Story of the song: …Baby One More Time by Britney Spears

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on ‘…Baby One More Time’ by Britney Spears

Where it all began: Spears daydreams in the video for her debut single, ‘…Baby One More Time’ (Jive Records)

Britney Spears’ debut courted controversy in much the same way as the 1963 Goffin and King number, “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)”. Max Martin, the Swedish pop Svengali and Grammy-winning writer for acts such as the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync, had worked up something for the girl group TLC. It was called “Hit Me Baby One More Time”, but Martin felt the title would be misunderstood as endorsing masochistic violence. “I changed the ‘Hit Me’ for an ellipsis because to me it was obvious it meant ‘so let’s do it again’,” he said.

Martin sketched it out on a Dictaphone and played it back to his producer, Rami Yacoub, who immediately heard the potential. A demo was submitted to Jive Records, but when a new 17-year-old signing to the label listened to the tape, it was clear the song was destined for her. “I knew it was a hit and I wanted to record it,” Spears said.

“... Baby One More Time” was created at Cheiron studios in Stockholm, in 1998. The song was completed over a full day of recording, with Martin and Yacoub trying out different styles to see what best suited Spears’s adolescent voice.

Eventually they settled on an urban soda-pop that later came to define the Britney sound. Back in New York, Jive sent her out on that peculiarly American marketing campaign, the shopping mall tour, and the song was an instant No 1.

The video, shot at California’s Venice High School (also the setting for the 1978 movie Grease), had little do with the lyrics, but proved just as controversial. “I thought it would be really cool,” Spears said, “if we were all in school, and were bored out of our minds – like most kids are when they are in school.” She claimed credit for everything, from the choreography to her pig-tailed school-uniform look.

The song soon gathered covers, by Fountains of Wayne, Weezer and, perhaps most implausibly, Travis, as a live encore and the B-side to their 1999 single “Turn”. “It’s wrong to fob off a perfectly great song because of the way it’s being marketed,” said Fran Healy of Travis. “We opened a door to maybe a lot of people who didn’t like it in the first place; now they’ve got a version they can listen to.”