10 July 2008
A second Eurodance number one of the year, and a second by Basshunter to boot: you people of Ireland 2008 really were determined to give it one last Celtic Tiger fling before the bad times rolled in. (Already by this point, people in my then-domicile of Paris were asking me concerned questions about the state of my homeland, whether my family had started boiling tree bark for sustenance, that sort of thing. And we haven’t even got to the banking crash yet.)
‘All I Ever Wanted’ is more of the Cascada-style ’00s Eurodance: trancey verses with corny romantic lyrics, techno chorus with chassis-shuddering beats and cheap nagging synths that duplicate the cookie-cutter vocal melody. Maybe its tribe bought it purely for the beats and the rote build-and-drop, but what did the mainstream daytime-radio-listening punter hear in this to send it to the top of our charts? Memories of an epic Saturday night out? It being number one was further proof to me that things in Ireland really had reached an irreversibly parlous state. Someone bail out the Irish singles chart!
Irish Number Ones 