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…
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!…
Popular '94 2 May 2013 I'm glad to see the back of this year. As usual, I give songs a mark out of 10, you can too, and here's where it all gets added up.…
My Pop Year: SYD - "Know" 28 Nov 2017 On first listen I liked Syd’s Fin mainly for its Spartan vibe: low-key, late-night R&B synths. Moody and pleasant. My second listen was like my eyes were adjusting to a…
MICHAEL JACKSON - "You Are Not Alone" 9 Jul 2013 Whatever grim spirits drove Michael Jackson, they were hovering around his music long before HIStory – a double album that, through hubris or masochism (or commercial good sense) directly linked…
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…
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
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
21 May 2012
Huge weepy thanks to Bob, Pete and Sarah for immortalising us in song. And thanks to commenters past and present for making it worth immortalising.
1 Oct 2002
Introduction It was about 2 in the morning and I was trying to get a handle on Alexander the Great. I had a final exam coming up and I’d missed half the syllabus – and something else was missing; a way into the man’s head. Alexander had single-handedly destroyed the world’s largest Empire and put […]
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 Jan 2012
Hi, I’m Lauryn Hill circa my breakthrough role in Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit, and it is a real pleasure to be able to present to you the top ten FreakyTrigger tracks of the year. When my mother told me I couldn’t join the choir run by a fake nun, I got really […]
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 […]