2018 Music Diary Week 3: The Week Of Appropriation 22 Jan 2018 NEW MUSIC Day 19: FALL OUT BOY – Mania: Short, and making no secret of its modern pop inspiration (there’s a song here with a reggaeton beat!), Mania underlines Fall…
2018 Music Diary Week 8: The Week Of The East 1 Mar 2018 NEW MUSIC Day 52: FISCHERSPOONER – Sir: Compelling, in a glum sort of way – meandering, thoughtful synth-pop outlining the late-night territories where desire, and weariness, and resentment of desire,…
2018 Music Diary Week 4: The Week Of Peel 29 Jan 2018 NEW MUSIC Day 24: FIRST AID KIT – Ruins: Slickly produced, occasionally countrified, notes on romantic disappointment by a pair of Swedish sisters who sing with a Nordics-meet-Nashville twang. There’s…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2018: #40-#31 5 Jan 2019 "Greetings! It's me, 90's summer dance craze The Macarena. I've never really gone away, as you must surely know: the muscle memory of hand flips and hip wiggles is ingrained…
2018 Music Diary Week 5: The Week Of Lassitude 5 Feb 2018 NEW MUSIC Day 29: JOHN SURMAN – Invisible Threads: Pastoral, ruminative jazz from an English composer and saxophonist. Very much a set of mood pieces, it seems to me, whose…
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,…
TOMCRAFT - "Loneliness" 31 Dec 2019 Andrea Martin’s “Share Your Love” is an attractively crafted 1998 R&B tune about loving a philanderer. She opens with a sad idea, “Happiness seems to be loneliness, and loneliness killed…
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
28 Nov 2004
i. shepherd’s/cottage pie ii. cheese flan/pizza iii. scotch egg iv. boiled egg actually i am not going to bother you w.all the ins and outs of the GREBT PIE DEBATE, as i wz not in on its inception, and besides the militia are now formed and a stiff crackdown ordered on heretics and dissidents. Hunting […]
5 May 2011
#667, 13th July 1991 Sixteen Listens For Sixteen Weeks: An Everything I Do Liveblog This song got to number one for 16 weeks, so I decided to play it 16 times in a row, writing as I went. Play 1: And we’re off. I’ve honestly hardly heard this in the last twenty years so I […]
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 […]
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 […]
21 Nov 2013
So here we are. The 32 qualifiers for the football World Cup have been decided, which means it’s time, once again, to get ready for the POP WORLD CUP. The point of this post is very simple. If you want to be a manager in the Pop World Cup, put your name in the comments […]
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 rather begs the question – why does nobody ever talk about Band Aids 3 to 29? Take a trip down memory lane as we remind […]
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 […]
