cover of 'You Needed Me' sounds thick, sluggish and overloaded. Much like 'Swear It Again' in fact, only this song wasn't built to bear that kind of weight; what was a gentle stream of a song in Anne Murray's hands is armed to the teeth by Boyzone's battalion of producers and turned into a swollen river in flood, with Ronan and the boys wading against both the flow and any passing kitchen sink caught up in the current. Keating's vocal itself is enough to bog the tune down in treacle, but a gospel backing choir mirroring his lines piles on the inertia until the it sounds too tired to make it's way out of the disc, making it all just too much like bloody hard work.

1999 Martine McCutcheon: Perfect Moment

Like Nick 'Wicksy' Berry before her, Martine McCutcheon graduated from the soap opera world of EastEnders to 'broaden her horizons' as a singer, and to add on some 'shit or bust' pressure to succeed, her onscreen character 'Tiffany Mitchell' left the show via a bridge burning sticky end in a fatal car accident. Or so I'm told anyway - I went cold turkey on EastEnders in 1988 and I've been clean ever since, but even with my disinterest the hype around Ms McCutcheon's new career move at the time was unavoidable, a publicity blitz that painted her rising star as a cross between Garland, Streisand and Dame Nellie Melba.

So, was the hype justified? Well it's hard to say - 'Perfect Moment' is a romantic ballad of old fashioned zinging harps, plucked and swooping strings with a measured stillness adding a hint of tension. This arrangement was a departure from the more strident 1997 original which gave singer Edyta Górniak a harder surface to emote off, which she does with a cracked abandon, but if McCutcheon does have a strong voice, then her own 'Perfect Moment' doesn't provide much opportunity for her to break out of the breathless girly mode that swamps this like a daydream. But then again, as she was going for the suave, sophisticated end of the easy listening market then maybe that's not surprising - you don't want Pat Benatar turning up at your dinner party in leathers with a bottle of Jack do you? No.

Which kind of sums up why, when it comes right down to it, 'Perfect Moment' doesn't 'do' much for me I'm afraid; it's too mannered, polite and predictable to move or resonate (give me Pat Benatar over a dinner party anyday), and when her voice does manage to break free from the gravity of mush to tremor on the high notes, I'm hearing far more of the actress behind than the singer in front (but that may be more a fault of this genre as a whole than McCutcheon's). But now I'm being too harsh so let me happily say that 'Perfect Moment' is probably the best single I've heard from a former EastEnders actor. Ok, when you consider the company she's keeping, that's not saying a great deal, but the distance between her and whatever horror would be in second place is measured in leagues rather than inches.

1999 Mr Oizo: Flat Beat

If 'Block Rockin' Beats' was a title that reviewed itself, 'Flat Beat' does a similarly decent fist of flagging up the sounds that lay within the disc. Only it's not really meant to; the 'flat' refers to 'Flat Eric', a yellow, rodent-like puppet who starred in a series of late nineties commercials for Levi jeans. Looking back at the history of these advertising campaigns, Levi always seemed to veer between trading on nostalgia ('Wonderful World', 'Stand By Me') and tapping into the contemporary ('Inside', 'Spaceman' ). That's a convenient distinction anyway, but 'Flat Beat' lobs a spanner into the works of my little thesis.

Little more than a lo-fi squelch of instrumental rhythm, had this been served up to me cold then I'd have struggled to throw a net around the track in terms of when or where it was recorded; sometime during the past twenty years sounds about right. Mr Oizo, however, was in fact a French house producer/DJ, and so on that front 'Flat Beat' is clearly from the 'now', but if you'd told me it was a stray outtake from a seventies krautrock album then I'd have no cause to doubt you either. All of which makes 'Flat Beat' a curious proposition - too slack to dance to, too sparky and weird for ambience and with nothing for the kids once you get past Eric on the cover, 'Flat Beat' is a mischievous, KLF style triumph of marketing over content and I kind of see it as a custard pie in the face of everyone who bought and 'bought' it. Now that's what I call comic relief.

1999 B*Witched: Blame It On The Weatherman

The last of B*Witched's four quartets, 'Blame It On The Weatheman' continues down the 'To You I Belong' path marked 'more mature sound' by pruning back the bubblegum pop joie de vivre and turning up the acoustic sincerity - honestly, it's like the first four years of The Beatles played out over three singles. Well not quite; 'Blame It On The Weatheman' is undoubtedly a more grown up offering, but it's one that's hamstrung by sounding akin to an early cut of Natalie Imbruglia's 'Torn' crossed with a half finished demo of a Cranberries B side.

Which wouldn't necessarily be a disaster in itself (after all, some of my favourite songs sound like half finished demos), but with such little meat on display then the bones are forced to stand by themselves. And unfortunately, the neo Beefheartian title is about as interesting as 'Blame It On The Weatheman' ever gets. As predictably drab and rote driven as anything else in their catalogue, that 'needs a lick of paint' aura adds not so much a layer of charm as a feeling that nobody can really be arsed anymore. Nobody except for Edele Lynch who, bless her, tries her best to inject a shot of emotion to lift it out of the doldrums, but the hackneyed clichés of the lyric ("Standing on the shore, calling out your name") don't give an inch and, with the music taking a back seat, her rancid croak is brutally exposed and singularly fails to spin this straw into decent animal feed, let alone gold.

1999 Boyzone: When The Going Gets Tough

In my classroom, the equation Boyzone + Comedy is never going to = a happy ending. And so it comes to pass; as the 'official' song for the 1999 Comic Relief appeal, 'When The Going Gets Tough' is a rod straight run through of Billy Ocean's 1986 original with little deviation and even less humour (unless you count Ronan's ever thickening tongue - '"I've got shumting to shay" - he's going to choke on that one day). Humour? Humour was as alien to Boyzone as a snowflake in August and they deliver this up with the forced grin of an unwilling adult forced to join in a game of charades at a kids party. Ocean's woozy song was hardly a classic in the first place, but at least he had the grace to stamp it out with a good natured smile that Boyzone, just by being Boyzone, manage to exorcise 'till it's grey. Which means that, 'comic' video aside, 'When The Going Gets Tough' is business as usual and could happily stand alone as the 'next' Boyzone single in its own right. Which further means that I'm even less inclined to cut it any slack on the basis of its charitable status, and in delivering a forgettable song in such dull and uninspiring style, Boyzone prove another equation - that zero + zero is always going to = zero.

1999 Britney Spears: ....Baby One More Time

From time to time over the course of this journey I've paused to muse on just what it is that makes a 'good pop song’. I don't have the answer yet I'm afraid, I probably never will, but I have noticed some Aristotelian common currency between those songs that make up my idea of ‘good pop’. Chief among these is the notion that the quality shouldn't be context specific or dependant. By that I mean a ‘good pop song’ shouldn’t have to rely on anything other than its own being to justify and sell itself.

To cast my net wider for an example, a much covered, much interpreted song like Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ thrives on its own inherent quality – there’s not necessarily a ‘definitive’ version of it out there, but that doesn’t negate its definitive existence both in its own right and within the context of ‘Porgy And Bess’. It's a standard that everybody knows. Back in the pop sphere, a song like (for example), ‘Sugar Sugar’ would, I'd submit, remain a good pop song regardless of the act behind it or the era it was released. Being 'performed' by a non-existent cartoon band highlights my point I think - obviously, somebody wrote and recorded ‘Sugar Sugar’, but their identity is not important; the song is such that it would have sold regardless and only an act of wilful sabotage would have prevented it from being anything other than a hit.

At the other end of the scale, a song like (for another example) 'Too Shy' is one I suggest sold purely on the strength of the zeitgeist it rode - the imagery and fashion conscious facade of the band that fronted it, and the cynical way it taps into the white boy, slap funk sound that was all the rage in 1983. Another band could probably have had a hit with it at roughly the same point in time had they conformed to the same rules of presentation as Kajagoogoo, but I don’t believe something so wretched could have got to number one in any other era; without those cultural touchstones, the song disintergrates like a vampire in sunlight.

I can say upfront that I think 'Baby One More Time' is a good pop song. In fact, I think it's a great one. One of the best, and to follow my own thesis, I don't believe it needed Britney Spears to sell it. True, Ms Spears cavorting through the corridors in school uniform like some jailbait Lolita in the video is memorable, but in truth a song this strong does not need to resort to such questionable tactics to sell it. Spears’ later career would come to depend on cleavage and thigh to maintain interest but 'Baby One More Time', like heroin, sells itself and would find its audience sans the promise of teenage sex which, in this case, are as superfluous as writing 'BANG!' on the side of a nuclear warhead and render Spears as much of a cartoon as The Archies were.

Which is all the more power to my thesis - 'Baby One More Time' succeeds in spite of Spears, not because of her. Her too self conscious by half attempts at an Eartha Kitt sex kitten growl are as erotic as granny pants the night before washday. But that's fine - her crude croaks and the song's tinribs production no more derail its trajectory than a butterfly could derail the flight path of a cannonball. And that's because like all good pop, ‘Baby One More Time’ is a master class in audience hooking . The "Oh baby, baby. How was I supposed to know" lights the fuse to kick-start the creeping, two step stealth of "My loneliness is killing me" where an audible shift of gears primes the mechanism to deliver the payload payoff of the “Give me a sign, hit me baby One. More.Time“ chrorus that's as effective and memorable as a nail driven between the eyes. Then job done, it leaves the flywheel spinning to start the process again until, just when you think its been milked dry, a monster key and tempo change on the middle eight (at to 2:05) keeps it fresh 'till the end. What's not to like?

1999 Lenny Kravitz: Fly Away

I tend to imagine Mr Kravitz as a man torn between wishing he'd been born some twenty years earlier than he actually was, and nightly giving thanks to all things holy that he wasn't. Because for the former, being so enthralled with the guitar based rock and psychedelia of the sixties as he evidently is, he'd have fitted right in with no need for much modification. In fact, I can see him now - all afro and shades, cranking out solo's and preaching love from the stage at Monterey. On the other hand, I secretly think Kravitz has self awareness enough to appreciate that, no matter how 'edgy' or retro leftfield his output seemed in the nineties, when put up against the bigger dogs of Hendrix or Clapton then it's a wannabe chin of adolescent fuzz rather than the full beard.

As you can probably guess, I don't have a great deal of time for Kravitz and his one man revival show, but out of his entire oeuvre, 'Fly Away' is a song I have even less time for than most. "I wish that I could fly, into the sky, so very high, just like a dragonfly" - how high do dragonflies fly I wonder? I have no idea. I doubt Kravitz does either - the aspirational clunk and cheapness of the imagery is matched only by the cheapness of the rhymes and one take tune they cling to. Lenny does his best to beef it all up with a crunchy guitar riff and wah wah slap bass like what Jimi might have done, but the contrived mock rock equates to a kitting out of Jack and Jill in kaftans and loon pants and sending them up the hill to meet their dealer. To be fair, Kravitz has acknowledged that the track was a throwaway B side at best, but its simplicity sticks and lures the weak minded like the chocolate at the supermarket checkout, making it ideal for the three advertising campaigns that used and abused it (Nissan, Peugeot and Sky Sports). Is this like what Jimi would have done too? I doubt it Len, I doubt it.

1999 Blondie: Maria

If Blondie's rise to fame in the seventies was swift, their decline was swifter, with the hits drying up in 1982 as quickly as if an 'off' button was hit. For my own part, I tended to believe it was for the best, that the eighties (as they panned out) would not have been welcoming for the band, just as the seventies wouldn't have been for The Beatles. That said, I greeted news of their reformation with a raised eyebrow and a disappointed sigh at what looked like another reputation tarnishing go round from a band who had surely said all they had to say. That it should result in their first number one in nineteen years was the last thing I expected.

First thing that strikes from the opening buzz of guitar and Clem Burke's bullworker drumming is how close to the familiar, classic skinny tie pop of old 'Maria' is. But as it was written by the band's Jimmy Destri as basically a re-working of his own 'Walk Like Me' from 1980 (right down to the "walking on imported air" line) should that come as a surprise? Not really - comeback singles are no places for experimentation and in Blondie's case there was a lot of ground to be made up in terms of a record buying generation not even born when they were at their peak. What does come as a surprise is how confident Ms Harry's voice has grown in the intervening years. Yes the New York drawl of old remains, but now it's tempered with a control and a maturity born of age and experience that lets her hit the high notes on the "Maria, Ave Maria" of the chorus with a pitch and force that Debbie of old would have bottled. She's hardly become Cher, but there's a difference, and it's noticeable.

Musically too, things have circled and re-loaded - power pop with the emphasis on the power, 'Maria' is Blondie with muscle. Curbing the experimental excesses of the preceding albums, 'Maria' harks back to the punky spark of 1978's 'Plastic Letters', but rather than mask the reediness of the sound with an in your face CBGB aggression, 'Maria' is carried with the chunky urgency of a band with chops, all grown up and with a point to prove. And proof of the pudding is that 'Maria' could (and does) sit comfortably on the tail end of any chronological 'Best of Blondie' album - it sounds like classic Blondie, but not as a wallow in simple nostalgia for saps like me who wish it was still 1979* and there's enough here to make it more than the work of a tribute band. A very pleasant surprise.


* And a personal level, there's two things about 'Maria' that hooks its claws deep into whatever soft spots are left in my heart. Firstly, the "She moves like she don't care. Smooth as silk, cool as air. Oooh it makes you wanna' cry. She doesn't know your name and your heart beats like a subway train. Oooh it makes you wanna' die. Oooh don't you wanna' take her, wanna' make her all your own?" could be Debbie reaching through the years to taunt the adolescent me who slept with a huge poster of her over my head throughout my early teens, while (secondly) the gamut of expressions that play across her face between 0:59 and 1:03 on the official video serve to remind me of why I fell in love with her in the first place. 'Iconic' is too small a word.

1999 Armand Van Helden featuring Duane Harden: U Don't Know Me

Like Norman Cook/Fatboy Slim with 'Praise You', 'U Don't Know Me' was the first solo UK number one for American house producer Van Helden (he'd previously been here with his 'Professional Widow' remix). Like Cook/Slim, Van Helden knows his history and 'U Don't Know Me' samples Carrie Lucas's 'Dance With Me' for its main riff and the drums from Jaydee's 'Plastic Dreams' to power it into something new. Which is the modus operandi of most house music producers, so so far, so good. Further to the good (and unlike 'Praise You'), 'U Don't Know Me' is full throttle garage house that bounces with glitterball life and manages to sound both 'now' yet distinctly retro at the same time, with Duane Harden's vocal/lyric adding the 'new' to the 'old' and 'borrowed'. As I've said before though, I never feel particularly well qualified to comment on the merits of individual examples from this genre and I'm reduced to asking myself 'could I dance to it'? And as the answer is 'yes', it must be doing something right. But if you are looking to me to explain why this should have risen to the top of the pile instead of any number of other dance tracks released that month in 1999 then I genuinely would not be able to tell you.

1999 The Offspring: Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)

Formally an underground, indie punk act, The Offspring confounded their seemingly carved in stone 'also ran' status to find commercial success with their fifth album (Americana) and a more mainstream rock sound. Or should that be 'mainstream mixed with comedy rock sound' - 'Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)' is a none too subtle dig at the white, suburban college types who steeped themselves in the 'keep it real' surface trappings of the hip hop/gangsta lifestyle just for the cool kudos. To be honest, that's a barn door target for anyone and The Offspring manage to hit it with a series of barbs ("He may not have a clue, and he may not have style. But everything he lacks, well he makes up in denial") wrapped in a jangling ska punk tune.

So far, so good, but in illustrating the shortcomings of this particular white guy through their own supposedly superior knowledge of all things street ("they didn't have Ice Cube so he bought Vanilla Ice", "Now he's getting a tattoo yeah, he's getting ink done. He asks for a 13, but they drew a 31") the band, in trying so hard to be hip as the people it takes the piss out of, come across as insufferably smug and superior. I can imagine a Randy Newman supplying a wry comment on the phenomenon, but in rubbing everybody's face in it 'Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)' simply takes the standard bully boy tactic of picking on the weakest to draw attention from themselves. And as far as that goes, 'Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)' might have carried more weight and/or humour had it not come from a skate/punk band with a line up all in their mid thirties. 'Pretty rad for a bunch of oldies' as da youf may well say in relation to Dexter Holland's "uh huh, uh huh" squawks and over excitable 'look at the fool' vocal. The "Give it to me baby" line is good value, but for the most part 'Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)' has all the tiresome jock humour of a National Lampoon film that doesn't star Chevy Chase. And most of those that do.

1999 911: A Little Bit More

Another Brit boy band who by and large passed me by, a quick scan of the stats show that 911 had ten top ten hits in the latter part of the nineties. Impressive, but I can't own up to knowing the first thing about any of them. 'A Little Bit More', their sole number one, is one of the few songs of theirs that I am familiar with, though that's due to it being a cover of a Dr Hook song. I say Dr Hook cover because they released by far the most famous version of it (which was all over the radio in the seventies as I recall), and I doubt anybody involved in this current recording paid much heed to Bobby Gosh's original.

In truth there's not much to choose between any of them; Gosh recorded it as a piano ballad, the good Dr gave it a country spin while 911 present it as a last song slowdance. None of which matters really - your attitude to all of them will depend mainly on your attitude toward whether you see any merit in Gosh's male dominated lyric of sexual stamina. At least, that's what I think it's about; "When your body's had enough of me and I'm layin' flat out on the floor. When you think I've loved you all I can, I'm gonna love you a little bit more" - Dr Hook always had a sly wink about them to suggest that under any ambivalence, a saucy interpretation was on the cards, but Gosh's own vocal in comparison is too straight as the gate to project any dimension other than the literal.

In other words, I've no doubt he means exactly what he says (though it's made more upsetting by him sounding uncannily like a toothless pensioner sucking on a fistful of viagra). Which means that whether a 'tender ballad' from the point of view of an alpha male with a raging hard on ("Look into my eyes and give me that smile, the one that always turns me on. And let me take your hair down, 'cause we're stayin' up to greet the sun") is your 'thing' or not will be down to your own personal taste. I can't say it's mine, but each to their own.

So where does that leave 911? Nowhere really; it's a slick and game recording with the trio are singing like three lads who can't believe their luck. But really, this is all so lazy and emotion free I'm amazed all involved found the energy to get out of bed to record it. Maybe they didn't. That would explain a lot anyway. And as I honestly can't think of a single good thing to say about it, I'll let my silence be my review.

1999 Fatboy Slim: Praise You

Though hardly a stranger to number one (he's been here before as part of The Housemartins, Beats International and as remixer of Cornershop), 'Praise You' was the first (and last to date) solo appearance by Norman Cook, albeit under the Fatboy Slim non de plume. As Mr Slim, Cook was initially a key player in the Skint Records/Big Beat scene, but 'Praise You' is more than one step back from those booming, house brick beats of old. Based around a sample from Camille Yarbrough's 'Take Yo Praise', Cook fashions Yarbrough's dry creak of a vocal into a soft shuffle dance track that simmers quietly without ever managing to come to the boil, with that vocal sample being the main source of the lack of heat. More a mood piece than out and out danceathon, to my ears 'Praise You' seems to have no purpose other than to demonstrate how good Cook's record collection is (check out the cover shot) and how clever he's been in spotting then stitching its disparate elements together. I'll admit its mixing old and new has a certain surface appeal, but its wrapping paper stiffness feels too much like dried goods for me to regard it with too much love I'm afraid.*


* Moby had already done better in sampling Bessie Jones on 1998's 'Honey' and would do better again with further samples of blues field recordings on the remainder of his 'Play' album.

1999 Steps: Heartbeat/Tragedy

In hindsight, it seems to me that posterity has treated the nineties as something of a faceless decade with no identity of its own. For example, if I were invited to a fifties, sixties, seventies or eighties theme party then I'd know roughly what to expect and what to dress as. The stereotypes are so ingrained that, to take the eighties, I'd know to dress up with big hair and a pastel suit with the sleeves rolled up rather than as, say, a striking miner or a Falklands veteran. What would be the basis of a nineties theme night I wonder? Would it even be possible to organise one?

Perhaps; on one level at least I suppose I'd consider going as a raver with a smiley face T shirt, beanie hat and a whistle, but is this imagery as deeply entrenched among the general population as the uniform of leather jacket and quiff on a fifties style Teddy boy? Probably not. But then on another level, deep within the archives of my mind, I'd always filed Steps away as an illustration of the archetypical nineties band - that is, poppy, clean cut, colourful, dance friendly and totally unthreatening. Which is kind of how I look back on that decade and so it comes as no small surprise to find Steps didn't appear until the tail end of the decade I had them in mind as dominating. So maybe there isn't one defining image that sums up the decade Oh well, best get on then.

A double A side, 'Tragedy' sets out the Steps manifesto in four and a half minutes of pop with a capital P. A cover of the Bee Gees former number one, Steps (or rather, producer Pete Waterman) strip the Wagnerian sturm and drang of the original back to the rail of the basic melody, which the Steps gang then ride with wild abandon and no deviation either left or right. In Steps' world, it's all about the chorus; The Bee Gees built up to it with an arc of dread ("Here at night in a lost and lonely part of town, held in time in a wad of tears I slowly drown") that exploded with the chorus like Gideon's trumpet on the end of days: "When the feelings gone and you can't go on it's tragedy".

Overblown it certainly is, but it's inescapable too yet Steps and their Anglo Abba presentation slip from verse to chorus with barely a skipped heartbeat or key change in a way that blands it into nothing more than a neat dance move (check out the 'Plus' boast on the sleeve) that turns the tragedy into a pseudo celebration. It's functional and effective, but only in the way that using a Renaissance oil painting to cover a stain on the wall is functional and effective and the end result misses the whole angsty point of the song by a mile. It may well be Steps' defining song, but I think it defines the decade as a whole far better. And I don't mean that as a compliment.

Flip side 'Heartbeat' is an original ballad and far more pleasing. The intro's plink plink piano and "Woohoo wooo whoooo" vocals suggests a generic pot boiler of effected misery is on the cards, but 'Heartbeat' then confounds expectation by riding a sleek bed of air seamlessly driven by a rhythm as smooth as cream pouring from a jug. "You are only a heartbeat away, baby and my love one day will find you it will remind you" - yes, it's another load of vacuous platitudes and gooey eyed sentimentality, but it's created by people who clearly know what they're doing and the value of a timely key change, all of which ensures the packaging is superior enough to be of lasting use long after the chocolates inside have melted.