ADAMSKI – “Killer” 14 Dec 2010 From Yazoo onwards, collaborations between electronic musicians and soul singers have followed certain protocols. The singer is the star, the living presence on the right-hand side of that "featuring": the…
The Freaky Trigger Readers’ Poll 2016: #10-#1 27 Jan 2017 "Call me Ron. I'm a straightforward sort of pup, me - what you see is what you get. But when I'm not out clubbing with my six older brothers, I…
wtf moments rereading kipling #1-3 11 May 2011 For reasons old and new, I started rereading Kipling about three months ago: just as I did for O-Level Eng Lit in 1974-75 , except a lot more systematically this…
Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? Round 7: the Number 4s. 24 May 2010 Looking at today's cumulative scoreboard, we find the Teens - who led the pack for the first two rounds - continuing their gradual slide down the rankings. The Eighties are…
MADONNA – “Papa Don’t Preach” 2 Dec 2009 "Papa Don't Preach" is a fantastic record. Not because it's a star getting serious, or because it raises issues, or because it 'tackles' anything in particular. It's not a newspaper…
WESTLIFE – “Uptown Girl” 10 Sep 2015 Features the best joke on a Comic Relief single - a girl gets bored of her “whitebread world”, and instead she chooses Westlife. But the video for “Uptown Girl” –…
EMINEM – “Without Me” 14 Sep 2017 Eminem produced “Without Me” himself, and the sound of this song is the best thing about it, a thick, soupy, snaky bassline and a brutally four-square beat. Ironic that this…
About the Author
I like trashy telly. So far I have written four songs for my Hollyoaks musical, despite having gone off Hollyoaks.
21 Dec 2009
Well, that’s that: the machine has been given a good beating and we can look forward to “Bulls On Parade” on the festive Argos ad next year. I will admit I didn’t think the RATM crew could do it: I was wrong. But as the dust settles on this most fractious and increasingly entertaining Christmas […]
9 Jul 2002
Andrew WK: I Get Wet: Pitchfork Review: Remarkable write-up of the Andrew WK album from Ryan Schrieber, Pitchforkmedia’s editor-in-chief. Remarkable because it gets Andrew WK’s music so descriptively right – “Nothing could penetrate a sound that dense. I was overcome. I tried to remember the last time anyone dared to push rock so poppily over […]
1 Sep 2002
I don’t think much of the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’ but there’s guilt and there’s guilt, isn’t there? There’s guilt for something you might be doing wrong – breaking some invisible law of taste, maybe – and that guilt you can and should kick aside. But then there’s guilt for the things you have done, […]
15 Aug 2017
Spooky happenings over on Silent London this week, where the Sound Barrier Podcast dabbles in the supernatural, otherworldly and ectoplasmic. Or rather, a pair of meditative films which use death, and the afterlife, to dwell on the nature of existence. But if that feels a little dry, don’t worry there are madmen axing down doors, […]
1 Jun 2002
1 The weather matters. Saturday 1st June: 8pm, and the sky out of my window is still fading pale blue, weightless, benevolent. A jubilee weekend of rain would be a symbolic down: but then, we are long used to finding a meaning in the rain. Not just we aesthetes (‘I’m happy when it rains’; ‘You’re […]
10 Mar 2015
This is a post listing the records I’m listening to for my YEAR OF ROCKISM**, as outlined here (cut and pasted from Tumblr): I’m going to listen to one album on a once-a-day basis for a week, a different one each week. Not in order to write about them or anything, unless I decide I […]
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 […]
22 Aug 2006
Despite a brief cameo by Michael Schumacher Car, the filum Cars steers clear of German cars. Oh, there’s a VW campervan, but that is a hippy, with a typical hippy accent (its your grandad’s idea of a hippy at that, straight out of early seventies films). Equally British cars barely get a look-in. So there […]
