The Friday Fun Canon Discussion And Monster Poll

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 […]

ALLLLLLLLLLIIIIIIIIIUUUUUUMS!!!!!

9 Jan 2004 Independence Day. Isn’t it marvellous? Hurrah hurrah let’s kill the stripper and those hippies! That’s the kind of morals I WANT from my films! Until the aliens bugger up by deciding just to kill EVERYBODY. Where’s the subtlety, the art, the je ne sais quoi indeed about that? Who cares when we have plucky heroes […]

Rage vs X-Factor: Winners and Losers

21 Dec 2009 Well, that’s that: the machine has been given a good beating and we can look forward to “Bulls On Parade” on the festive Argos ad next year. I will admit I didn’t think the RATM crew could do it: I was wrong. But as the dust settles on this most fractious and increasingly entertaining Christmas […]

Couldn’t Life Ever Be Sane Again?

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 […]

The Usual Excuses

2 Feb 2001 The Usual Excuses  Bowery Electric’s “Freedom Fighter” is bewitching and worrying, and not just because it was made by a band I’d put down as America’s most useless. In fact the beat Bowery Electric use on “Freedom Fighter” sounds as familiar as ever, but that for once works in the song’s favour, in the same […]

Pokémon X And Why

9 Jan 2013 GET UR FROAK ON While most of my online acquaintances were geeking out today at the thought of a new David Bowie album, our house was far more excited by the announcement of new Pokémon games – Pokémon X and Pokémon Y, the first on Nintendo’s 3DS console(1). The announcement was made by the President […]

THE BOOMTOWN RATS – “Rat Trap”

13 Aug 2008 #428, 18th November 1978 “Rat Trap” is billed – in the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles, no less – as the first punk No.1. I couldn’t recall it – my memories of the Rats themselves were vague; Geldof I knew for later good works. So I approached “Rat Trap” cold but with a frisson of definite […]

THE FT TOP 100 SONGS: 100, Sultans Of Ping FC – “Where’s Me Jumper” (1992)

4 Jan 2005 An OLD MAN and a WISE MAN are sitting on a bench. WISE MAN: Tell me, Old Man, if you had one piece of advice to give young students, what would it be? OLD MAN: I would tell them to be neither too proud or too ashamed of their music taste. The music you hear […]