To say that Christmas was only two weeks away, the charts in December 1999 seemed very full of dance records. Where were all the cloying big ballads and sentimental schmalz that traditionally made an appearance at this time of year? Apart from the No 1, the rest of the Top 5 was wall to wall dance hits. Look at this (SPOILER ALERT!):

1. “The Millennium Prayer” – Cliff Richard
2. “Re-Rewind The Crowd Say Bo Selecta” – Artful Dodger featuring Craig David
3. “King Of My Castle” – Wamdue Project
4. “Back In My Life” – Alice Deejay
5. “Communication (Somebody Answer The Phone)” – Mario Piu

Blimey! We’ll be seeing and hearing two of those songs listed above in this show. Our host is Jamie Theakston and we start with…oh…a big ballad. Well, that’s not a brilliant beginning to this post’s theme is it? Thanks a bunch Whitney Houston! In all fairness, “I Learned From The Best” may have been a ballad but it was definitely not of the sentimental kind. A defiant denial of an ex-lover’s attempts to rekindle a broken relationship, it was more sass than schmalz with Whitney delivering a perfectly on point vocal to tell the tale.

This was clearly a repeat of the performance we saw the other week which itself was part of a package of performances that Whitney recorded in one sitting months before this as some kind of deal struck between her (and her people) with the BBC which I’ve discussed a few times before – well basically every time she’s appeared on the show in 1999 which was…

*counts them up*

…TEN! That was some hardball negotiating that went on from her side when that deal was agreed. Those appearances break down as:

• “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” x 5
• “My Love Is Your Love” x 3
• “I Learned From The Best” x 2

If I’ve talked about this subject ten times then I think that’s quite enough. We’ll move on I think…

The first of those previously mentioned dance hits now in the form of “Communication” by Mario Più (real name Mario Piperno). What was this nonsense all about?! Well, the official explanation from its Wikipedia entry is that the track was:

“…constructed from the interference caused on improperly shielded audio equipment when a GSM mobile telephone rings nearby. The Ringtone sample that can be heard is from the Motorola MicroTAC International Series of GSM Mobile Telephones”

Ah yes, that well know source of inspiration for creating pop music! WTF?! Surely that describes the antithesis of a musical muse? I’m guessing it was a bare-faced attempt to cash in on the whole technological eruption of the accessibility of the mobile phone. As Jamie Theakston says in his intro, “The mobile phone was the accessory of the 90s”. We’d seen this sort of chart tie-in before with things like the computer games in the early 90s – think “Tetris” by Doctor Spin and “Supermarioland” by Ambassadors of Funk – but the idea that this sort of exploitation was still viable years later was shocking.

The track itself is just a horrible, whiny trance beat that worked itself into a higher state of consciousness à la Josh Wink allied to that irritating, monotone voice droning “Somebody answer the phone” intercut with the occasional ring tone. The staging for the performance (if you can really call it that) is interesting in that the backing dancers are dressed in suits (of sorts). Was that a (rather outdated) nod towards the notion that mobile phones were for young business types, ‘yuppies’ if you will? If so, surely that was an 80s perception – by 1999 the whole point was that mobile phones were accessible to us all. Even I had one though mine, like all my fellow Our Price employees, was given to me as a Christmas bonus as we were part of the Virgin family by then. The truth is that this was an horrendous idea horrifically executed and at Christmas time too? Where was Cliff Richard when you needed him? Oh…yeah…

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE! Jamiroquai in song that-doesn’t-sound-exactly-the-same-as-all-the-rest shock! Finally, as I get to their final TOTP appearance that I’ll have to comment on, they come up with something that doesn’t require me to say the same thing over and over again but in a slightly different way. Oh, the irony. “King For A Day” was the fourth and final single taken from the band’s fourth studio album “Synkronised” and was perhaps the closest they ever came to a ballad. Yes, the outfit who made their name on funk-based tunes come up with a ‘slowie’ just as I’m bemoaning the prevalence of dance tracks on a chart right up against Christmas. I say again, oh, the irony.

I’ve always felt torn by Jamiroquai. When they first appeared in 1992/3, I quite liked their sound despite all the accusations of Stevie Wonder pilfering but after they stubbornly refused to diversify at all from it subsequently, I couldn’t really be doing with them as boredom took hold. Now, whilst you couldn’t mistake “King For A Day” as being by any other artist, there is something different about it. It’s decidedly downtempo and is based around a persistent, rolling piano riff which gives it a melancholic tone. Then there’s the string section that imbues it with the quality of a James Bond theme. Yep, there was definitely something curiously different about this one. It possibly deserved better than its chart peak of No 20 but then it was the fourth single from an album that had been in the shops for dix months so…

P.S. Small props to Jamie Theakston here for his intro about always being taller than Jay Kay and for the latter going along with the joke. A nice little nod to the scene in A Hard Day’s Night when Norm accuses Shake of always being taller than him.

Now, I’m certainly no fan of Celine Dion but you have to admire her rate of recording and releasing material – 27 studio albums in 45 years, more than one every two years since 1981? That’s prolific. However, 1999 would see her undertake an hiatus prompted by that punishing release schedule and her husband’s diagnosis with throat cancer. It would be nearly four years before she released a new studio album. That gap was plugged with a greatest hits album called “All The Way…A Decade Of Song” from which this single – “That’s The Way It Is” was taken. Written by Max Martin who has been responsible for hits by the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Katy Perry, it was much more of a pop sound than her trademark power ballads and probably received plenty of airplay at the time, helping that Best Of album to the top of the UK charts. However, it’s surely not one of her best known hits and would produce a good score on Pointless if the category was ‘Celine Dion singles’. When you release as many songs as Celine has, I guess they can’t all be burnt into our memories. That just the way it is.

P.S. Not sure why we only got a just under two minutes performance of a four minute song here but I’m really not complaining.

The second of those aforementioned dance hits now but it’s actually much more than that. Rarely does a hit transcend its natural chart life and boundaries to become a staple of popular culture but in the case of “Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)” by Artful Dodger featuring Craig David, it surely did.

OK, let’s start with the facts. In the subsequent years, we would all come to know who Craig David was but who was/were the Artful Dodger (and no sarky replies about Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist thank you)? Well, they were songwriters and producers Mark Hill and Pete Devereux. Hill was a student at the University of Southampton who started a jazz-funk band and set up a recording studio with fellow band member Neil Kerr. Devereux was in a grunge band and met Hill after booking time in his studio. Joining forces, they produced bootleg editions of tracks including “Dreams” by Gabrielle and “You’re Not Alone” by Olive under the Artful Dodger alias which they adopted to shield their identities from potential copyright lawsuits. They developed a love of the 2-step garage as an alternative to the ubiquitous four to the floor house music (I’ve clearly no idea what I’m talking about here) and a chance meeting with Craig David via a project with a youth centre linked to Southampton football club led to the trio working together.

“Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)” was one of the tracks to be recorded from the collaboration and what a strange concoction it was. Starting off with a smooth soul sound supported by David’s tuneful vocals, when the chorus kicks in, it suffers a crisis of identity and goes…well, bonkers but that was why it was so successful. The words ‘rewind’ and ‘selecta’ are both elongated to form a jarring but memorable hook. David restyles the former as “Re-e-wind” whilst the latter is run through some sort of vocal effect (a vocoder maybe?) to make it sound like the needle is stuck in a groove. Striking a chord with clubbers and record buyers alike, it crossed over into the mainstream spending two weeks at No 2 in the UK Top 40.

The crossover didn’t stop there though. The following year, Craig David would become a huge star with his debut album “Born To Do It” (which featured a version of the Artful Dodger hit renamed as “Rewind”) went straight to the top of the charts selling 225,000 copies in its first week thus becoming the fastest-selling debut album ever by a British male solo act, a record the album still holds. That wasn’t the end of the crossovers story however. The phrase ‘Bo Selecta’ would escape its reggae origins – it was derived from a combination of ‘selector’ or DJ and ‘Bo’, an exclamation of appreciation, often simulating the sound of a gunshot – to take its place in the cultural lexicon of the time. The biggest crossover though would come courtesy of the comedian Leigh Francis whose sketch show Bo’ Selecta! would propel the phrase into common parlance but, more than that, it would single handedly destroy the career of Craig David. Or not. Depends who you talk to. In fact, it can depend on which day of the week you talk to Craig David himself about it as his opinion has differed over the years. Probably best if you ask him on a Sunday as he’s chilling then but definitely not on a Wednesday as he’s otherwise occupied.

After his nice little interaction with Jamiroquai earlier, Jamie Theakston blots his copybook by delivering a cringey intro for the next act. “In fact, in a recent survey, 8 out of 10 cats said their owners preferred Atomic Kitten. Miaow!” Oh dear. You can only hope he didn’t write those lines himself. Anyway, ignoring Theakston, this was our first introduction to those “feisty Liverpudlian lasses” (I said to ignore Theakston!) and I, for one, have no memory of their debut hit “Right Now” at all. If I think of Atomic Kitten (which admittedly isn’t very often) the songs that come to mind are “Whole Again” (obviously) and their covers of “Eternal Flame” and “The Tide Is High” – so their three No 1s basically. As for the rest of their discography, I wouldn’t have a clue. Watching this performance back though, “Right Now” isn’t as bad as I was expecting. An uptempo track with a disco feel which the trio sell with energy to burn (you can hear them geeing up the crowd before Theakston has even finished his intro so keen were they to get to it), it kind of reminds me of “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)” by Sub Sub. Kind of. I also wasn’t expecting the song’s lyrics to be so suggestive of the carnal act with lines like “Do it to me slowly” and “There’s a party in my head but you should have been in bed with me now”. Blimey!

I’m not telling you anything you don’t know about the group by stating that Atomic Kitten were the pet project of OMD’s Andy McCluskey or that original member Kerry Katona was replaced by Jenny Frost but did you know that the original line up consisted of Katona, Liz McClarnon and Heidi Range who would go on to find fame in the Sugababes? No, neither did I. Were I continuing this blog into the 2000s, no doubt I would have been reviewing Atomic Kitten on a regular basis but I’m not and I won’t be. I can’t say I’ll be making a cat’s bum face about that to be honest.

Here’s Cliff Richard! He’s still No 1 for the second of three weeks with “The Millennium Prayer”. It’s also his third consecutive week on TOTP. How the BBC must have been rueing their decision to blacklist the single from the playlists of Radios 1 and 2. Now, could a song that consisted of the words to The Lord’s Prayer set to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” have been a hit anywhere but the UK? It was certainly something that occurred to me but it wasn’t true. “The Millennium Prayer” was a No 2 hit in Australia and New Zealand and also registered in the charts of Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. One in the eye for paganists everywhere then.

Order of appearance	Artist	Title	Did I buy it?
1	Whitney Houston	I Learned From The Best	Nah
2	Mario Più	Communication	Never
3	Jamiroquai	King For A Day	Negative
4	Celine Dion	That’s The Way It Is	I did not
5	Artful Dodger featuring Craig David	Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)	Nope
6	Atomic Kitten	Right Now	No
7	Cliff Richard	The Millennium Prayer	Absolutely not

Disclaimer

I make no claim to the rights of this show and all ownership and contents including logos and graphics belongs totally to the BBC or copyright holder(s).

All opinions on the music and artists featured are my own. Sorry if you don’t agree.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002x8mb/top-of-the-pops-10121999