Hi ho, Quicksilver - away!

Timeslip moment again...

It's raining, it's miserable today, but our trusty TARDIS has whisked us away from all that, back to the naïvely optimistic world of 1997 - the year of Geri Halliwell's Union Jack dress, "Cool Britannia", Tony Blair, Dolly the Sheep, the Teletubbies, Comet Hale–Bopp and (sadly) the death of Princess Diana.

In the news in May twenty years ago: the Labour Party won a massive landslide in the General Election, ousting John Major and many of his cabinet colleagues and hoisting Tony Blair (Britain's youngest Prime Minister since 1812) to power; the Russian–Chechen Peace Treaty was signed; the Bank of England became independently responsible for UK monetary policy; in the ascendant were Katrina and the Waves (who won that year's Eurovision Song Contest with Love Shine a Light, which received a record-breaking 78.82% of the votes), Mohammad Khatami (elected Iran's first ever "Reformist" president) and IBM's Deep Blue computer (which defeated World chess champion Garry Kasparov), but there were military coups in Zaire and Sierra Leone; and we bade a fond farewell to Laurie Lee, author of Cider With Rosie. In our cinemas: Donnie Brasco, Anaconda and Liar Liar. On telly: Stars in Their Eyes, Jonathan Creek and the 2000th edition of Channel 4's weekday evening quiz show Countdown.

And in our charts this week in 1997? Leading the pack was the utterly sublime Olive and You're Not Alone [one of my favourite songs ever]. They were accompanied in the upper echelons by Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli, (the aforementioned) Katrina and the Waves, No Mercy, the faboo Cardigans [with Lovefool, another fave!], Damage, R Kelly, Shola Ama and Toni Braxton.

But holding on in there was this choon - a true dance classic that I really cannot believe is two decades old - DJ Quicksilver and Bellissima!

DJ Quicksilver - Bellissima

My, how we danced to that one...