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Cherie Blair dance track hits Number One

Hoax of the summer?

"Will you still love me, will you still hug me, when I'm number 1?" read a story in The Independent on 4 August, which revealed the startling news that Cherie Blair, wife of the Prime Minister, was to become the summer's biggest dance hit sensation.

According to the article, a sample of Cherie singing The Beatles' 'When I'm Sixty-Four' at a Chinese press conference last month had found its way onto a dance track and become an instant hit. "The sample has serious novelty value. It's a catchy tune and an eccentric performance. When people realise it's Mrs Blair it is difficult to know how they will react but it is set to be red hot this summer," an apparent spokesman for Radio 1 in Ibiza told the reporter.

"The tune has taken off in a big way in the nightclubs all over Europe. It was treated as a bit of a joke but it's now proved to be a big favourite on the dance floor," said a "music industry source".

The news was too good to miss and suddenly every media outlet was running wild with the tale, picked up off the Internet. Most, in the best tradition of British reporting, omitting to mention the fact that they had stolen it from The Independent.

The song is "proving a hit" said the Evening Standard, stealing the same record industry quote. The same quote is then found all over the US media. The Age in Australia revealed it was "dazzling Britons on the dancefloor". The Scotsman is confident that it will "storm the UK's pop charts". The Mirror knowingly tells us it is "a hit in clubs from Ibiza to Ayia Napa". According to Sky, the single has sparked a "dance craze". The same hyperbole is repeated all over the world.*

Except, except, except. Five days after the sensational news was revealed to an astonished world, has anyone actually heard this incredible summer hit? Thousands of clubbers are, even as we speak, dancing to it, yet no one save a so-called Radio 1 spokesman and a "music industry source" has had anything to say about it. And - possibly the final proof - it hasn't appeared on any of the file-sharing networks.

Maybe we're wrong. Maybe the song is so devastatingly good that the listener's mind is incapable of remembering it mere seconds later. But it would seem that Cherie's Song will only be number one of one chart this summer and that is the Media Hoax Top Ten. ®

*With the exception of the BBC, which appears to have learnt from its numerous previous cock-ups and gone with the headline 'Mystery of Cherie's Ibiza 'hit''.

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