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#12 DJ Luck & MC Neat – Piano Loco: The fourth consecutive hit for two of UK garage’s more popular mid-level players. #11 Artful Dodger featuring Michelle Escoffery – Think About Me: My personal favourite of the Artful Dodger hits, this is a very smooth kiss-off record with a nicely haughty vocal from Escoffery. They had a couple of bigger hits than this to come, although it was always very much Eminem + others. #10 D12 – Shit On You: Eminem now famous enough to give his mates a leg up on a record which is about as witty as its title. #4 Gorillaz – Clint Eastwood: Who wouldn’t have preferred this at #1? Great song, and the whole ‘nightmare Archies’ conceit managed to stretch into a surprisingly long and interesting chart career. RIKROK – “It Wasn’t Me” HEAR’SAY – “Pure And Simple” » Comments Was this record a bad decision? Not really. Westlife until now have offered nothing so seismic – theirs are songs of security, with drama coming not from bold choices made but from bad decisions avoided. “Uptown Girl” is a daydream of inversion, the world turned upside down so much that an ordinary boy and a rich girl might make it together. Still it’s an unusual track for them, not just in the tempo but in the way the song and its singers operate in different registers of fantasy. Its sin, which it shares with almost every 2001 cover hit, is that there’s no earthly reason to choose it over the original. So there are far worse Comic Relief singles and far worse Westlife records. But it’s not like that wasn’t part of the original’s appeal. This jolly atmosphere matches its video, though the emphasis on poor virtue’s triumph over rich vice has the sad side-effect of treating Claudia Schiffer as a prize. “Uptown Girl” becomes more of a romp – no butchery, as it always had rompish elements – and to seal that impression it’s all iced and cherried with a patented Westlife key change. On record, Westlife’s take cuts out a lot of Joel’s emotional nuance – the delicious tension between brag and daydream, the way Joel is fronting for the lads, but also thinking, what if…? In Westlife’s version, the boys are the lads, and the song is staged as a round, with different members stepping up for a verse. “Uptown Girl” in Westlife’s world involves a woman waking up to the fact she’s stuck with a pack of howling arseholes. He wants to beat the high class boys, but they’re a background detail. This puts the emphasis on a part of the song Billy Joel doesn’t stress as much – “Uptown Girl” in his reading is the fantasy of a boy dreaming that a rich girl will notice what a stand-up guy he is. But the video for “Uptown Girl” – the most entertaining thing about it – leans into just this conceit, casting the band as five honest lads working service jobs and pitched into a cartoon class-clash fantasy, against posh goons straight out of an IPC comic. Features the best joke on a Comic Relief single – a girl gets bored of her “whitebread world”, and instead she chooses Westlife.