the eight-and-a-half pillars of true punk 21 Jun 2018 (disclaimer: some of them are false) [This post originally went up at my PATREON: subscribers get to read posts and hear podcasts early — and help offset costs and time…
TFTACOXS* - December 12: M&S Chestnut Roast Wrap 12 Dec 2017 If buying sandwiches from a pharmacy seemed alien to me, I wonder what I would have thought about department stores selling them. I learned what Marks and Sparks was on…
ALL SAINTS - "Never Ever" 13 Apr 2014 You’re in the car with the radio on and no expectations, and suddenly you hear it: a song that stops everything around it, breaking through the playlist and announcing itself…
2021: Son Of Poll! 8 Jan 2022 Thanks to getting Covid (again!) I've made only slow progress on the poll track write-ups - in fact I only finished this selection after all the matches ended (oops). YouTube…
Omargeddon #5: Cryptomnesia 15 Dec 2018 Most Omar Rodríguez-López albums are released under his name, but there a few variations: El Trío de Omar Rodríguez-López, the Omar Rodríguez-López Quartet, the Omar Rodríguez-López Quintet, and when touring,…
The World Cup Of Four Letter Words* 18 Aug 2021 *Four Letter Word Song Titles, that is. As you all know I spend a lot of my pop time these days running elaborate Twitter tournaments. These have a lot of…
how not to write about jazz, probably 30 Aug 2018 [This post originally went up at my PATREON: subscribers get to read posts and hear podcasts early — and help offset costs and time and help me do more of…
About the Author
writer and editor bit by bit fashioning a history of the UK music press HERE https://www.patreon.com/marksink3r/posts
26 Jan 2004
“Black Man Ray” is Ray Charles, who China Crisis apparently believe in. Now Ray Charles’ blackness is not a secret, so why did China Crisis see fit to remind us of it on their incomprehensibly awful single? My theories: i) They were talking about the photographer Man Ray, and asserting that he was black. Which […]
10 Jul 2000
The Pokemon Phenomenon This piece was going to be an unabashed paean to Pokemania, explaining what a cracking game it was and how the mass tweener hysteria which greets every fresh Pokegame, cardset, pillow-case, or doily was a good thing inasmuch as ten-year-olds are natural obsessives and it wasn’t like they were wasting their time […]
19 Jan 2002
Everlasting Pop and Dexys Midnight Runners There is pop, and there is popular, and then there’s popular. And there’s also “timeless”. Sometimes when people say that a record is “timeless” – let’s pick on, oh, a U2 album – they mean it will be listened to and loved say twenty years from now. What they […]
15 Aug 2006
The Notorious Bettie Page is a film about the good old days of porn. You know, when it wasn’t exploitative, and all the girls portrayed within were not only fun loving conspirators in an art project, but believed in Jeebus too. Most film about porn are about the good old days. Inside Deep Throat told […]
30 Dec 2005
#222, 20th August 1966 DIGRESSION: For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project: “This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous condescencion of prosperity’…the lives of the kind of people who spent the […]
10 Jul 2017
#924, 4th May 2002 At The Disco A scene from Phonogram III: The Immaterial Girl, by Gillen, McKelvie and Wilson, published in 2015. It’s the early 00s, at a disco somewhere in the south of England. A group of people who love music so much it’s become their life and the tools of their craft […]
22 Jan 2009
This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.
10 Aug 2004
Distilled from several years of pop experience, here from the WORST to the BEST are ways to approach a cover version. The Acoustic Guitar: i.e. “Any good song will sound great on an acoustic guitar”, runs the prized nugget of MOJO wisdom which results in Travis mauling “…Baby One More Time”. Culprits throw up their […]
