Wiki-illiams Quizz 2018. Round 13 12 Jan 2019 Which hospital: 1 Was a beneficiary of the South Sea Bubble? 2 Recalls an alternative title of Princess Diana? 3 Was built as a memorial to a solicitor’s wife at…
Wiki-illiams Quizz 2018. Round 15 14 Jan 2019 1 Which entomologist was lost in the Grimpen Mire? 2 Who drowned, aged 29, when his schooner, Don Juan, sank? 3 Who succumbed to the whirlpools of the Seine on…
ROOM 5 ft OLIVER CHEATHAM - "Make Luv" 18 Dec 2019 The sound of a subgenre on its deathbed. We’ve had some good times with filter-disco, or French touch, or whatever you want to call this woozy sound. At its best…
T.A.T.U. - "All The Things She Said" 22 Oct 2019 Nobody could claim that time and changing norms have rendered t.A.T.u. problematic; they were glaringly, undeniably skeevy from the off. Executive producer Ivan Shapovalov – who masterminded the duo’s anime…
The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2018: #40 - #31 4 Jan 2019 So as per usual I will be dispatching the movie poll results in batches of ten, which might start in a puppydog quick fashion, and finally limp out the final…
EMINEM - “Lose Yourself” 24 Sep 2019 There’s a convention in DC Comics – started by Frank Miller with Batman in the mid-80s – of “Year One” stories. You take an established character and rewind back to…
From Beyond 1 May 2015 NEW THRILL! This is an origin story. Thirty years ago, give or take a day, I went to my local newsagent and I bought a new comic. The next day…
911 - "A Little Bit More" 4 Sep 2014 The formation of minor boyband 911 is a telling vignette of how pop in the late 90s was working. The general boyband narrative is one where a managerial Svengali recruits…
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
29 Sep 2014
#817, 21st February 1999 How was I supposed to know that something wasn’t right? It was a gilded age: the commercial zenith of the music industry at the end of the 20th century. In America, its apex as a money-making force came in 1999 when – adjusted for inflation – $71 per head was spent […]
4 Jul 2018
An intriguing group for this third Pop World Cup match, with two of the sleeping giants of pop football – Sweden and South Korea – lined up against the always capable Germany and dark horses Mexico. Group of death? In a sense, they are all groups of death when YOU have the casting vote. Pick […]
14 Nov 2006
In The Beginning There Was Nothingness. IF ONLY. In The Beginning There Was The Word. NOT THE BIRD FROM L7 PULLING DOWN HER KECKS AGAIN. But neither of these are strictly true. Because the first book of the Bible Of Badness is Genesis. And if you were ever to question how bad this Bible could […]
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 […]
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, […]
30 Jun 2020
This month’s poll at @peoples_pop on Twitter is about the year 1990. This is the nerdy procedural post about how I’ve put it together and how I’m going to run it. DO NOT READ IF YOU HATE ADMIN.
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.
27 Mar 2014
#774, 20th September 1997 Every Popular entry starts with the same question: why this record? This time it’s especially loud. “Candle In The Wind ‘97” is the highest-selling single of all time in the UK, almost 2 million clear of its nearest competitor. This is as big as pop gets. But “why?” might strike you […]
