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…
S CLUB 7 - "Never Had A Dream Come True" 6 Jul 2015 “Never Had A Dream Come True” is enjoyably drippy, but does nothing to shake my sense that S Club 7 are the blandest proposition of this pop era. Like their…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2018: #20-#11 16 Jan 2019 "Howdy! It's me, Pizza Rat! You may remember me as the heartwarming if somewhat unhygienic meme from 2015, back in the days before... some stuff happened. Don't ask me what…
PWC14 Semi-Final: Chile v Nigeria 4 Jun 2014 Four more games to go in this Pop World Cup, and our first semi-final sees lartsaegis' Chile face off against Cis' Nigeria. Nigeria got here with a win over Ghana,…
WESTLIFE - "I Have A Dream"/"Seasons In The Sun" 31 Dec 2014 In that other great Irish exploration of the experience of death, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, the protagonist endures an afterlife built on the principle of recursion. Having murdered a…
PWC14 Quarter-Final: Chile v Japan 19 May 2014 Welcome back to the Pop World Cup, and to the first of our four quarter finals. Chile (managed by lartsaegis) reached here via what turned out to be the narrowest…
My Pop Year: AUSTRA - "We Were Alive" 12 Dec 2017 Austra’s Future Politics was one of the first 2017 albums I heard, somewhere in the weeks of dread, defiance and hand-wringing around the Trump inauguration. It’s coloured how I hear…
2018 Music Diary Week 4: The Week Of Peel 29 Jan 2018 NEW MUSIC Day 24: FIRST AID KIT – Ruins: Slickly produced, occasionally countrified, notes on romantic disappointment by a pair of Swedish sisters who sing with a Nordics-meet-Nashville twang. There’s…
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 Jan 2005
An OLD MAN and a WISE MAN are sitting on a bench. WISE MAN: Tell me, Old Man, if you had one piece of advice to give young students, what would it be? OLD MAN: I would tell them to be neither too proud or too ashamed of their music taste. The music you hear […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
24 Dec 1999
Low’s Christmas tree is a simple one, with eight plain wooden baubles. The band write four tracks themselves, offer interpretations of two carols and crooners’ favourite “Blue Christmas”, and nobody’s bothered to take credit for “Taking Down The Tree” (but it sounds like one of Low’s own). The record is packaged – beautifully – like […]
28 Jun 2013
We are now firmly into the BRITPOP YEARS on Popular, oh yes, so it’s time to consider its musical legacy in the only language we truly understand, viz. a ticky-box poll. We have selected 32 bands who someone, somewhere, might possibly have once described as Britpop. Tick all the ones you like and by science […]
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, […]