In August 2000 a Miami club instrumental with a borrowed Salsoul hook and a little known indie singer on top went head to head with the first solo single by a Spice Girl. Everyone expected Victoria Beckham to win. Instead, Groovejet by Spiller and Sophie Ellis-Bextor took the UK number one on the final day of sales, and the Groovejet Victoria Beckham chart battle became one of the most talked about races the Official Singles Chart has ever seen.
Two singles, one release date
Both records landed in UK shops on Monday, 14 August 2000. On one side was “Out of Your Mind”, a UK garage track credited to True Steppers and Dane Bowers featuring Victoria Beckham, her first single outside the Spice Girls. On the other was “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)”, released on Positiva and already a proven weapon on Ibiza dancefloors that summer.
Groovejet had a long run up. The Italian producer Cristiano Spiller first released it as an instrumental in early 1999 on his Mighty Miami EP, naming it after the Groovejet club in South Beach, where it was first played. The track is built mainly on samples of “Love Is You”, the disco cut Carol Williams recorded with the Salsoul Orchestra. When Positiva picked it up, the label asked for a vocal because the instrumental was repetitive. That job went to Sophie Ellis-Bextor, the former singer of indie band theaudience, who wrote the topline with Rob Davis. Boris Dlugosch produced the vocal sections.
The Groovejet Victoria Beckham chart battle
The tabloids turned the week into a personal contest between the two singers. Beckham went all in on promotion, with a release day appearance at the Virgin Megastore in London’s Piccadilly Circus and record signings where David Beckham also turned up. Before release, reports even claimed her camp had asked for the Spiller single to be pushed back, something NME covered on 8 August.
Ellis-Bextor did not exactly calm things down. Speaking to NME that week, she said: “I like Victoria Beckham but I think if I was her I wouldn’t be mentioning ‘the other song’ so much.” Asked about the pressure, she added that Beckham was “a bit more worried about it than I am. She’s got more to lose.”
She was right. The midweek sales flashes had “Out of Your Mind” in front, and it was still projected to be number one until Saturday. Then Groovejet pulled ahead on the last day of the chart week and finished around 20,000 copies clear by Sunday. Beckham’s single sold 180,584 copies in its first week, the biggest opening for any solo Spice Girls single at that point, and it still had to settle for number two. BBC News summed up the result with the headline “Posh suffers chart failure”.
Handbag house beats pop star power
The result mattered beyond the gossip pages. In 2000 the UK chart was crowded with club records crossing over, and Groovejet proved that a filtered disco loop with a cool, detached vocal could outsell one of the most famous women in the country. i-D later described the race as handbag house winning out over drum and bass, while Stylus Magazine called the single “handbag house’s last hurrah”.
Groovejet finished as the eighth best selling single of 2000 in the UK and went on to top the charts in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, where it held number one for seven weeks. In the US it reached number three on Billboard’s Dance Club Play chart in 2001.
What happened next
For Ellis-Bextor the record was a launchpad. She signed a solo deal that year and released her debut album Read My Lips in 2001, turning a one off guest vocal into a long career in dance pop. Beckham’s debut album arrived just over a year later, and “Out of Your Mind” was left off it.
The long tail belongs to Groovejet too. According to the Official Charts Company, it has now passed 760,000 UK chart units, compared with 416,400 for “Out of Your Mind”. In April 2015, on the eve of Record Store Day, the Official Charts Company named it the UK’s biggest selling vinyl single of the millennium. Today the track sits in the Defected catalogue, and Billboard placed it at number 75 in its 2025 list of the 100 best dance songs of all time.
Why the story still lands
Chart battles usually reward the bigger marketing machine. This one went the other way: a record born in a Miami club, powered by a 1970s Salsoul sample and an indie singer few people outside London knew, beat a global pop star in the week she was supposed to own. If you want more of the samples and stories behind that era of club crossovers, read how Modjo built a hit from one guitar riff in Lady Hear Me Tonight, or how a single preset saved Robin S in our piece on the Show Me Love StoneBridge remix.
