My Pop Year: MARA BALLS - "Elävä kivi" 23 Nov 2017 Not the last Finnophone musician I’ll be writing about, Mara Balls is the rock-name of musician and artist Maria Mattila, who’s done stints in a few Finnish hard rock bands…
Unheard Album Project: February 2017 1 Mar 2017 These are 27 of the 28 albums I listened to for the first time in February as part of this project. (The 28th, Joanna Newsom's Divers, is not on Spotify:…
2018 Music Diary Week 6: The Week Of Wakanda 15 Feb 2018 NEW MUSIC Day 36: тпсб – Sekundenschlaf: Philip Sherburne’s Pitchfork review goes in deep on the enjoyably ridiculous backstory of this dude, how these are supposedly found tracks from the…
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…
Wiki-illiams Quizz 2018. Round 5 4 Jan 2019 Where: 1 Was Tilia reduced to 7ft? 2 Did Garry and Frank take 36 and 34 off Malcolm? 3 Did Steve and Venkat say “Enough” after 62 balls? 4 Is the venue…
CHEF - "Chocolate Salty Balls" 15 Aug 2014 Every so often on Popular I hit a knowledge gap that there’s simply no way of talking around, and this is one. I have only ever seen one episode of…
The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2017: #40 - #31 9 Jan 2018 Hi, I'm Captain Ivan Drago, the Muscles from Moscow and still Undisputed World Heavy Champion if you were the kind of person who wandered out of Rocky IV halfway through…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2014: #20-#11 14 Jan 2015 "Greetings! I'm Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. You may remember me from one of this week's University Challenge bonus rounds where one of the teams failed to recognise me 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
17 Jun 2010
Finally, the moment of ABSOLUTE POP TRUTH is upon us! And my goodness, what a nail-biter of a contest this has been. Halfway through the voting, two decades broke decisively ahead of the pack, establishing a lead that proved impossible to catch up with. Although one of them looked to have the edge, its rival […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
23 Mar 2014
#773, 13th September 1997 “Whenever we played that live there would be rows of grown men crying. It was almost like these guys couldn’t cry when they needed to cry, but that song operated like a pressure valve for them and it was okay for them to cry at a big rock concert.” – Richard […]
30 Jun 2020
This month’s poll at @peoples_pop on Twitter is about the year 1990. This is the nerdy procedural post about how I’ve put it together and how I’m going to run it. DO NOT READ IF YOU HATE ADMIN.
