My Pop Year: JANA RUSH - "??? ??" 6 Dec 2017 The titles of Jana Rush’s tracks on her Pariah LP have an enjoyable bluntness. “Beat Maze.” “Chill Mode”. “Frenetic Snare.” She’s been DJing and making records for over 20 years,…
Top 100 Tracks Of The 2010s Part 1 10 Jan 2020 I've been running this on the Patreon - available to patrons of any tier - but the intention has always been to export the entries onto this site in chunks.…
Omargeddon 9 Jul 2018 I came late to the Mars Volta, becoming a fan after my friend Glynnis sent me ripped copies of De-loused in the Comatorium and Frances the Mute. I’d been looking…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2017: #30-#21 10 Jan 2018 "Hullo! I'm Hero, the naughty hedgehog mascot of the 2017 World Athletics Championships. You thought I was mute, didn't you, just because I was holding up all those Bangface-style signs?…
Omargeddon #3: Octopus Kool Aid 26 Aug 2018 It would be inaccurate to say Octopus Kool Aid passed me by, but by the time I learned of its existence, I was too depressed about The Mars Volta’s breakup…
SUGABABES - "Freak Like Me" 10 Jul 2017 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…
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…
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
3 Apr 2017
So for a while myself and Pamela Hutchinson, of Silent London fame have been talking about doing a more regular podcast. And while we love talking about silent films, we also like new films too. And so The Sound Barrier was born over a Campari Spritz or four, we take a new release and we […]
8 Aug 2019
Hello Popular readers! After sixteen years, and suffering from (as you’ll have noticed) a much slower posting rate, I’ve come to a decision. I’m going to crowdfund this project, using Patreon. HERE’S THE LINK. This coincides with me leaving my day job and going solo, which opens up a lot of spare time. But billable […]
4 Sep 2009
#543, 15th December 1984, video “Do They Know It’s Christmas” is significant in one way, and insignificant in another. First, it raised a lot of awareness and money and established the pop single as an excellent mechanism for doing those things. This was significant. Gargantuan “supergroups” like this fell out of favour but charity records […]
4 Feb 2014
#757, 25th January 1997 In 1997, talking about music on the Internet means USENET, a Gormenghast of diverging and reconnecting fora whose goblin tribes gleefully rampage through each other’s chosen lairs: a thread will start on alt.music.prodigy, then careen into alt.music.spice-girls via alt.music.misc, while Discordians and trolls plot to spread it still further. Still, there […]
21 May 2008
I give marks out of 10 to every song – based on whatever criteria you like, here’s your opportunity to say what you’d have given more than 6 to from 1976. Tick as many as you like. And use the comments to discuss the year as a whole, if you like.
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 […]
13 May 2008
#394, 4th September 1976 In my teens I read a science fiction novel with a startlingly elegant twist. (I won’t mention the book’s name in case you come across it yourself.) It was about a brilliant scientist who vanishes: the book’s protagonist goes looking for clues to what happened, and becomes close to the scientist’s […]
