1. Atomic Kitten - The Last Goodbye 🟡
Is this Strawberry Fields Forever? No, it's Liverpool's other greatest band, Atomic Kitten. After that brief misleading intro, we're into a standard Atomic Kitten pop ballad. Atomic Kitten were never my favourite band but I do know pretty much all of their singles, including this one which I bought, but I didn't recognise it until the vocals came in. It feels like a weird choice to open a pop compilation with a break-up song that wasn't a huge hit - having looked at the charts, it was probably chosen because it was a new song at the time, having just come out in December 2002. The song is okay, I wouldn't say it my favourite of theirs but it's better than I remember. It's very soft and sort of mumsy, and it has that middle-eight-followed-by-key-change cliché that we're going to hear again on this disc. I wouldn't buy this song if it came out now.
2. Blue - One Love 🟡
I recognised this song as being by Blue but I couldn't have identified it as One Love until the chorus. I never really liked this group when I was younger - I understand they're going for that cool urban city vibe that US boybands do well but they sound more like a male Atomic Kitten. This sounds very 2002, like it could have been cool but it's so over-produced that it sounds flat and dull. The chorus lyric "One love for the mother's pride" always made me think of bread, rather than the streets or whatever they were going for. I've never even had Mothers Pride bread, but I would rather have bread than Blue.
3. Liberty X - Holding On For You 🟡
Liberty X said "Hear'Say, but make it slutty". Made up of the leftovers from the first pop music reality show I can remember, Popstars, they hit it big in 2002 with the sexy, black-leather-music-video song of the summer Just A Little, which I guess was on the Smash Hits Summer 2002 CD. This song is a bit of a downer though. I do know it, but I don't think I cared for it. Every song so far has felt like it's all sticking to one volume, one tempo, one set of harmonies... it's very safe. All of the instruments on this sound programmed and synthetic. I can remember all of the members of this band but I didn't think any of them were in the public eye so I did a bit of 'where are they now?' Googling. Apparently a couple of them do Loose Women, and one of the men won a series of The Voice, but that's news to me.
4. Darius - Colourblind 🟢
Like Liberty X, Darius came from pop reality TV. He was considered a laughing-stock after doing a quirky Baby One More Time cover so I couldn't admit to liking this at the time but it is actually pretty good and somehow I know most of the words. It's a little bit weak and Radio 2 but I understand that he needed to come back and be commercial to prove he could do it after the show. Again it sounds dated, very 2002 - where did this music go? Darius worked with other writers on this song but it feels like his, whereas Blue's song (which they also co-wrote) sounds much more bought in. I was surprised to find that Colourblind was a number one hit but I enjoyed its brief resurgence last year when Radio 1 chose it as their 'Hottest Record In The World' for Comic Relief last year.
5. Ronan Keating - I Love It When We Do 🟠
This is peak mum music (not my mum, but you know what I mean?). I never liked this guy and I definitely don't like this song with its earworm chorus that still gets stuck in my head despite the fact I haven't heard it for many years. Everything about this kind of music, and Ronan Keating, sounds like it was made to be in some British romcom of the era. The verses are forgettable but the chorus, which goes "I love it when we do what we do cos we do what we do til it's done" is unfortunately memorable. I hate that I'm going to have stupid lines like that and "I love it when we kiss and we hug and you're cuter than a bug in a rug" in my head again now. I prayed for this to end.
6. Busted - What I Go To School For 🟢
Yes! This is my shit! I stanned Busted from the minute I first heard this song. Without checking I can tell you it got to number 3 in September 2002. It's really cheeky and is the poppiest possible iteration of pop punk. It's light and accessible, but it's very much my first step on a path that I've travelled ever since. I listened to this song on repeat at this time, on CD or cassingle in the car (sorry to my grandparents who had to put up with that) and I can still play the music video in my head, from 'Miss McKenzie' bending over in front of them at the start, them falling out of a tree while spying outside her house, right to them driving off with her at the end. I've rated it fairly low on the basis of the song itself not really standing up to the test of time but for personal importance and nostalgia reasons it's really pivotal.
7. Nickelback - How You Remind Me 🟢
I'd say this is another guilty pleasure like Darius, but this is from a time when it wasn't yet cool to hate Nickelback. Or maybe it was in the grown-up music papers, but I wasn't reading those yet. I liked this angsty rock song and again, I can picture the video with its green hue and Chad Kroeger fighting with his girlfriend. I still know the words to this song and I will admit to liking it but I can't say I'm fond of their other work. It's definitely more interesting than Blue and Ronan Keating - at least the song has some dynamics and the instruments sound real.
8. Oasis - Little By Little 🟡
This is an okay song sung by Noel Gallagher. It's hard to say how aware I was of Oasis at this point. I feel like I've always been vaguely aware of Blur v Oasis (which happened when I was 2) but I'm not sure I knew any of their songs aside from Stop Crying Your Heart Out which is on another of these Smash Hits CDs. Little By Little is disappointing in comparison. It's fine, but it's not as good as the last couple of songs, and not as good as Oasis had been previously. It also has a really long outro which always loses points in my book.
9. Appleton - Fantasy 🟡
Looking at this song title it means nothing to me - all I know is that the Appleton sisters were in All Saints and I'm sure Smash Hits suggested they'd started this duo to become 'rock chicks' - I knew one of them was going out with Liam Gallagher and Wikipedia says the other married Liam Howlett from The Prodigy. That said, this sounds like Atomic Kitten again. I forgot how the song went while I was listening to it and I can vaguely remember the chorus now but my brain is mashing it up with something else. Why is everything in 2002 so slow?!
10. Britney Spears - I Love Rock'n'Roll 🟡
Britney is a year or so into coming out as a sexy singer rather than a teen idol at this point and she sounds good on this song. She's no Joan Jett, but she's still cool. However, I cannot stress enough how bad the backing track sounds. If I remember rightly, this song appears in Britney's film Crossroads and she gets up and sings it at a karaoke night. Karaoke night is exactly what it sounds like; it's really synthetic and horrible so it doesn't work without the context. Classic song, great singer, but let down so badly by the execution. No wonder it only got to 76 in the charts.
11. Romeo ft Christina Milian - It's All Gravy 🟢
Romeo, the Stormzy of his time. Even though I was starting to travel down the alternative route, I loved rap choruses so I liked this song. I didn't understand what 'it's all gravy' meant at the time, but I'm sure Smash Hits printed articles to decode the language of Romeo and his fellow So Solid Crew members. This is a nice collaboration - the two sound good together, it's very cosy - but it feels very short, like it could have done with another verse. Christina Milian felt like a big name to have on a British rap song at that time given that she was an American singer who hosted a show on the Disney Channel, but her chart positions suggest she did better over here than she did in the US so maybe it made sense for her to appear after all.
12. Charli Baltimore ft. Ashanti, Ja Rule and Vita - Down 4 U 🟢
I loved Ashanti! She sounds lush on this chorus. I've never heard of Charli Baltimore or Vita outside of this song - both are female rappers and weirdly Charli raps the last verse and seems to appear on the track the least, so I'm not sure why she's given credit as the main player. The Official Charts Company lists the track as an Irv Gotti Presents production rather than giving someone top billing, which makes more sense having heard it. All of the ladies sound good but Ashanti is the star. Ja Rule, on the other hand, sounds ridiculous. He's got a low growling voice that bulldozes his way into this track. He collaborated with Ashanti a lot but the combination here is like trying to pick up delicate porcelain with boxing gloves on.
13. Ms Dynamite - Dy-Na-Mi-Tee 🟢
I liked this song at the time too, but it might have been for the novelty element of the chorus. I feel like this UK garage/hip-hop scene was covered a lot in the music press, even the likes of Smash Hits, a lot when I was younger and it was very London-centric. Especially coming from a part of the country which has very little racial diversity, the cultural and lyrical references in songs like this perplexed me - Ms Dynamite talks about lunch at grandma's having "macaroni, rice and peas, chicken and pineapple punch" and as a kid I could not wrap my head around a single meal combining rice and pasta. Still, the song sounds good, even today.
14. Beverley Knight - Shoulda Woulda Coulda 🟠
I hated this Radio 2 soft RnB adult contemporary mum music in 2002, and I still hate it now. I remember the chorus to this song, mostly because of the stupid title - it's Ronan Keating all over again. Having songs like this on my pop CDs irritated me because you never saw Beverley Knight appearing in Smash Hits, so I didn't know who she was and yet she always got a place on Now compilations and the like. It has another of those tacky key changes and overstays its welcome.
15. Beenie Man ft Janet - Feel It Boy 🟡
This song elicited no feelings in me, positive or negative. I quite like Beenie Man's accent but the song just isn't catchy, despite it being a Neptunes production (it's got that distinctive drum pattern that screams Pharrell). I'm not opposed to Feel It Boy, but it's boring. Both of them did better - I love Dude by Beenie Man, and Janet Jackson doesn't get a chance to shine. It's interesting that the song was put out as Janet Jackson ft Beenie Man and only scraped the top 100, then the week that they flipped the names it went top 10.
16. Aaliyah - More Than A Woman 🔵
I didn't expect this song to be on here - what a pleasant surprise! I vividly remember seeing the music video for this a lot and that it said RIP Aaliyah at the end. At the time I hadn't been aware of any other music by her so it interested me that I was seeing a video by an apparently new singer who had already left us. In fact, Aaliyah had been releasing music for a decade before her tragic death in a plane crash aged only 22. Anyway, it's hard to explain what I love about this song but I think it's the hook - that riff, which is sampled from an Arabic piece, sounds incredible. Of course, Aaliyah also puts in a great performance and it's devastating that she got to number one posthumously.
17. Samantha Mumba - I'm Right Here 🟠
Looking at the title of this song doesn't spark a memory, and the song doesn't sound familiar listening to it either. In fact, I'm writing this mere hours after listening and I don't remember it now. I remember Samantha Mumba as being the black Billie Piper - they were both teen pop stars at around the same time. The song is fine but again it's all very much on one level. It's like she wants to be what Beyoncé would become in the coming years, but she's not quite there. The song is about looking for a good man or something and there's a break where she says "Could he be over there? I think they've over here!" etc which is very cheesy. We get a key change again and this one sounds the worst of all, it's like someone was taking a nap on the sound desk and accidentally knocked one of the sliders. You know that sort of wobbly sound you get when your record is warped and it kind of speeds up a bit and goes off key? It sounds like that.18. Badly Drawn Boy - You Were Right 🟠
Again, I have zero recollection of this. I know he won the Mercury Prize (a couple of years before this, it turns out) and it sounds like some post-Britpop music industry clutching at any man with a guitar and an English accent, trying to keep the spirit of 94 alive rather than accept that it's over. This song is boring as fuck. I paid attention to the verse where he was singing about Madonna - something about him having a dream she lived next door and fancied him but he turned her down - but ugh, it's so dull. I'm offended that we were giving disc space to shit like this in 2002, there's no way I'd be seeing his video on Smash Hits TV anyway.
19. Supergrass - Grace 🟠
It starts off sounding like the intro to Go Your Own Way, then there's a guitar part that sounds like a police siren. I've no memory of this song either. It sounds like The Fratellis or one of those 'landfill indie' mid-00s festival bands. It's definitely no Caught By The Fuzz, that's for sure. Almost the entirety of the song is the same line repeated over and over; something about Grace doing it for the kids that I've forgotten by now. None of the big Britpop bands were doing well in 2002; at least Elastica had the good sense to pack it in.
It starts off sounding like the intro to Go Your Own Way, then there's a guitar part that sounds like a police siren. I've no memory of this song either. It sounds like The Fratellis or one of those 'landfill indie' mid-00s festival bands. It's definitely no Caught By The Fuzz, that's for sure. Almost the entirety of the song is the same line repeated over and over; something about Grace doing it for the kids that I've forgotten by now. None of the big Britpop bands were doing well in 2002; at least Elastica had the good sense to pack it in.
20. Liam Lynch - United States Of Whatever 🔵
Finally, we're having fun again! This is so fuzzy and homemade sounding, the bass is reverberating through my bedroom floor - it's the kind of excitement Supergrass debuted with. I still know every word and every eyeroll in this little song. I took it at face value at the time but now I wonder whether there's a wider context around it. A bit of Googling says that Liam Lynch had a comedy sock puppet show on MTV in the late 90s but this song really does stand on its own. Aged 9, this song with its headbanging and sarcasm was absolutely genius. United States Of Whatever is short, a noisy punk rock outsider tacked on to the end of the CD, but for me, it's the highlight of the whole disc. Whatever.
Overall, not a great showing for this album, with half a dozen good songs and a couple of great ones. Lets hope disc 2 is better, when I get to it!
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