Popular News 11 Apr 2012 Short version: Popular will be back on Friday and back to a regular schedule. Long version: Obviously Popular posts have been intermittent recently - to put it kindly. There are…
Popular Crystal Ball: 2016 – The Year Pop Broke 18 Jan 2017 Well, that was a year. It’s not what 2016 will be remembered for, but this was the year that streaming broke the charts – or fundamentally changed what they reflect.…
The Freaky Trigger Readers’ Poll 2014: #30-#21 9 Jan 2015 "Hi everyone, I'm Tasmin Archer. You may remember me from The Harry Hill Show on TV's Channel 4, where following a freak accident that NASA have banned me from talking…
BABYLON ZOO – “Spaceman” 17 Aug 2013 The nu millennium demands nu music. Twinkling neon keyboard and nebular swells of synth herald the cyberdelic overlord of compu-pop. What galactic visions have his mauve eyes witnessed? What secrets…
BRYAN ADAMS – “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” 5 May 2011 Sixteen Listens For Sixteen Weeks: An Everything I Do Liveblog This song got to number one for 16 weeks, so I decided to play it 16 times in a row,…
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tafka pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør, Duke of the Rotten Underfelting of All Culture, Marquis of the Mothed Marches, gorgeous as the fifth moon and terrible as a tummy with hammers, i bind your gnomes to slake my bed: ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR AND THEN SUBSCRIBE ---> https://www.patreon.com/marksink3r
29 Oct 2010
#641, 3rd February 1990 Sinead O’Connor is one of the finest song interpreters not just because she thinks hard about the material and the feelings locked in it, but because she’s so good at placing songs into a situation. A great example of this is her version of “Chiquitita”, warm and homely where ABBA’s is […]
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 […]
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. […]
15 Sep 2013
Ten years ago tomorrow, I started writing a review of Al Martino’s “Here In My Heart”. I’d never heard the first UK Number One, and thanks to P2P networks I had the chance. Somewhere between starting the blog entry and finishing it, I thought of reviewing all of them. I had no idea how long […]
27 Sep 2001
What is “Panic” about? Dismissed and attacked since its release as small-minded, or snobbish, or even borderline racist, The Smiths’ anti-disco broadside continues to intrigue. On this thread, The Pinefox calls it a “yoking of two ideas” – a revolutionary fantasia and an attack on dance music – and claims that it’s the second of […]
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 […]
26 Apr 1999
The mode of the music changes, the city quakes, or at least those blocks of primer-than-thou office space quake that house the HQs of worldwide record companies. The reason, apparently, is MP3 technology, which you all know about and most of you use, and which has been the subject of acres of ruminative, pessimistic music […]
12 Mar 2010
People in the Popular comments boxes are talking about “the canon”. I’m always quite curious as to which bits of the canon have ‘taken’ with a broadly pop-positive audience such as we have here. So here’s a poll, very easy to fill in, just say which of the Top 50 albums OF ALL TIME EVER […]
