Great Moments In Pop – The 2000s Part 29.

There were a rather large amount of dance acts to have had hits in this era, and I feel that this is one of the more interesting stories. The button pusher in this case was Josh Abrahams, an Australian who was better known as Puretone. In January 2002 “Addicted To Bass” was released, which had already been on the scene for a few years by the time this was a hit.

Now I know that when a popular song reaches no. 2, people claim that it is something of an injustice, as they feel that it is a much better song than the one that has actually topped the chart, and sometimes they might be right about this. But ultimately it is fair, as they simply did not sell enough copies to reach the top. But there have been occasions were there were computer or record label errors.

This meant that a song had missed out in what were less than fair circumstances. I have already said about the Deee-Lite incident in 1990 when “Groove Is In The Heart” missed out by the narrowest of margins which was hugely disappointing. In this case, some copies of “Addicted To Bass” leaked out to record shops a week early, meaning that they could actually be bought before the official release date.

This meant that this unexpectedly entered the chart at no. 68. And then a week later, this leapt to no. 2, which is one of the biggest climbs in the Top 75 that there has ever been. But if the leaked copies were sold in the week that they were supposed to be, I believe that this would’ve been a chart-topper. This must’ve been very frustrating for everybody involved.

I do think that this was definitely good enough to be a Number 1 single, this is one of my favourite dance hits from this era, and for a brief time this barely seemed to be off the radio. And the video is rather memorable too. Something similar happened in 2002 when “I Would Die 4 U”, a remix of a Prince song by Space Cowboy, missed out on making the Top Ten after the CD version was disqualified.

But to make up for it, they appeared on Top Of The Pops anyway, with their chart position saying “!” where the number would usually be. In May 2003, “Stuck In A Groove” was released, and this was on a different label to “Addicted To Bass”, I don’t know if that had anything to do with the mess-up with the previous single, but this reached only no. 26, not causing as much of a stir, and that’s where Puretone’s hits came to an end.