Wiki-illiams Quizz 2018. Round 1 31 Dec 2018 RUBRIC: welcome to the FreakyTrigger wing of a quiz sat for a hundred and funfty years by some lucky/isle of man schoolkids etc blah blah bloop. Themed sets of 10…
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 FreakyTrigger Top 30 TV Shows of 2018 19 Dec 2019 Sooo...... Sorry. Four years ago I started the FT Film poll (to ape Kat's music poll - but also because they are pointless fun things to do - and might…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2014 5 Dec 2014 'Hi everyone! I'm long-haired Canadian warbler Alanis Morisette, and I'm here to remind you that you "oughta know" that submissions for the Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2014 are now OPEN!…
The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll #10-#1 16 Jan 2015 Breaker breaker, Trigger Digger buddies! You got the Big A, Ace Garp, the tucker trucker so tumshy they had to croak him twice, comin' in atcha with the top ten…
Alan Moore Knows The Score (It's One Star) 18 May 2017 Watchmen by Alan Moore My rating: 1 of 5 stars Modern comics events seem to demand endless lead-ins and spin-offs, and sadly Doomsday Clock, from the blockbuster team of Geoff…
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…
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.
30 Apr 2000
April 2000, Piccadilly The sun comes out over London and the Summer starts: everywhere you look you see people in love, snogging on the tubes and holding hands on the escalators so you can’t get past them. Baggy shorts and halter tops all over the place, kids sitting together on Eros and choking on the […]
2 May 2008
#389, 2nd June 1976 I was aware of this song long before I heard it – as a young boy it was quoted at me by my Dad should I ever object to tidying my room. Since my room was rarely tidy, I became very familiar with the central notion of “No Charge”. Like my Dad, I […]
20 Apr 2020
Update: See list of all previous Peoples Pop Polls, their winners and more here As you’ll know if you follow me on Twitter, I’ve been using the quarantine to run pop polls – there’s a UK Number 2s one about to enter its third round right now. This has been a delightful distraction for me, […]
4 Feb 2014
#757, 25th January 1997 In 1997, talking about music on the Internet means USENET, a Gormenghast of diverging and reconnecting fora whose goblin tribes gleefully rampage through each other’s chosen lairs: a thread will start on alt.music.prodigy, then careen into alt.music.spice-girls via alt.music.misc, while Discordians and trolls plot to spread it still further. Still, there […]
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 […]
24 Dec 1999
Low’s Christmas tree is a simple one, with eight plain wooden baubles. The band write four tracks themselves, offer interpretations of two carols and crooners’ favourite “Blue Christmas”, and nobody’s bothered to take credit for “Taking Down The Tree” (but it sounds like one of Low’s own). The record is packaged – beautifully – like […]
22 Jan 2009
This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.
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 […]