

His class of holiday-makers all did it on the beach and, after their holiday was over and they’d all gone home, they asked DJs in clubs to play it, so they could do the funny dance again.

The story goes that an aerobics instructor in Valencia came across it in a record shop and created a funny dance for it. We were testing some variations on the melody at the end of the song and loved that bit so much we decided to make it the initial hook.Ī Spanish company – actually two guys from a record store – released the track initially.

The famous “Dee dee na na na” bit that Whigfield says at the beginning started as a joke. Calling it Saturday Night felt right since it was so happy and upbeat. It was a very simple song that we thought would work in clubs and on radio. Davide was the musician and I spent three days writing the lyrics. It started with just the drums and the bass.

These days, I perform hip house music as Sannie and cheesy bubblegum pop as Whigfield. But I still get calls even now, just because of Saturday Night. I was insulted a lot and had beer thrown at me on stage. I got a platinum disc, was asked to present Top of the Pops and, at one point, owned two houses in the same street in Barcelona. They said they were glad because they were fed up being No 1. In Britain, it went straight to No 1, knocking Wet Wet Wet’s Love Is All Around off the top after 15 weeks. Then suddenly labels right across Europe wanted it. I remember someone telling me: “I hated it at first, but now it’s stuck in my head.” People would hear it and start whistling it. I named myself Whigfield after my old music teacher. The song is like a nursery rhyme, with lyrics about what girls do when they’re getting ready to go out, and about getting hot when they’re out dancing. We must have done over 20 takes, then they just painstakingly spliced the best bits together. I’m the first to admit I’m no Maria Callas. ‘Wet Wet Wet said they were glad it knocked Love Is All Around off No 1. It wasn’t my kind of music, but it at least sounded unlike everything else around at the time. By the mid-1990s, I was just about to quit when they came up with Saturday Night. It’s not easy being told your music is shit. He persuaded me to sing for them.įor years, nobody was interested. One of the club DJs, Davide Riva, was part of a music production duo. I ended up scraping by, doing modelling by day and PR for clubs at night. I studied fashion design in Copenhagen, then decided to go to Milan and show the Italians how it’s done.
