MARIAH CAREY AND WESTLIFE - "Against All Odds" 6 May 2015 I don’t know if “Against All Odds” is the best Phil Collins song. I suspect it is. But it’s certainly the most Phil Collins song, the complete conjunction of things…
Making Your Mind Up: How Eurovision Caused Brexit 10 May 2017 FAKE NEWS! But REAL POP! In April I went to Seattle and talked about Eurovision and Brexit, and now thanks to the miracle of YouTube and Bruce from my work's…
Great News For All Our Readers! 8 Aug 2019 Hello Popular readers! After sixteen years, and suffering from (as you'll have noticed) a much slower posting rate, I've come to a decision. I'm going to crowdfund this project, using…
OZZY AND KELLY OSBOURNE - "Changes" 26 Jul 2021 From one reality TV hit to another - “Changes” wouldn’t have existed without The Osbournes, an everyday story of a loveably decayed rock star and his no-bullshit manager-wife. The show’s…
EMINEM - "Stan" 10 Jul 2015 “Stan” is a murder ballad. A song - not the first or last such Eminem recorded - about killing a woman. If this seems a strange way to look at…
Omargeddon #4: Weekly Mansions 4 Nov 2018 I’ve been stuck in a funk of late. Sadly, not a George Clinton-flavoured funk, but a stank, stuck funk of my own making. My compulsive need to trace the original…
Sam Smith's and the Fitzroy Tavern 29 Oct 2016 It seemed appropriate to return to writing with a piece about the refurbed (although that's an understatement) Fitzroy Tavern and my continuing love/hate relationship with Sam Smiths. Huge swathes of…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2014: #30-#21 9 Jan 2015 "Hi everyone, I'm Tasmin Archer. You may remember me from The Harry Hill Show on TV's Channel 4, where following a freak accident that NASA have banned me from talking…
About the Author
Tom invented Freaky Trigger on a bus journey in the mid-90s. A page about what he's up to can be found here
1 Apr 2001
freaky trigger : all cure, all the time everyday – beach kyoto paris siam : : i love the cure : : cure artefacts How To Join In Cure Discussions Cure Reviews Cure Articles Other Cure Articles Cure Albums of the 90s Cure Singles of the 90s Cure Links E-Mail every week Am I Bob […]
21 May 2012
Huge weepy thanks to Bob, Pete and Sarah for immortalising us in song. And thanks to commenters past and present for making it worth immortalising.
20 Jul 2007
I semi-remember just two lines from the NME’s (Charlie Shaar Murray’s?) review of “Armed Forces” (secret unused title “Emotional Fascism”). One was that one of the other songs resembled ELP “jamming in the bottom of an oil drum”! The other — more germane to this post, as well as being true — is that “with […]
13 May 2008
#394, 4th September 1976 In my teens I read a science fiction novel with a startlingly elegant twist. (I won’t mention the book’s name in case you come across it yourself.) It was about a brilliant scientist who vanishes: the book’s protagonist goes looking for clues to what happened, and becomes close to the scientist’s […]
10 Jul 2017
#924, 4th May 2002 At The Disco A scene from Phonogram III: The Immaterial Girl, by Gillen, McKelvie and Wilson, published in 2015. It’s the early 00s, at a disco somewhere in the south of England. A group of people who love music so much it’s become their life and the tools of their craft […]
11 Jan 2016
I wrote a thing for here about David Bowie and how I felt about him and what he meant to me, but then Pitchfork kindly decided they wanted to run it, so it’s below. (Original title: He Could Be Dead, He Could Be Not, He Could Be You). And to any other good pieces I […]
17 Nov 2003
I notice elsewhere, in my absence, some young scamp over on NYLPM has started a concept piece, some say think piece entitled the Alphabet Of Pop. Now no-one knows more than myself the beauty of lists, as my Week Of Wank and Breakfast Of Banality proves. Its cheap easy journalism and also gives one a […]
14 Nov 2006
In The Beginning There Was Nothingness. IF ONLY. In The Beginning There Was The Word. NOT THE BIRD FROM L7 PULLING DOWN HER KECKS AGAIN. But neither of these are strictly true. Because the first book of the Bible Of Badness is Genesis. And if you were ever to question how bad this Bible could […]