The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2015 18 Dec 2015 "Hi I am Kevin Costner, star of Waterworld and The Postman, but in this instance from the poorly German Dubbed Version of Swing Vote, here to sell to you the…
Feeding The 13,000 14 Jan 2016 Last night, in my commitment to not kowtow to the critics, I decided to watch 2014 flop comedy Let's Be Cops. It was, I believe, reviewed particularly harshly because it…
The Freaky Trigger Movie AND TV Polls 2017 23 Dec 2017 Hi I am Veronica Mars. You might know me from my mid 2000's TV show Veronica Mars where I navigated the class structures of Californian High School and solved crimes…
The Sound Barrier Podcast: 5: Wall-E / The Red Turtle 31 May 2017 On the fifth Sound Barrier we have no guests, but an extremely animated discussion about - oh, did you see what I did there. We are comparing a Pixar classic…
4 U 21 Apr 2016 Six days ago I was about to do an EMP talk and I saw rumours about Prince on Twitter. I thought for a second about what I would do if…
The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2016 20 Dec 2016 “Hi I am Red Skelton, exceptionally annoying star of the 40's and 50's - trust me there was no comic turn I could flatten, or subtle humour I couldn't mug…
The Freaky Trigger Not-A-Poll Films Of 2014: 20-16 8 Jan 2015 So I saw 397 films in 2014, 156 of them in the cinema. Of those films, 148 were released in the UK in 2014 and thus would be eligible for…
From Beyond 1 May 2015 NEW THRILL! This is an origin story. Thirty years ago, give or take a day, I went to my local newsagent and I bought a new comic. The next day…
About the Author
Pete Baran: Half formed opinions on everything, three quarter formed opinions on film so that's my main topic of discussion. Started Pumpkin State and Pumpkin Pubs in 2000 which got incorporated in a Great News For All Our Readers style in 2004 into Freaky Trigger.
2 Jan 2001
On Skykicking last week, Tim touched, popwise, on the continuing cultural battle over what the eighties were or are or mean or meant. The story of mainstream rock and politics in the 1990s was among other things the story of a similar battle, that time over the sixties. On the one hand you had the […]
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 Patreon. HERE’S THE LINK. This coincides with me leaving my day job and going solo, which opens up a lot of spare time. But billable […]
19 Jan 2002
Everlasting Pop and Dexys Midnight Runners There is pop, and there is popular, and then there’s popular. And there’s also “timeless”. Sometimes when people say that a record is “timeless” – let’s pick on, oh, a U2 album – they mean it will be listened to and loved say twenty years from now. What they […]
20 Feb 2007
“[John Thelwall] also had the misfortune to be a mediocre poet — a crime which, although it is committed around us every day — historians and critics cannot forgive.” —E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class* It was called The Battle of Waterloo, and it was one of the plays offered by J. K. […]
5 May 2011
#667, 13th July 1991 Sixteen Listens For Sixteen Weeks: An Everything I Do Liveblog This song got to number one for 16 weeks, so I decided to play it 16 times in a row, writing as I went. Play 1: And we’re off. I’ve honestly hardly heard this in the last twenty years so I […]
1 Jan 2003
This article was the author’s working notes for his since published book “Adorno: A guide for the perplexed”, available from Waterstones, reputable booksellers, and Amazon Introduction, by Alex Thomson In many ways Adorno exemplifies the image problem faced by critical theory today. Adorno is not a sexy figure. He comes over in his writing as […]
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 […]
24 Nov 2006
Tarmac? What kind of a brand is that, its just the pavement, right? Wrong my friends. Tarmac is a brand and an awe-inspiring dominant one at that. I love brands whose names are synonymous with their main product, it shows an awesome degree of brand dominance when the brand name becomes subsumed into language. But […]
Pac Man: The Movie.