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
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, […]
1 Jun 2002
1 The weather matters. Saturday 1st June: 8pm, and the sky out of my window is still fading pale blue, weightless, benevolent. A jubilee weekend of rain would be a symbolic down: but then, we are long used to finding a meaning in the rain. Not just we aesthetes (‘I’m happy when it rains’; ‘You’re […]
8 Aug 2019
Hello Popular readers! After sixteen years, and suffering from (as you’ll have noticed) a much slower posting rate, I’ve come to a decision. I’m going to crowdfund this project, using Patreon. HERE’S THE LINK. This coincides with me leaving my day job and going solo, which opens up a lot of spare time. But billable […]
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 […]
17 Oct 2019
Hi all – We know some of you have had serious issues with the FT comments, both in terms of logging in on existing IDs and creating new ones. This is because of something being imposed by our hosts to stop continued spam comment attacks. We’ve taken the actions requested (updating wordpress etc) but there’s […]
5 Jul 2013
#725, 26th August 1995 BOXING? A “heavyweight battle”, the NME cover-billed it. And if “Country House” vs Oasis’ “Roll With It” was a title bout, the music press were desperate to play Frank Warren. Perhaps they had most at stake. It was, in a way, their last great fight. Many other moments define Oasis. Blur […]
18 May 2009
#516, 5th March 1983 Michael Jackson came to the title “King of Pop” in the style of a medieval ruler, carving out his realm piece by piece across a hard year of campaigning. He won some of his new subjects when he performed this song as part of a Motown anniversary special: others when he […]
20 Jun 2005
Last week saw the release of not one, but two films about previous films. And I don’t mean Batman Begins (which should be retitled Batman Starts for Essex). Inside Deep Throat, a documentary about the making of and the effect of notorious porn film Deep Throat. And Baadasssss!, Mario Van Peebles film about the making […]
