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.…
My Pop Year: SERGE BEYNAUD - "Akrakabo" 7 Dec 2017 Serge Beynaud's Accelerate LP is a danceable feast, showing how Cote D'Ivoire's coupe-decale is one of those musics which can absorb almost anything, from pop-reggae to trap-style vocal exclamation. It's…
Lost Property Office 2-4: Choose Life 7 Feb 2013 Welcome back to the Lost Property Office which is reaching a critical phase in a standard University term. The duvet is still there, but the influx of lost jackets, jumpers…
marvel: a character guide 8 May 2013 As a kid I only read British comics (Beano, Dandy, Topper, Beezer, Sparky et al), and never graduated to -- or really understood -- Marvel or DC. They were too…
10 reasons it's okay to not like The Wicked and The Divine #1 18 Jun 2014 Coronations are dull things You read enough Vertigo comics in your youth (or, last week) and you have had sufficient for the next decade of ingénue audience identification figures having…
2017 Albums I Like Part 1 1 Apr 2017 Thanks to the Unheard Album Project (March mix on its way!) I am finally in a position where I can ACTUALLY DO a list of the records I've enjoyed most…
I Love It 30 Jan 2013 I see from my Twitter feed (Lena Dunham Panopticon Division) that the song "I Love It" by Icona Pop is "happening" now. That's fine by me, I like that song.…
MARIAH CAREY AND WESTLIFE - "Against All Odds" 6 May 2015 I don’t know if “Against All Odds” is the best Phil Collins song. I suspect it is. But it’s certainly the most Phil Collins song, the complete conjunction of things…
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
9 Jul 2010
So we get a winner, down on Brewer Street in Soho, the Glasshouse Stores was voted the number one pub of the noughties by those of us who voted. A nice pub sure, but so much better than the others? To find out why it scored so highly I thought I would canvas a number […]
23 Mar 2014
#773, 13th September 1997 “Whenever we played that live there would be rows of grown men crying. It was almost like these guys couldn’t cry when they needed to cry, but that song operated like a pressure valve for them and it was okay for them to cry at a big rock concert.” – Richard […]
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 May 2008
I give marks out of 10 to every song – based on whatever criteria you like, here’s your opportunity to say what you’d have given more than 6 to from 1976. Tick as many as you like. And use the comments to discuss the year as a whole, if you like.
4 Feb 2014
#757, 25th January 1997 In 1997, talking about music on the Internet means USENET, a Gormenghast of diverging and reconnecting fora whose goblin tribes gleefully rampage through each other’s chosen lairs: a thread will start on alt.music.prodigy, then careen into alt.music.spice-girls via alt.music.misc, while Discordians and trolls plot to spread it still further. Still, there […]
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 […]
22 Aug 2006
Despite a brief cameo by Michael Schumacher Car, the filum Cars steers clear of German cars. Oh, there’s a VW campervan, but that is a hippy, with a typical hippy accent (its your grandad’s idea of a hippy at that, straight out of early seventies films). Equally British cars barely get a look-in. So there […]