Freaky Trigger
Est. 2000
Est. 2000
Tom Ewing's Popular
Reviewing every UK #1SUGABABES – “Round Round”
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- JAMIROQUAI – “Deeper Underground” 29 May 2014 Another early 90s press darling scores another late 90s number one – except the reaction isn’t “Wow” this time but “what kept you?”. Within a year or two of turning…
- Time Considered As A Hastily Scrawled Set Of Notes On A Livejournal Beermat 30 Mar 2013 Doctor Who: The Bells Of St John This one came off as a remix of a few previous companion-intro episodes. Disembodied intelligence and London landmark from Rose, whimsical Doctor and…
- A Great Big Clipper Ship 19 May 2015 On Friday I went to the first day of Mark Sinker’s Underground/Overground conference, about the British music press from 1968-1985 - dates that spanned the rise of the underground press,…
- My Pop Year: MARA BALLS – “Elävä kivi” 23 Nov 2017 Not the last Finnophone musician I’ll be writing about, Mara Balls is the rock-name of musician and artist Maria Mattila, who’s done stints in a few Finnish hard rock bands…
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- The FT Top 25 Pubs of the 00s No 1: Glasshouse Stores 9 Jul 2010 So we get a winner, down on Brewer Street in Soho, the Glasshouse Stores was voted the number one pub of the noughties by those of us who voted. A…
- FT Periodic Table: Element 6: SUGABABES 20 Jul 2012 Freaky Trigger has been going since 1999, almost the exact amount of time the Sugababes have existed. Like the Sugababes it has had many incarnations, from breathless multi-column blog, to…
- DJ PIED PIPER AND THE MASTER OF CEREMONY – “Do You Really Like It?” 29 Dec 2015 “Jump, don’t ever stop”. One fascinating and melancholy thing lately has been watching dance music grow old. Not just as a genre, coming to terms with itself as something that…
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 hereFeatured Posts
Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? The Results, Decade By Decade.
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 […]The Cottage Industry Of Moments
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 […]The Freaky Trigger Reader’s Poll 2011: #10-#1
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 […]10cc – “Dreadlock Holiday”
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 […]Do You Feel Real, And If So I’d Like To Know…
30 Jan 2000 I. The cod-philosophical question at the centre of pop fandom is this: is pop a genre or a state? Not all records designed to be ‘great pop’ – in the sense of being good for the feet, the heart and the bank balance – make it to the Top Forty, or anywhere near. But not […]The FT Top 25 Pubs of the 00s No 1: Glasshouse Stores
9 Jul 2010 So we get a winner, down on Brewer Street in Soho, the Glasshouse Stores was voted the number one pub of the noughties by those of us who voted. A nice pub sure, but so much better than the others? To find out why it scored so highly I thought I would canvas a number […]The Magic Mill
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 […]The Freaky Trigger Top 100 Tracks Of All Time: No. 57 ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS – “Oliver’s Army”
20 Jul 2007 I semi-remember just two lines from the NME’s (Charlie Shaar Murray’s?) review of “Armed Forces” (secret unused title “Emotional Fascism”). One was that one of the other songs resembled ELP “jamming in the bottom of an oil drum”! The other — more germane to this post, as well as being true — is that “with […]FreakyTrigger on
