1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #48 - Song #1 by Serebro

Claire: When sourpuss UK commentators bemoan the lack of potential for a British victory, they tend to overlook the paucity of their own song selections. After all, a pop gem in the form of "It's You!" by The Revelations was overlooked in favour of a tedious wine bar ballad everyone has already forgotten. It is from the east of Europe that most of the Eurovision drama comes from, and no co-incidentally, they mostly provide the best songs, and then they win. Sure, there's some dodgy block voting going on, but quality is quality. They don't send Gemini now do they? In 2007, Georgia sent an excellent OPUS III style ballad from Sopho, that had a film clip which suggested Georgia invented the light bulb. And then there was Serebro, runners up in a hideous travesty of nonsense. A wonderfully old fashioned in the lab pop group, they even had a svengali and some kind of wonderfully made up back story that just read like complete nonsense. That they came out of the traps with one of the 00s best pieces of out and out pop is, as seasoned observers of this kind of thing would guess, not a massive surprise. They had it all figured out before they started...they even have a logo. Britain sent Scooch. Not rigged at all then Wogan?

I must admit serious personal surprise that several "pop" websites who spent a lot of 2007 bemoaning the death of quality pop didn't get behind the Russians fully. After all, all the things bemoaned by said sites, namely that bands don't have a lot of glamour (Serebro had it in spades), songs with extended dance breaks (there's more or less two in Song #1s film clip), or don't really enjoy some serious lyrical trash (Song #1 has the best pie/sex interface since Noiseworks Hot Chilli Woman). They even went to the trouble to make no fewer than 13 remixes of the song, including a "black" version which was probably the second best song of last year. It is such a wonderful mix of fun and wonder and tongue in cheek camp without ever becoming disrespectful or parody, you wonder why everyone else struggles with it. They even went to the trouble of making about three or four versions of the film clip before settling on the one below, the dance mix version which revives the old pop tradition of dancing around in a car park for no apparent reason. And yet people still bought Rihanna albums...madness...absolute madness...

They don't seem to have followed it up with anything anywhere near as good - there is a song in which they stand amazed as a whale jumps over their head. Like Britney Spears, when you have such a wonderful debut single, it can be very hard to top. Unlike Britney Spears though, they didn't call Melissa Joan Hart, just the makers of Free Willy. On such delicate decisions can fates turn...this is amazing...lest we forget...