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” –…
THE KLF ft THE CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION – “3AM Eternal” 16 Mar 2011 "Faceless". I don't know who first used this particular epithet against dance music's pop takeover, but the concept stuck. Facelessness became a stick used to beat the new music with…
About the Author
I like trashy telly. So far I have written four songs for my Hollyoaks musical, despite having gone off Hollyoaks.
1 Jan 2002
British Bubblegum Pop 1968-1972 “Sunday morning, up with the lark, I think I’ll take a walk in the park, Hey hey hey, it’s a beautiful day …” Daniel Boone, “Beautiful Sunday”, 1972 British bubblegum pop, circa 1968-1972 – as distinct from its more worldly and sophisticated American equivalent – is a pure insight into a […]
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 […]
20 Jun 2005
Last week saw the release of not one, but two films about previous films. And I don’t mean Batman Begins (which should be retitled Batman Starts for Essex). Inside Deep Throat, a documentary about the making of and the effect of notorious porn film Deep Throat. And Baadasssss!, Mario Van Peebles film about the making […]
24 Jan 2010
Here at Freaky Trigger we have realised that January has been a bit slow with output. A new year can put new strains upon our writers and what with Tom’s Guardian column and me embarking on a year without cinema, pickings have been slim. What was needed was something that would galvanise all the writers, […]
8 Aug 2008
#426, 23rd September 1978 On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain and returns to the comfort of his hotel where a woman […]
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 […]
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. […]
