Album-A-Day 2019 #2: Hello Pork Pie Hat 21 Jan 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 intros and miscellanea as well as the LP…
Great News For All Our Clients 11 Jul 2013 I was reading this piece on Ernst & Young and it struck me - not for the first time - that growing up reading IPC comics was the best possible…
Beamslingers 5 Apr 2014 I have finally compiled Hazel and my posts about Young Avengers (and matters related) into a series - you should be able to see it there at the side when…
THE BLUEBELLS – “Young At Heart” 6 Feb 2012 Another song where hearing the original changes your perspective on it: as a Bananarama album track, "Young At Heart" is fizzy but unusually thoughtful, a vignette of a kid growing…
rah rah ragnarok* 22 Jan 2013 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQl_RXC0gYg Beyond the hills the far horizon/In the purple evening sky/ You'll find the Valley of Valhalla/There when you die ^^^Actual Young Avengers/Old Boney M fanfic crossover aka 'By the…
Album-A-Day #3: Dwellers Under The Stove 29 Jan 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 intros and miscellanea as well as the LP…
MODJO – “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” 3 May 2015 “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” came hard on the heels of “Groovejet” as a revivalist disco hit. It also works as a despondent, pleading answer record: where Sophie Ellis-Bextor embraces the…
I Love It 30 Jan 2013 I see from my Twitter feed (Lena Dunham Panopticon Division) that the song "I Love It" by Icona Pop is "happening" now. That's fine by me, I like that song.…
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
1 Mar 1981
My name is Tanya Headon. I hate music. All of it. And I’m bloody good at what I do. Which is why, when picketing a gig of The Feeling I managed to get over 90% of the fans to agree with me that they are just soft rock bobbins and their new album is just […]
1 Jan 2003
This article was the author’s working notes for his since published book “Adorno: A guide for the perplexed”, available from Waterstones, reputable booksellers, and Amazon Introduction, by Alex Thomson In many ways Adorno exemplifies the image problem faced by critical theory today. Adorno is not a sexy figure. He comes over in his writing as […]
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 […]
10 Jul 2000
The Pokemon Phenomenon This piece was going to be an unabashed paean to Pokemania, explaining what a cracking game it was and how the mass tweener hysteria which greets every fresh Pokegame, cardset, pillow-case, or doily was a good thing inasmuch as ten-year-olds are natural obsessives and it wasn’t like they were wasting their time […]
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 […]
28 Jul 2009
Here’s something I did for fun yesterday: a graph showing the % of UK #1 hits with female lead vocals, year by year. (Shared male/female leads counted half)*. (Click on it if you want it a bit clearer). The red bars are the percentage of female leads for each year. The line is a trendline […]
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 Jul 2013
This article by Laurie Penny on the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of the manic pixie dream girl trope is really good. I’m the same age as Laurie Penny, so was plagued by the same cultural stuff as her- I don’t know if it’s just egocentrism for my own timeline but I feel like the 90s marked […]