Pop World Cup 2018: Group A Match 1 17 Jun 2018 It's here! The opening game of the Pop World Cup finds the four teams of Group A raising the curtain on the tournament. Pop football veterans Russia and Uruguay meet…
The UPDATED Secret History Of Band Aid 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…
The Pollards Of Lop Episode 1: Cover Versions 1 Jul 2020 Last month's Twitter poll was about Cover Versions, and to accompany it, I was joined virtually by Cis, Mark and Pete to CAST THE PODS and talk about cover versions…
Album-A-Day #5: Tarkus In Black Vinyl, Please 15 Feb 2019 This is a document of my album-a-day listening project. Each entry originally comes out as a tinyletter and subscribers to that get framing content and non-music miscellanea as well as…
Omargeddon #2: Tychozorente 25 Jul 2018 Last week at work, while creating the dashboard reports for this month’s round of governance boards, I was struck by the idea of creating an Omar Rodríguez-López music matrix. The…
Ragnarok And Roll 6 Nov 2014 The Mighty Thor, by Walt Simonson I got into comics in the 80s, a copy of Walt Simonson's Thor was one of the first Marvel Comics I bought with my…
THE CORRS - "Breathless" 1 Apr 2015 We’re halfway through 2000’s overstuffed curiosity shop of number ones, and I’ve realised something about this period’s glut of hits. The common idea is that the rapid turnover at the…
CRAIG DAVID - "Fill Me In" 25 Feb 2015 As UK Garage hit its end of the century peak, three things became clear. It could ring up the hits, like no underground dance scene since hardcore rave. It was…
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 2002
Andrew WK: I Get Wet: Pitchfork Review: Remarkable write-up of the Andrew WK album from Ryan Schrieber, Pitchforkmedia’s editor-in-chief. Remarkable because it gets Andrew WK’s music so descriptively right – “Nothing could penetrate a sound that dense. I was overcome. I tried to remember the last time anyone dared to push rock so poppily over […]
30 Jan 2000
I. The cod-philosophical question at the centre of pop fandom is this: is pop a genre or a state? Not all records designed to be ‘great pop’ – in the sense of being good for the feet, the heart and the bank balance – make it to the Top Forty, or anywhere near. But not […]
15 Aug 2007
On my eleventh birthday I received a copy of a tape called “Rave ’92” through the post from my sister Grace, who was away at university. It was the second tape she had made for me whilst she was away, (the first being a random mix of grebo, soul, indie and ‘Love Shack’ by the […]
8 Aug 2008
#426, 23rd September 1978 On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain and returns to the comfort of his hotel where a woman […]
3 Sep 2007
Mars Planets: the atomisation of the Mars Bar. An entropic dis-integration, the tendency of all things to become more chaotic, in confectionery form. I’m trying to resist the impulse to tie this stuff up to no-such-thing-as-Society atomisation because that’s not how we do things, right? And Mars Planets are better to share than a proper big […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]