Going Back To My Routes: Intro 10 Oct 2013 This is a set of posts about the Pokemon series of games - one long post for each Pokemon generation. I wanted to write about something my sons cared about…
Pokémon X And Why 9 Jan 2013 GET UR FROAK ON While most of my online acquaintances were geeking out today at the thought of a new David Bowie album, our house was far more excited by…
Lost Property Office 2-8: Annoying Axl Rose 28 Aug 2013 This week in the Lost Property Office you finally, the interview you have all been waiting for. The Nabob himself of this scene, Tom Ewing, a man who tells a…
Skylanders Reprise 17 Apr 2013 My earlier Skylanders post - about the parallels between the smash game's Physical-Digital interfaces and the ongoing vinyl revival - was written without having actually played much of it. I…
The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2019: #20 - #11 1 Feb 2020 Here we go into the top twenty. At this point, those of you who have a big picture view of this kind of thing can probably do the maths and…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2018: #10-#1 23 Jan 2019 "Bonjour dudes, it's me, the Lascaux Cave Paintings, specifically the one where a bull with a spear through its arse is goring a bloke to death while a chicken on…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2015: #30-#21 8 Jan 2016 "Good morning readers, I am a humble cyanobacteria from the Paleoproterozoic Era! I am responsible for the First Great Mass Extinction Event around 2 billion years ago, when I farted…
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
8 May 2018
Eight episodes are now up: Hazel Southwell and Mark Sinker talking through the story of the UK music press from two very different angles (bcz I am old and she is not), to help start the conversation around my upcoming book. pod 1: the pilot! pod 2: uh merry memories of the nme! pod 3: […]
13 Feb 2000
England is DIFFERENT (or SPECIAL if you want to be polite) to everywhere else for many reasons, but one is because our music “industry” (it’s not an industry – making baked beans is an industry, and nobody does THAT in their spare time, writes fanzines about it or has them poured over themselves at weddings. […]
10 Jan 2012
Hi, I’m Lauryn Hill circa my breakthrough role in Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit, and it is a real pleasure to be able to present to you the top ten FreakyTrigger tracks of the year. When my mother told me I couldn’t join the choir run by a fake nun, I got really […]
10 Jul 2000
The Pokemon Phenomenon This piece was going to be an unabashed paean to Pokemania, explaining what a cracking game it was and how the mass tweener hysteria which greets every fresh Pokegame, cardset, pillow-case, or doily was a good thing inasmuch as ten-year-olds are natural obsessives and it wasn’t like they were wasting their time […]
26 Jan 2004
“Black Man Ray” is Ray Charles, who China Crisis apparently believe in. Now Ray Charles’ blackness is not a secret, so why did China Crisis see fit to remind us of it on their incomprehensibly awful single? My theories: i) They were talking about the photographer Man Ray, and asserting that he was black. Which […]
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 […]
28 Jul 2009
Here’s something I did for fun yesterday: a graph showing the % of UK #1 hits with female lead vocals, year by year. (Shared male/female leads counted half)*. (Click on it if you want it a bit clearer). The red bars are the percentage of female leads for each year. The line is a trendline […]
12 Feb 2002
There’s too much love to go around these days How much do you think I like music? Sometimes I get e-mails, angry about this or that, telling me I don’t like it at all. Sometimes I’m inclined to agree. Every now and then a poster pops up on our discussion board, I Love Music, and […]
