The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2014: #20-#11 14 Jan 2015 "Greetings! I'm Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. You may remember me from one of this week's University Challenge bonus rounds where one of the teams failed to recognise me at…
Unheard / Unread: January 2020 24 Feb 2020 Starting in 2017, I've had the aim of listening to a new (to me) album every day. This has been - for the most part - one of my best…
Who-ular '14 10 Nov 2014 I know that some of the visitors to this site ALSO watch Doctor Who. So as an experiment to see whether a) this is true and b) what sort of…
Every Butt In The Universe: Now THAT Was A Hack 5 Nov 2016 2. Spitfire And The Troubleshooters #1 (Brown/Morelli/Conway/Trimpe/Sinnott/Morgan/Roussos) The New Universe was intended to be more ‘realistic’ than the main Marvel line – “the world outside your window” as the early…
Wiki-illiams Quizz 2018. Round 1 31 Dec 2018 RUBRIC: welcome to the FreakyTrigger wing of a quiz sat for a hundred and funfty years by some lucky/isle of man schoolkids etc blah blah bloop. Themed sets of 10…
Popular Crystal Ball: 2018 - Gotta Get Down On Friday 3 Jan 2019 By annual tradition, my rankings - best to worst - of the year's UK number one hits, with initial thoughts - very initial, I'd heard only one of these before…
And Then I Took Some Of THESE 25 Jan 2018 Mark E Smith, 1957-2018. Some things to read. My favourite ever piece or sequence of pieces on The Fall is our own Kat Stevens' stint on One Week One Band.…
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
25 Jul 2006
Or: Games I Have Known. For the sake of my patience and yours, I have mostly restricted this to games I either owned or played – ones where I read a friends’ rulebooks and only dimly remember have been ignored, with a couple of notable exceptions. If you want to know more about any of these, […]
13 Jul 2018
What if a World Cup lasted ALL YEAR? That’s the experiment we appear to be running with this year’s PWC, and a grand experiment it is too. Here we are with the fourth match, group C, which even features a team that is STILL IN the football tournament. France are one of the great exponents […]
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 […]
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 […]
18 Aug 2006
The man who invented the Gala Pie is a hero of mine. Not just because he took one of natures nicest foodstuff (namely the pork pie) and made it even better. He made it better by the addition of the hard boiled egg. But not just any old hard boiled egg. No, not only did […]
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, […]
8 Jun 2010
Here we are, at last. Here we stand at the summit of Pop Football achievement, looking back at 63 matches: some wonderful, some perplexing, some illuminating, very few boring. We’ve heard so much pop, enjoyed so many marvellous moments, and we have 30 losing managers to thank for all their research and taste. Never mind […]
15 Dec 2009
One of the things that’s fascinating about the UK Top 40 is that a device designed to be a pure expression of popularity also works as a reflection of so many other things. People buy songs: if enough people buy a song it gets into the charts, or to #1. Simple! But so simple that […]
