The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2017 3 Dec 2017 "Hi, I'm Barry Scott! Despite my reappearance in the nation's ad breaks this year, the amount of grime in general circulation has actually *increased* somehow! I blame the millennials and…
BLACK LEGEND - "You See The Trouble With Me" 13 Mar 2015 No black legends were harmed in the making of this single: Barry White, whose 1976 song forms the dislocated spine of “You See The Trouble With Me” and whose vocal…
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…
WESTLIFE - "Mandy" 1 Dec 2020 The tears are on their mind and nothing is rhyming. Sometime between previous single “Hey Whatever!” - a very non-Imperial number 4 - and this cover version, Brian McFadden decided…
hullo clouds hullo sky -- but answer came there none 30 Dec 2015 Some time during my father’s last summer, I sat with him in his garden. It was late afternoon: the sun, bright and warm but no longer overhead, was hitting the…
ROBBIE WILLIAMS - "Millennium" 4 Jul 2014 Expansive of theme, expensive of sample, “Millennium” is a self-conscious event single, carrying itself as if Number One was never in doubt. But while Robbie Williams was the biggest star…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2015: #20-#11 14 Jan 2016 "Hi readers, I'm Lionel Richie's Enormous Clay Head. You may remember me from the 'Hello' video where a visually impaired student nearly sticks her fingers right into my eyeballs -…
The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2019: #30 - #21 21 Jan 2020 Here’s the next batch of ten films. Some big studio productions and some tiny indie films too. Again it is notable how many of these films centre on women's stories…
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
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 […]
30 Dec 2005
#222, 20th August 1966 DIGRESSION: For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project: “This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous condescencion of prosperity’…the lives of the kind of people who spent the […]
23 Apr 2000
My first encounter with the exotic was on the Magic Mill at Thorpe Park, a South-East England theme park which from appearances had originally been based around a cramped zoo or city-farm set-up. At some point in the late 70s it had seemingly panicked, though, and parked itself up in order to survive. With its […]
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, […]
12 Nov 2014
The Secret History Of Band Aid Everybody remembers Band Aid. And – despite everything – most people remember Band Aid 2. And now we have Band Aid 20 30. Which rather begs the question – why does nobody ever talk about Band Aids 3 to 29? Take a trip down memory lane as we remind […]
28 Nov 2004
i. shepherd’s/cottage pie ii. cheese flan/pizza iii. scotch egg iv. boiled egg actually i am not going to bother you w.all the ins and outs of the GREBT PIE DEBATE, as i wz not in on its inception, and besides the militia are now formed and a stiff crackdown ordered on heretics and dissidents. Hunting […]
17 Jun 2010
Finally, the moment of ABSOLUTE POP TRUTH is upon us! And my goodness, what a nail-biter of a contest this has been. Halfway through the voting, two decades broke decisively ahead of the pack, establishing a lead that proved impossible to catch up with. Although one of them looked to have the edge, its rival […]
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, […]
