WESTLIFE - "My Love" 4 Jun 2015 “My Love” is Westlife in their pomp - a seventh straight number one, leaving records trailing. They were as popular as they’d ever been, which is to say, not as…
SONIQUE - "It Feels So Good" 11 Mar 2015 Sonique’s success has a distinct feelgood factor, one of pop’s lottery-winner stories. A singer and DJ who had been on the circuit for over a decade, her closest tilt at…
Together! We Will Learn And Teach 22 Feb 2016 I am delighted to share the news that Popular (or rather me) is GOING WEST, with a speaking slot at this year's EMP Pop Conference in Seattle. You can find…
all the world on one short shelf — remembering roy carr 5 Jul 2018 Putting together a collective history for a project like this, of something you were at one time near the heart of, inevitably ends up being a series of missed opportunities.…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2017 3 Dec 2017 "Hi, I'm Barry Scott! Despite my reappearance in the nation's ad breaks this year, the amount of grime in general circulation has actually *increased* somehow! I blame the millennials and…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2014 5 Dec 2014 'Hi everyone! I'm long-haired Canadian warbler Alanis Morisette, and I'm here to remind you that you "oughta know" that submissions for the Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2014 are now OPEN!…
The Freaky Trigger Readers’ Poll 2016 15 Dec 2016 "Hello readers! It's me, last year's winner, Missy Elliott! Although 2016 has been an eventful year, I definitely hadn't forgotten about my triumphant song at all. Definitely not. And neither…
2017 Albums I Like Part 2 12 Jul 2017 I am still listening to a new-to-me LP every day! A lot - in fact, most - of those LPs come from this year. So here are 30 MORE albums…
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
11 Jan 2016
I wrote a thing for here about David Bowie and how I felt about him and what he meant to me, but then Pitchfork kindly decided they wanted to run it, so it’s below. (Original title: He Could Be Dead, He Could Be Not, He Could Be You). And to any other good pieces I […]
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, […]
2 May 2008
#389, 2nd June 1976 I was aware of this song long before I heard it – as a young boy it was quoted at me by my Dad should I ever object to tidying my room. Since my room was rarely tidy, I became very familiar with the central notion of “No Charge”. Like my Dad, I […]
20 Jul 2007
I semi-remember just two lines from the NME’s (Charlie Shaar Murray’s?) review of “Armed Forces” (secret unused title “Emotional Fascism”). One was that one of the other songs resembled ELP “jamming in the bottom of an oil drum”! The other — more germane to this post, as well as being true — is that “with […]
1 Jan 2003
101. THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS – ‘My Elastic Eye’: ‘It sounds exactly like an elastic eye!’ said Fred S. I scoffed, but you know what? – it does! Though maybe more a clockwork one – but the wobbly fuzz-bass still sounds like it’s looking, even probing the track for something. Every music-box noise here is luxurious […]
11 Oct 2006
The discerning televisual fan will be aware of the vacuum currently residing in the schedules between the 7.30pm end of Hollyoaks First Look and the 9pm commencement of Ghost Whisperer. There are only so many times one can flick between Puff Daddy jiggling next to the Lead Pussycat on TMF and the startlingly abhorrent animated […]
2 Jan 2001
On Skykicking last week, Tim touched, popwise, on the continuing cultural battle over what the eighties were or are or mean or meant. The story of mainstream rock and politics in the 1990s was among other things the story of a similar battle, that time over the sixties. On the one hand you had the […]
27 Sep 2001
What is “Panic” about? Dismissed and attacked since its release as small-minded, or snobbish, or even borderline racist, The Smiths’ anti-disco broadside continues to intrigue. On this thread, The Pinefox calls it a “yoking of two ideas” – a revolutionary fantasia and an attack on dance music – and claims that it’s the second of […]