2018 Music Diary Week 2: The Week Of Intensity 15 Jan 2018 NEW MUSIC Day 12: Camila Cabello – Camila: Short, well-put-together pop LP which puts “Havana” fourth – I don’t really get how post-physical media track ordering works, but back in…
Twenty Eighteen, A List (i) 1 Jan 2019 This list was inspired by Brad Nelson in another place, and their excellent idea of just smushing together the things which stood out in 2018 regardless of media or format…
Album-A-Day #8: The Unquiet Groove 8 Apr 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…
PWC14: Group E Match 1 (Switzerland, Ecuador, France, Honduras) 6 Feb 2014 THERE ARE NO MINNOWS IN POP FOOTBALL. And Group E is proof, being home to the mighty Honduras, shock semi-finalists in the 2010 Tournament, and Europop 2010 stars Switzerland. France…
2018 Music Diary Week 7: The Week Of Unsettlement 23 Feb 2018 This is late, and brief, as I’ve been in France helping my parents as my Dad’s been ill. NEW MUSIC Day 43: TAL NATIONAL – Tantabara: Pell-mell afro/jazz/rock from Niger,…
The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2018: #10 – #1 4 Feb 2019 And here it is, after leaving a slightly longer gap than hoped - the Freaky Trigger Top Ten movies of the year. Firstly, before anyone says anything, Paddington 2 came…
“ITES, REEL” 19 Sep 2018 Being a melancholy appreciation on his passing of this nation’s pioneering reggae writer: the great PENNY REEL “Sing great song, down inna Babylon, show them your culture, down inna Babylon”…
The People's Pop Polls 26 Jul 2020 I started doing the People's Pop Polls on Twitter (@peoples_pop) during lockdown in the COVID-19 pandemic, as a distraction for me and others. They did this job extremely well -…
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
4 May 2010
#601, 19th December 1987, video In the comics series Phonogram, there’s a scene in which the – kind of horrible – pop DJ Seth Bingo and his indie collaborator Silent Girl are struggling to work a recalcitrant dancefloor into life. Their solution? “Play the Blondie!” – a copy of “Atomic” which literally glows as it’s […]
28 Jun 2013
We are now firmly into the BRITPOP YEARS on Popular, oh yes, so it’s time to consider its musical legacy in the only language we truly understand, viz. a ticky-box poll. We have selected 32 bands who someone, somewhere, might possibly have once described as Britpop. Tick all the ones you like and by science […]
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 […]
26 Apr 1999
The mode of the music changes, the city quakes, or at least those blocks of primer-than-thou office space quake that house the HQs of worldwide record companies. The reason, apparently, is MP3 technology, which you all know about and most of you use, and which has been the subject of acres of ruminative, pessimistic music […]
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 […]
20 Aug 2004
How Old Is Superman? One of the seemingly undefined aspect of the Superman mythos is that of his ageing. Those who fall on the side of his omnipotence in everything (the superhearing, superbreath, superhair bunch) probably think as a preternatural godhead he will live forever. Look, he has been banging around in the comics for […]
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 […]
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 […]
