Whigfield – ‘Saturday Night’

23 September 1994

I’m stuck in the overcrowded stairway of a dangerously heaving city-centre basement nightclub at a freshers’ disco, trying to wriggle a square inch of room to slip off my coat before I pass out from the heat. It’s September 1994. The song playing is Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’. That’s it; that’s the anecdote. Anyway, this unglamorous reminiscence is brought to you by my hearing ‘Saturday Night’ again. If you were of sentient age in 1994 then even just reading the song title you’re already having a Proustian rush of your own, hopefully one more interesting. Far more than Riverdance, USA ’94 or the Guinness ad, Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’ is the distilled essence of that time. I went to other discos then too, you know, and always heard that song; maybe that memory is because it was my first night out in the big city as a naive and newly-arrived student. ‘Saturday Night’ was the sound of an exciting night out, or at least its potential.

Even as an indie kid, more concerned at the time with Suede’s staffing problems, I had no problem with enforced listening to ‘Saturday Night’ as per above. I was at a disco, ‘Saturday Night’ was a disco hit, and it was a Saturday night: Q.E.D. Also, compared to the harsh pounding of Teutonic Eurodance like ‘Rhythm Is A Dancer’ and ‘What Is Love’, ‘Saturday Night’ was a welcome resurgence of lighter, bubblier Italo-house. In other words, it was more fun. A lot of this was surely down to the energetic and slightly cheeky persona of its Danish singer, Sannie Carlson. (No one seems to have found the legendary Mrs Whigfield, Carlson’s school music teacher from whom she took her British-sounding stage name.) Whigfield in the video (below) wrapped in towels and singing to the mirror surely struck a chord with disco-readying girls the world over. Also, she’s not as wilfully cartoonish as her compatriots Aqua, so even the track’s flimsy repetitiveness doesn’t get wearying or annoying: again, that spark of personality and that lighter sound go a long way. ‘Saturday Night’ has one brief—be the soundtrack to a great Saturday night out in the ’90s—and meets it to the letter.