That Don't Impress Me Much (Shania Twain, 1999)

My mobile disco business Blame It On The Boogie! never had a residency, although for one or two hotels in the Lake District it was the go-to if they had a wedding booking. Every gig was a one-off and it was a precarious way to scrape a living.

I was almost always the sole source of entertainment at my gigs, unless you counted the wedding speeches. Only a few times did I serve as a support act for live music. Once I was playing second fiddle to a drag act. Another time the headliner was a local girl who would soon afterwards be whisked off to Los Angeles and groomed for a stardom which never quite materialised.

On one occasion I supported a four-piece covers band led by a would-be guitar hero with a large ego. He strapped on a twin-neck guitar, 6- and 12-strings as modelled by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin; but throughout the set he only played the 6-string neck. The other was all for show.

Most memorably, I was booked alongside a Shania Twain tribute act in Appleby Market Hall in the summer of 2000. Twain was at the height of her popularity, three years after the release of her enormously successful Come On Over album. The album was a record industry phenomenon – it spent 151 weeks in the Billboard Country Top Ten, entering at #1 and occupying the top spot for a total of 50 weeks.

It is still the best-selling country album in the world, best-selling studio album by a female artist and best-selling album by a Canadian performer. It is the ninth best-selling album in the world in any category. Its status is helped by the fact that Twain released three different versions of the album – the original country take in 1997, followed by pop and international versions with different mixes and running orders – to maximise its appeal to every conceivable marketing sector. To my surprise, while writing this piece, I found a copy of Come On Over on my CD shelves. No one is immune, it seems.

In spite of that, I had never heard of Shania Twain at the start of 1999 when I was returning to DJ-ing. She was “country music”, something I had never much listened to. I came across her as I gradually transferred my operations from vinyl to CD. The easiest way for me to get up to speed on current hits, having stopped buying 45s in about 1985, was to buy the Now That’s What I Call Music! compilations which came out three times a year. Now 44 included That Don’t Impress Me Much in one of the strongest Now collections ever released. It’s still, more than twenty years later, the best-selling volume of the series.

That Don’t Impress Me Much was the seventh of twelve singles culled from the sixteen-track album.I was suspicious at first. It was said at the time that Twain’s husband and producer Mutt Lange had crafted her vocal track out of thousands of digital edits to make it “perfect”. As a music snob I thought we were hearing more of Lange’s work than Twain’s as a result. As a DJ however I could not argue with success. That Don’t Impress Me Much was a guaranteed floorfiller at gigs. That’s all a DJ asks.

It’s women who dance at discos. On the few occasions when I have played a man’s request, the floor emptied and the man in question stood against a side wall nodding appreciatively or making sporadic power gestures with his limbs. Women love to dance and a song which expresses their feelings, fantasies or frustrations with the world will always be a DJ’s friend.

In that respect That Don’t Impress Me Much sits right up there with Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive and the Weather Girls’ It’s Raining Men. It mocks men who think they are god’s gift to women by virtue of their hair style or the car they drive, and its opening fanfare summons women to join in the mockery in the safety of the dance floor, something they might not always feel able to do at home.

My gig supporting “Shania Twain” was a success, and the singer did a very good impression of the woman and her music. During the fit-up however I made a classic faux pas. The singer had naturally requested that I not play anything by the real Shania Twain and of course I agreed. Then unthinkingly I put on a country music compilation CD which I had bought specially for the occasion. Sure enough, the first track was You’re Still The One, the third single from Come On Over. Instantly “Shania” turned the air blue with her furious reaction. No doubt Shania would have done the same.