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There are some hefty bangers in the Britney Spears back catalogue, but when it comes to naming the best of them, Dua Lipa seems pretty sure.
The star revealed her top Spears smash in a high-concept video for Vogue, in which she was required to prepare cocktails that pair with some of her favourite songs.
Around halfway through, she started mixing up a Basil Smash (that’s gin, lemon juice and some “simple syrup”, in case you were wondering), a drink that Lipa first had at the festival that she and her family host every year in Kosovo, a place that they have strong ties to.
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This, reckons Lipa, is a cocktail that makes you feel “very excited, silly, giggly and fun,” – and that’s where Britney hit from 2003 comes in.
“I need to hear Toxic at the end of every single night when I’m feeling like that,” says Lipa. “It’s one of my favourite songs. I think it’s one of the greatest pop songs ever made. It makes me feel nostalgic, but also at the same time, if it came out yesterday, it would be an absolute smash.”
She’s not wrong – Toxic sounds as good today as it did when it was released, more than 20 years ago – but its writing process was anything but straightforward. In fact, according to co-writer Christian Karlsson, its various parts might never have coalesced into a song at all.
“Before Toxic became a song, basically, it was, like, 10 beats I was working on on just one given day,” he told Music Week in 2018. “I had the strings on a loop, and then I left it to think about it. The next day I came back and I listened to it and I was like, ‘This is impossible to make a song out of, but I love it!’”
Luckily, Karlsson persevered: “I didn’t know how to make it a song but I wanted to try, so I immediately looked to get some acoustic guitar in there,” he says. “It was all piece by piece – it was all about trying to make that freaking string thing work in a song without making me nuts. I’m happy we did that.”
Cathy Dennis, another of the song’s writers, also struggled with it, later telling Songwriting Magazine that the process was “sheer torture”.
“I beat myself up for seven days, not sleeping,” she admitted. “The melody came first, then I had this puzzle of trying to fit words to the right number of syllables. It was really weird. I kept writing and then re-editing myself again, and again, and again.”
Despite these initial difficulties, in hindsight, Toxic sounds like an obvious hit single, but when it was offered to Kylie Minogue, she decided to pass on it (she’s since referred to it as “the fish that got away”). What’s more, it wasn’t an immediate ‘yes’ from Team Britney, either.
“We didn’t know it was going to be a big hit or anything, because we didn’t even know if anybody was going to take the song,” Karlsson remembers. “I sent the song out to the first artist and we didn’t hear anything back. When I was in a session with Britney, I played it for her and her A&R and they were like, ‘We’ll get back to you.’”
Fortunately, Spears and her team saw sense, and Toxic went on to become one of the star’s signature songs, topping charts around the world and winning her a Grammy.
“Britney just has that tone of voice that, no matter if you like it or not, you know that it’s her,” says Christian Karlsson. “I like that you’re never going to think it’s another artist, you’re going to know that it’s her. I think that’s the most valuable thing, more than maybe being the best singer in the world – to have that tone that is recognisable is worth so much.”
Dua Lipa is one of many artists to have praised Toxic in the intervening years, and the song has undoubtedly had an influence on the sound of pop in general, proving that quirky writing and production doesn’t have to be a barrier to commercial success.
“I think Toxic resonated because it was just fresh-sounding, in so many ways, within pop music when it came out,” reckons Karlsson. “It was both original and very strong in the melody. The production was also something that people thought was very new. I think the Bollywood string thing really grabbed people’s attention.”
