Top 40 of the noughties : 20-11

20. Scissor Sisters - Comfortably Numb (#10 January 2004)

The sign of a true landmark pop group is that it often becomes impossible to imagine mainstream music without them around, infiltrating public consciousness to the point where it seems the artist has always been at the forefront of the market selling shitloads of records and turning up on the radio everytime you go to the supermarket. Scissor Sisters occupied this position for much of the middle part of the decade, their fun-packed debut album landing in early 2004 and spawned numerous hit singles before follow-up 'Ta-Dah!' and its inescapable lead single 'I don't feel like dancing' continued the trend two years later. Both albums topped the charts and dominated sales, their debut edging out Keane's infinitely less cheery 'Hopes and Fears' to claim the mantle of 2004's best-seller whilst its successor came close to repeating the feat in 2006, and their reign over the world of pop seemed impregnable for a good portion of the mid-noughties.

So let's trace the campaign back to its origins - emerging from the New York gay scene and named after a slang term for lesbians, the band announced their arrival on planet pop with the strangest possible choice for a debut single : a Pink Floyd cover. Their high-pitched disco revamp of Floyd's stadium staple 'Comfortably Numb' defied doubters by managing to respect the spirit of the original despite changing it into an almost unrecognisable beast - Roger Water's drugged-up paranoid lyrics were yelped out Bee Gees style over a pulsating club beat, dragging the song onto the dancefloor and into a new era. Many critics expecting to hate it were surprised at how much they liked the band's cover, and its release in Janaury of 2004 set things up for the band to dominate the rest of the year with a string of excellet singles to emerge as lords of the manor as it drew to a close 11 months later. The high-octane fun of their debut may have been dulled through over exposure and the slightly disappointing follow-up, but back in the halycon days of their first album the sisters were pop's brighest sparks - after years of lumpen guitar rock like Travis and white bread soul à la Dido, the charts had been taken back over by a pop act worthy of the name. Say what you like about Scissor Sisters a few years down the line - the decade would have been boring without them.

19. O-Zone - Dragostea Din Tei (#3 April 2004)

One thing the last decade has lacked has been a bit of decent Europop. After the 90s provided us with an absolute deluge of cheesy yet loveable Eurodance in the shape of 2 Unlimited, Aqua et al, the noughties have been a barren land for all that is goonish, continental and generally ridiculous. The genre has been revived slightly towards the end of the decade with the rise of acts like Cascada but even they seem to fling out more crappy cover versions rather than original material. The one bresh of fresh Euro air came in 2004 from the most unlikely of places and went on to utterly dominate the European charts in the way that only the massive Eurodance hits of the previous decade could have managed.

Moldovan pop trio O-Zone had notched up success in Eastern Europe in the decade’s early years but they were understandably invisible anywhere further West due mostly to the fact that their songs were all in Romanian – however, their style of brash bouncy Europop coupled with flambouyant videos and metrosexual pop attire endeared them to many and their hopes of notching a truly international hit were realised when ‘Dragostea Din Tei’ hit airwaves in 2003. The track, a ludicrous Euro dance club hit whose lyrics read more like a folk song than a pop hit (the title translates as something along the lines of ‘Love under the linden trees’), was one of those tunes that tapped into the collective light-heartedness of every European territory – including the UK where it reached #3, a virtually unheard of feat for a non-English language record. The track, backed by a decidedly silly video featuring the three band members dancing on the wing of a plane, reached the top of the charts in virtually every European country – the only exceptions were Italy and Sweden, where imitation versions were rush-released to beat the group to the domestic charts. We hadn’t seen this since the halcyon days of Whigfield and KWS in the 90s, where summer dance tracks swept the continent so quickly that record companies could hardly keep up with things and multiple versions of the songs would jostle for position on the charts of every country. Viral video versions of the track swept the States whilst a Spanish parody version conquered the South American market, and for a while it seemed like you would have to try pretty hard to find anywhere on planet Earth where the song wasn’t a hit single.

‘Dragostea Din Tei’ is hardly the most well-crafted song on this list, but I decided to include it as a novelty as it’s one of the hits from the last decade that nobody really saw coming. Having the entire planet bounce around to the same (admittedly not very good) tune gave us all a brief sense of unity under the same banner of cheesy pop music. For a short period it felt like you could stop wars with this tune, and although it will doubtless go down as one of the cheesiest tracks of the era I would rather pick it out as an example of how penning a catchy hit can catapult you to the top of every chart on the planet if you pitch it right. Moldova’s best export since……erm….well…..

18. Missy Elliot - Get ur freak on (#4 March 2001)

For reasons best known to themselves, NME writers decided to forgoe guitar music at the dawn of the decade and instead begin fawning over R'n'B and Hip Hop records to an unprecedented extent - maybe this was because there was only so excited you could get by the likes of Starsailor and Toploader, but the new focus on Black American music revealed some decent tunesmiths and captivating performers, none more loveable than Missy Elliot. Having arrived into the chart landscape of the late 90s alongside Foxy Brown and Lil' Kim, Missy eschewed the edgy gangster rap trappings of the former in order to cater her music towards pop radio and club dancefloors, flinging out two decent albums, a cluster of memorable hits and some groundbreaking videos in the process.

By the time the new decade dawned, she had forged a partnership with new producer extraordinaire Timbaland and unleashed 'Ger Ur Freak On' in early 2001 to instant chart success and critical acclaim. The production was hailed as groundbreaking at the time, combining Indian tablas and Hindi vocal samples with Elliot's trademark delivery but what made the track a breakthrough hit was the catchy vocal hook and the stop/start rhythmic bounciness of it all. The title of parent album 'Miss E....So Addictive' pretty much encapsulated the direction of Missy's new material - it was full of infectious,
immediate pop hits, and also gave a slightly confusing nod towards the emergent trend of ectsasy use in Hip Hop circles. Whether drugs had any role in the creation of 'Get Ur Freak On' is besides the point though - you wouldn't need to be chemically refreshed to become seized with the irrepressible urge to boogie to this, it was practically impossible to sit still when it came on the radio. Still sounding fresh nearly ten years down the line, the track laid things out for a decade of pop princesses à la Beyoncé, Kelis, Rhianna and countless others to come along and clean up with super-production R'n'B megahits - whilst they produced some undeniably great moments, few could rival Missy's breakthrough success in terms of sheer originality and unorthodox appeal. Classic pop for the noughties, this one will run and run.

17. Britney Spears - Toxic (#1 January 2004)

We all love a bit of Britney don't we? Mind you, you can pick and choose your moments - whilst she's been the mouthpiece for some of the catchiest pop tunes of the decade, she's also found herself thrust into the foreground of some truly awful pieces of cynical pop-exploitation, vulgar image rebranding and shittier-than-actual-shit plastic pop music. Since emerging clad in Catholic schoolgirl garb in 1999, her image is one that has run throughout the decade in pop culture - from her debut as a wide-eyed nymphette sworn to pre-marital chastity through to her failed marriage and ensuing shaven-headed single mother blunderings, she's been the quintessential image of the decade much in the same way Madonna was in the 1980s (although you have to admit that Madge in her heyday did seem a little more worldly wise than Britney in the noughties, who seemed happy to frolic around doing pretty much whatever her producer told her if it would sell records).

'Toxic' captures the blond bombshell at a mid-career high - taken from her fourth album 'In the Zone', the track repeated the trick of Missy Elliot's 'Get Ur Freak On' (see previous entry!) in sampling Bollywood breaks and crafted a slinky, sexy dancefloor number for Spears to frolic over in the memorable video (feast your eyes on it here). It marked her passage to a different period in her life as a perfomer - whilst her beginnings were mired in clunky Max Martin Disney pop production, by 2004 she was starting to morph into a slightly more credible perfomer, freed of the squeaky adolescent naivety of her debut and newly matured into a sassier, seductive perfomer who could take on a potential hit like 'Toxic' and give it the delivery it needed to go global. Much like Kylie's image rebranding circa 'Better the devil you know', 'Toxic' cast Britney in a different light and made many onlookers cast aside their cynicism for a moment to admit how much they actually liked the track. Follow-up ballad 'Everytime' was equally effective and the video showcased Britney in an apparent suicide attempt, and it looked like the starlet was headed towards a new performance era as a relatively serious pop prospect.

Sadly, it didn't last - a crap Bobby Brown cover came and went before her premature Greatest Hits collection landed in late 2004 to effectively draw the curtain on the first act of her career. A prolonged absence would follow during which she spent more time in the press for her bumbling actions in her troubled private life than for her music, but she returned later in the decade with another global hit ('Womanizer') and seemed good for a few more years onstage before she finally loses her marbles permanently. As the noughties draw to a close, let's try to remember her as the nubile supervixen of the 'Toxic' era rather than the calamitous descent into Hollywood purgatory that followed.

16. t.A.T.u - All the things she said (#1 August 2002)

Despite what seems like an endless stream of soundalike British and American acts dominating the pop landscape, the noughties have actually been quite musically diverse, at least in the geographical origins of the decade's biggest stars. Aside from longstanding strongholds such as Jamaica and Sweden, some of the biggest acts internationally have succesfully made the transition from stars in their own backyard to global pop phenomena - whilst Shakira is the most obvious example having traded in Latin American ubiquity for planet-straddling megastardom and a string of hits, Russia's t.A.T.u were the first to really step up a notch internationally back in 2002 with the notorious debut English-language release.

Having been groomed for pop stardom by a pop svengali in their homeland much in the same way Britney and Christina were in the States (plucked from kiddie pop troupes and marketed as a slightly salacious pop music act for the global market once they became legal), the girls shared many characteristics with the likes of Miss Spears - their debut video saw them dolled up as schoolgirls in the pouring rain, engaging in a spot of girl on girl snogging designed to back the somewhat unconvincing idea that the two were lesbians (later debunked by the girls themselves, claiming 'We've always advocated love with boundaries'). Weirdly enough, it wasn't actually as crass as it could have been - whilst Britney Spears prancing around in schoolgirl garb despite preaching pre-marital abstinence had all the trappings of middle American morality, t.A.T.u's take on the formula seemed to have a bit more Soviet mystique around it - bizarre follow-up moves such as their cover of the Smiths' 'How Soon is Now?' and narrowly failing to win Eurovision in 2003 only enhanced their image as one of pop' more weird and wonderful creations, as did the fact that the English translation of their lyrics often made very little sense. Success in the UK faltered after the mid-00s but they continue to pull audiences in South America and Japan (surprise!) and as the decade closes they rank as Russia's most successful pop act of all time. Their debut ranks as one of the biggest international hits of the noughties and ranks alongside Roman Abramovich's arrival in London as Russia's greatest cultural gift to the decade - Lord only knows what those crazy Kremlinites have in store for us over the next ten years.

15. Fischerspooner - Emerge (#25 July 2002)

We’ve been a wee bit short-changed for dance music since the turn of the millennium – compare the myraid trends and shifts over the course of the 1990s to the feeble attempts at crafting something new in the post 2000 landscape and you have to admit that there’s not really anything on a par with breakbeat, jungle or trip-hop. However, that didn’t stop people trying and there were a couple of bubbles of fresh air in there – UK Garage, New Rave and the neon beast that briefly threatened to devour the charts in the early 2000s : Electroclash.

There wasn’t really anything particularly complicated about Electroclash, it was just another shift in club culture that allowed dance music to gravitate towards festival stages and mingle with the big name rock acts. Acts such as The Rapture and Chicks on Speed succeeded in filling hipster playlists with their take on the formula, but it was Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner who set their sights on Rolling Stones-sized venues with their new band of stadium electro. ‘Emerge’ was their mission statement, a slow building club thumper that gradually whipped up into an absolute frenzy. Although their confrontational interviews took place largely in the rock press, the tunes were 100% suited to the dancefloor – unlike the later New Rave explosion, the best parts of electroclash could work in any club across the world without relying on the hipster contingent on the dancefloor to get things started. Immediate, ambitious and self-consciouly massive, the track should have been #1 across the entire planet but in the end just stalled in the mid 20s and disappeared soon afterwards. Consider this one of the decade’s great injustices – for once we had a track set to split the mainstream in two like the best rave classics of yester year but it missed the moment for some reason. Like Andrew WK’s awesome ‘Party Hard’, the tune pinpointed a moment in time and whilst it wasn’t an anthem to millions, it became a party staple for the privileged few. A tinge of nostalgia creeps over me when I think of nights out spiraling out of control to this one – as the soundtrack to a nightclub boiling over into total neo-rave frenzy, there was nothing better suited.

14. Bloc Party - Helicopter (#29 October 2004)

Indie underwent quite a transformation over the course of the decade, losing its way early on in a deluge of thrashy, tuneless 'garage rock' à la The Hives, The Vines, Jet, The Datsuns and many more like them penning two minute guitar fests extolling the virtues of being young, reckless and really rather dumb. Student Union types were bound to reclaim the dancefloors after a while and their flagship band became Bloc Party, themselves a bunch of skinny introverts looking like the Physics department reps on an episode of University Challenge.

I'll admit to judging Bloc Party on their appearance and dismissing their music as trendy student bollocks before actually listening to it properly - once I bought their bombastic debut album on a whim, I was pleasantly surprised at how much it actually rocked. Jam packed with potential singles and future live favourites, 'Helicopter' remains my favourite track on the record as it embodies what the band do so well - tightly wound and rhythmically vibrant, it chops along much like the vehicle in the title and comes suited to both indie dancefloors and bedroom philosophy sessions for the timid student in all of us. Whilst the acts that had dominated indie in the years prior to BP's emergence had favoured big, dumb and loud over intimate, clever and complex, the band marked a sea change in the genre by favouring emotional depth and sober analysis of the world around them (the track, according to some, is about George W Bush). What's more, it is perhaps the best display of the band's nimble fingered musicianship - unlike two-chord trogs like Jet, these guys were pretty handy with their instruments and didn't shy away from showing it (I saw 'em live for the first time this summer and the stage show ups the ante even more - these guys are tight).

Like many of my favourite bands (Stone Roses, Smiths), the band have declined to rely soley on the album format and have put out many of their best moments as non-album singles (Two More Years, Flux, Little Thoughts) - 'Helicopter' may not have been one of them, but as one of five tracks on their debut album to grace the singles charts, it stands as one of the moments that launched them as one of the best singles bands of the decade. Five years and numerous hits down the line, the band's future remains uncertain - even if, as rumours suggest, we may have seen the last of them the memories triggered by their music will only be positive ones. Choppy, danceable and intelligent, 'Helicopter' is the sound of indie shedding dead weight and re-emerging lean and mean for its strongest period of the decade.

13. Kaiser Chiefs - I predict a riot (#9 August 2005)

There’s about a zillion quizzes on Facebook asking you to name celebrities based on photos of them from back before they were famous, culled from high school yearbooks or childhood sports team photos. I haven’t checked out whether Kaiser Chiefs are in there yet, but chances are I’d be able to pick out at least a couple of them quicker than I did when I saw them on the cover of the NME on a plane back from Dublin – hungover and slightly confused, I had to flip backwards and forwards between the band interview and the cover photo before it eventually dawned on me : ‘Holy Crap! That’s Ricky fucking Wilson!!’.

Which, ironically, was exactly what he was hoping would happen in the interview inside – a frustrated pop star who’d been treading water for years as front man to the thoroughly unremarkable Runston Parva, Wilson and his cronies underwent an image re-tuning in the mid 2000s and re-emerged as an out-and-out pop group and set to work chronicling their everyday lives in Leeds on their debut album ‘Employment’. ‘I predict a riot’ was one of four incredible singles culled from the record and is arguably the most recognizable, a bombastic pop headrush detailing a night out in central Leeds in impressively witty fashion – sure, it was in vogue at the time to make your lyrics as familiar as possible to young British audiences but nobody did it in quite as clever a fashion as Wilson with couplets like ‘I tried to get to my taxi/A man in a tracksuit attacked me’. You didn’t need to have spent your formative years against the backdrop he was singing about to get the joke, and thousands did as the album sold by the truckload and the singles ruled the airwaves for what seemed like forever.

Wit is a valuable commodity in pop music – not everyone has it, Alex Turner has certainly retained it and Ricky Wilson may have seen his contributions reap lesser returns as the decade has progressed but he will still be remembered as one of the era’s cheekier raconteurs. ‘I predict a riot’ still gets a dancefloor going to this day and remains a timely reminder of that point in the middle of the decade where it seemed the British indie kids that had been struggling to gain recognition for years all suddenly got their dues at the same time. The subject matter may have been a less than glowing image of modern Britain, but the musical output was a great example of the kind of thing us Brits can be fiercely proud of.

12. Andrew WK - Party Hard (#19 October 2001)

A passing fad to the cynics out there, for his followers Andrew WK was a hairy bolt of energy into an indie scene too wrapped up in itself to just knuckle down to some serious rocking for a change. Once The Strokes had broken through to the mainstream, the NME had acts queuing up at the door begging for a spot on the cover as the next big thing – Andrew WK was one of the first in line and duly bagged his space on a double fold out cover in late 2001 under the banner ‘so good we have to put him on the cover twice!’ and the hype machine was in motion.

None of this would have mattered if he didn’t have the tunes to back it up, but one spin of his unspeakably fantastic debut single silenced all doubters – ok, maybe not all of them but anyone trying to voice criticism over the deafening wall of guitars that ushered in ‘Party Hard’ would have had a job making themselves heard. Seeing him perform the track live brought home exactly how simple the whole thing was – three enormous guitarists all playing the same riff, bass and drums straight off the death metal circuit (tubthumper Donald Tardy previously warmed the drumstool in Florida DM legends Obituary), plinky plonky piano lines and vocals that sounded like a werewolf coaching a rugby team, the track was the most thrilling three minutes in years and duly sent nightclub dancefloors into sweaty delirium every time it was played. I can’t describe how much I loved this record when I first heard it, and I still stick it on fairly regularly when I’m on my way to work half awake. Parent album ‘I get wet’ (featuring an infamous cover shot of WK bloodied from the nose down after a stage-diving mishap) was full of more of the same and Andrew briefly became the new face of fun for the indie renaissance of 2001.

Many didn’t get the joke of course (tour mates The Coral derided WK as a ‘sweaty fucking gimp’ during their nationwide jaunt the following year) and the chart performance of ‘Party Hard’ (an impressive yet still slightly underwhelming #19) contributed to his swift categorization as a one-hit wonder. It was never going to be career-building stuff, but this list is all about moments that have marked the decade and for me, ‘Party Hard’ sticks out like the memory of a particularly good night out. Loud, brash and thoroughly irresponsible, it’s still the quickest way to put a smile on my face after all these years.

11. Kasabian - Club Foot (#19 May 2004)

The musical landscape of the decade hasn’t been marked by a wave of never-heard-before trends like those seen in previous eras – much of what has topped the listings over the last ten years has been stuff that those of us who’ve been around a while have heard before plenty of times. The thing is, we’re probably not the ones out there buying the records – as has always been the case, the people deciding what gets into the singles charts are ‘the kids’, and they have pretty short memories. Plus, they don’t spend ages analyzing what are essentially floor-filling, crowd-pleasing mass appeal anthems trying to find some hidden meaning – they’re too busy out there having a good time to care whether the soundtrack has been around before.

I’m maybe being a little hard on Kasabian here – they’re not totally unoriginal, but a large portion of their style has been pilfered wholesale from the likes of Primal Scream, Stone Roses and any number of indie bands whose time in the sun dates back to the early 90s. But if we’re going to compare them to anyone from the previous decade, the obvious choice is Oasis whose fanbase they had succeeded in casually usurping over the course of the last few years – the Gallagher brothers weren’t re-inventing the wheel either when their debut landed in the charts, but they did succeed in bringing droves of lagered-up football fans into the record shops to partake of the phenomenon, something most of their contempories failed to do. Kasabian preached to the same congregation and saw their music instantly coupled with pissed-up festival crowds, smelly soccer hooligans and clusters of beery blokery at kicking out time in pub car parks across the nation. These are people you would rather not get stuck next to at a gig but it was hard to begrudge them their band of choice – Kasabian’s familiar blend of indie and dance provided the ideal soundtrack for a lairy night out or the half-time lull at Premier League games, it was entertainment for the masses and there was nothing round with that. ‘Club Foot’, to finally get onto the record at hand, was their debut statement of intent and pretty much sums up what they do well in four minutes – the lyrics are meaningless drivel, the music blunt force proto-Madchester thuggery and the delivery verging on boorish and irritating, but the end product was irresistible. More would follow in the same vein, but nobody’s looking tired of it for the time being.

Now that Oasis have finally closed the book, the lads from Kasabian wasted no time in declaring to the NME that they were now Britain’s biggest band – they might have some way to go before matching Noel & Liam’s vice-like grip over the nation’s airwaves back in the day, but for the moment you’d have to agree that there are few other serious contenders for the place at the top of British guitar music’s food chain. With a third hit album under their belts and pummeling live show to back it up with, there’s no sign of these guys dropping the ball any time soon.