The Canon Crawl 16 Sep 2015 This is another one of my 'listening exercises' - in a world of enormous musical choice, I find games like these are a good way of structuring what I hear,…
R. KELLY - "Ignition (Remix)" 4 Jan 2020 So here we are. In 2014, when I wrote the entry for “I Believe I Can Fly”, acknowledging the monstrousness of R Kelly, I had plans to make this piece…
The Freaky Trigger Not-A-Poll Films Of 2014: 5-1 23 Feb 2015 "Hi I am Lorelei Linklater and I am here to present the top five Freaky Trigger Not A Poll movies of 2014, even though it is well into 2015. I…
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…
They Ask Me What The Use Is: Pop Conference 2017 5 May 2017 Last year’s Seattle Pop Conference, on Voice, was an epiphanic experience for me, reviving a part of me that had become burnt out since I stopped writing regularly about current…
Omargeddon #6: Corazones 12 Jan 2019 There’s the Mars Volta and there’s the Mars Volta Group, and it’s important to understand the difference between the two. The Mars Volta is the partnership of Omar Rodríguez-López and…
Going Back To My Routes: Sinnoh 31 Mar 2017 This is part of a series of critical essays on the Pokémon games. This one is about Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, the fourth "main series" games, and inevitably contains LOTS…
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
12 Feb 2002
There’s too much love to go around these days How much do you think I like music? Sometimes I get e-mails, angry about this or that, telling me I don’t like it at all. Sometimes I’m inclined to agree. Every now and then a poster pops up on our discussion board, I Love Music, and […]
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 […]
27 Mar 2014
#774, 20th September 1997 Every Popular entry starts with the same question: why this record? This time it’s especially loud. “Candle In The Wind ‘97” is the highest-selling single of all time in the UK, almost 2 million clear of its nearest competitor. This is as big as pop gets. But “why?” might strike you […]
18 Aug 2006
The man who invented the Gala Pie is a hero of mine. Not just because he took one of natures nicest foodstuff (namely the pork pie) and made it even better. He made it better by the addition of the hard boiled egg. But not just any old hard boiled egg. No, not only did […]
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, […]
10 Jul 2017
#924, 4th May 2002 At The Disco A scene from Phonogram III: The Immaterial Girl, by Gillen, McKelvie and Wilson, published in 2015. It’s the early 00s, at a disco somewhere in the south of England. A group of people who love music so much it’s become their life and the tools of their craft […]
