Huge weepy thanks to Bob, Pete and Sarah for immortalising us in song. And thanks to commenters past and present for making it worth immortalising.

At this point, what differentiates the hip-hop that tops the UK charts from the stuff which peeks in lower down is legibility: not too much slang, metaphors spelled out, a flow any kid could follow. At a time when the public face of rap in Britain was Snoop Dogg on the front page of the Daily Star – “KICK THIS EVIL BASTARD OUT!” – the material crossing over commercially wasn’t likely to cause any moral panics. So the “harder edge” promised by DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince on their final album, Code Red, was highly relative.

Of course it’s easy to look at the glories of hip-hop in 1993 and draw harsh comparisons with “Boom! Shake The Room”. In the USA, the radio-driven singles chart trailed the Billboard albums list, where Snoop’s Doggystyle and Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday both went to number one. But Will Smith was playing a different game in any case, and as pop-rap “Boom!” is a roaring success. The bits that don’t work – “Many have died trying to stop my show”, oh really – are hugely outnumbered by the bits that somehow do: the patiently explained football metaphor (“in response to the way that I was kicking it”), the Jekyll/Hyde stuff, the stutter-rapping, and tying it all up Smith’s bustling enthusiasm.

The Fresh Prince’s style is not world-beating, and his lines aren’t startling. But as a training level tutporial for what rap does – still needed even at this point – “Boom! Shake The Room” is a lot better than “Ice Ice Baby” or the Turtles ever were. Not just the MCing, either: that squiggle of turntable garnish on a big walloping break is more important to the song’s charm than anything Smith does. Anyone with the slightest sympathy for it then probably has a massive personal fondness for “Boom!” now. I certainly do.

The formula for 90s Eurodance was well established by now: strobe-lit dancing to urgent beats, big-voiced singers, a rap somewhere in the middle to change up the pace. It wasn’t the most thoughtful of music, but done well it had a real kick. And “Mr. Vain”, latecomer though it was, does it very well. It’s one of the most direct Eurodance hits, and one of the most aggressive. Eurodance lyricists could tend to pseudo-profundity, or calls to spiritual awakening: there’s none of that here.

Instead “Mr.Vain” heads straight for the dark heart of the club, sketching a dancefloor predator who – like Eezer Goode – is as much metaphor as character. For drugs, lust, loss of control – who knows? The lyrics’ almost-there English works to the song’s benefit – there’s an awkward poetry to “Call him Mr Raider, call him Mr Wrong” – and for once the obligatory rap isn’t an embarrassment, with Jay Supreme’s gloating, bassy flow reminding me of knowingly devilish Chicago house classics like “Your Only Friend”. “Mr Vain” is the hustling flipside to “All That She Wants”, and almost as good a pop record.

The original “Living On My Own” was a highlight of 1985’s uneven but likeable Mr Bad Guy album, one of the tracks where the disco backing had enough muscle to carry Mercury’s imagination. That track rides on a steady, ambulatory pulse, creating the space for Freddie to run free, scatting and shrieking. For its 1992 remix, on the posthumous Freddie Mercury Album, the skibbedy-bobbedy stuff was pruned back and the mix focused on the track’s whoops and war cries, leading off with a swaggering yodel. And then for this release – carrying the song to the top of the charts – “Living On My Own” was remixed further, turned a little more sombre, that triumphant opening shout replaced with a slow synth build, in case we’d somehow forgotten that Freddie Mercury wasn’t with us any more.

Would he have enjoyed the reverence? Who knows. Later in the 90s I worked in a bookshop in Notting Hill, and it was known that Freddie Mercury had a house nearby. Each summer we would field enquiries from three or four tourists a week looking for it – usually Spanish or Italian, always very serious. Freddie seemed set to become the boring, pilgrimage-inducing kind of icon, Jim Morrison in medallion and white flares, which felt a little sad. For all its absurd ghastliness I think We Will Rock You derailed that, so there’s something in its favour.

And it’s nice that almost the last we see of Freddie Mercury comes from his solo career, where he wriggled free of his pomp rock obligations. It lets you imagine a parallel world and lost future where Mercury lived. Because – for all that this is a by-the-books remix of an old track – “Living On My Own” works. Queen never dabbled in it, but Mercury sounds terrific over house music, even when it’s not terribly creative house music. I can easily imagine him in semi-retirement, contributing the occasional show-stealing guest vocal to lucky producers. A shame it could never happen, but this is a fine, idiosyncratic way to take a bow.

From my perspective, Take That’s ubiquity was as sudden as a snowfall and apparently as permanent. This viewpoint – 20 years old, indie-leaning, straight, male – was quite irrelevant, and quite wrong: I simply had no tools to conceptualise what the band were doing and what they might mean. I don’t think I even knew what a “six pack” was, for example. For the likes of me, a clip kept circulating – the boys in an early promo vid, in leathers, having – from memory – some kind of jelly fight. Don’t worry, the clip told us, this is camp at best, these are himbos. This will pass.

By the time that video did the rounds the band had evolved fiercely and quickly: those chuckling at them had already lost, but not because the group had ‘matured’ (they played that card several times later). On paper Take That were just the Rollers Redux – a gaggle of hot boys, favourites to be played and argued over but really (those outside the circle nodded wisely) homogenous. But times had changed. In the 80s I’d bought Smash Hits, and Nick Rhodes won “Most Fanciable Human Being” year after year. But the way the divine Nick was photographed was very 60s, very chaste – more obvious make-up than Fabian, more glam hair, but the same smudged-lens pout at the core.

Now look at the video for “Pray”: total objectification, to a hilarious and impressive extent. Between the jelly fights and this oiled-up island fantasy, what’s changed is the budgeting and the degree of focus – this isn’t a band moving away from the idea that pop boys can be sold on their bodies, it’s a group doubling down on that bet. It seems to me this kind of confident boy-focused carnality was new to UK pop, and once that door was open, it never shut.

You could damn it for selling a gay club aesthetic as a representation of female desire, and now it comes off enjoyably kitsch, but a) it worked, and more importantly b) it’s an amazing intensifier for the song, bringing Gary Barlow’s tremulous devotion to hard-bodied life. Barlow’s songwriting was overhyped later, but at this point he was still the group’s secret weapon – canny and professional enough to bring the hooks but with a streak of desperate earnestness. So the classic Take That song – “Pray” isn’t their best, but it very much sets a template – wanders like a lost puppy on the verses then pulls itself together for a monster chorus. Later boy bands had the abs, occasionally the songs, but hardly ever could they sell that neediness like Take That did.

Gabrielle starts as she was to go on: a voice apparently soaked in personality singing songs with a total absence of it. Gabrielle’s throaty, worldly tone marks her out as this year’s version of that recurring chimera, the Great British Soul Hope. The GBSH – last seen on Popular in the form of Lisa Stansfield – tends to play out in a broadly similar way each time. A girl, or guy, or group with good voices and the best intentions enjoys early success, but the toxic mix of acclaim and dull material does for them.

In the case of “Dreams”, Gabrielle is halfway there already. The production is reassuringly professional, very close to the kind of powerpoint soul the Lighthouse Family would serve up later in the 90s. I think it’s the mix of strings and acoustic guitars that turns me off – two well-worn signifiers of “classy” in British pop, but they don’t play well together: the union has an inescapable beigeifying power. In fact the most interesting thing about the song is that it’s trying terribly hard for legal reasons not to be “Fast Car”. Once you learn that the original “Dreams” was built around a Chapman sample it’s impossible not to hear it, and hard not to wonder if the lack of clearance castrated the track. As for the lyrics, this isn’t strictly that other 90s curse, the motivational hit – but Gabrielle sells it like it is.

Pop reggae wasn’t invented in Gothenburg, more’s the pity. Back in 1983, UB40 had made a record celebrating the Jamaican music they grew up loving, and discovered that a lot of other people had loved it too, and even more loved the idea of loving it so long as it was filtered through the curatorial larynx of Ali Campbell. Labour Of Love made the band a fortune and froze their career: gentle weddings’n’parties reggae was what they did now.

“I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” was another single which seemed to grab the chart by the bollocks for weeks on end – though this turns out to be my loathing of it magnifying the situation. I have to admit it doesn’t sound quite as Satanic now – the backing in particular has a bit more weight than I remember (or perhaps than my cheap TV set could muster). But it’s far from a good single – the brass sounds thin, the digital whomp becomes too rigid after a while, and all the instruments are fighting a particularly pedestrian Campbell. He seems to have no idea what to make of the song, which is a flexible one – it’s been done well as seduction and addiction, but Campbell takes “can’t help” and turns it into habit. By the end “falling in love” might as well be “going to Homebase”.

(Some tiny degree of interest might be generated by the video, exploiting the song’s position as soundtrack single to Sharon Stone vehicle Sliver, and featuring mush-mouthed Ali C as a sleazeball video voyeur. Alas there’s nothing on the record to back this reading up.)

Of all the hundreds of microgenres that make pop the funnest kind of butterfly collecting, perhaps the greatest is Swedish Reggae. The first person I heard talk about Swedish Reggae was Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields at the end of the 90s, but by then its heyday was long gone. It was a holiday romance, opposites attracting, never really meant to be – a union of the sun-hardened authenticity of reggae and kitschy Scando popcraft which couldn’t truly produce anything lasting, or could it?

In fact, now I think about it, maybe there only ever was one Swedish Reggae song – this song, “All That She Wants”, so startling that you imagined a whole style around it. The sound of “All That She Wants” is disarmingly simple – high, clear, piping synths over a basic skank – but also quite perfect. It’s a cooling sound, it makes the rest of pop sound busy and overheated. As the song so poetically puts it, “It’s not a day for work – it’s a day for catching time”.

Not just time, though – with its gulf between high and low end the Swedish Reggae sound is all about creating space, and the protagonist of “All That She Wants” demands that space – she’s an utterly autonomous creature, an apex predator of romance, lonely like a polar bear is lonely. She gets all that she wants, and all that she wants is (maybe) you (for the moment). It’s a lovely touch to have her in the song only as a reported presence – her “baby” isn’t singing, nor is she, just an unplaced narrator, a witness to her as an event as much as a person.

Long version: Obviously Popular posts have been intermittent recently – to put it kindly. There are a bunch of reasons – from adjusting to a new job to the joys and demands of two small kids. But at heart, I think what I wasn’t admitting to myself how burnt out I’d got on writing about music after doing the Pitchfork and Guardian stuff: I needed a break. I would occasionally do a post, fool myself into thinking I’d do more, then just not turn that vague desire into action. It’s not the first time this has happened – Popular itself got started when I wanted to get away from writing and thinking about current music – but I’ve now had a break and feel a lot better for it.

I’m now trying something a bit different. I’m writing posts a batch at a time, instead of one at a time – since this weekend I’ve been working on the rest of the 1993 entries, and have 5 complete and 5 in note form. This still isn’t exactly churning it out, wordcount-wise, but the most important thing is I’ve really been enjoying it again. By Friday I will have enough to start posting them and I’m planning on putting new material up every Tuesday and Friday after that. Meanwhile I will have a new batch on the go.

So for anyone who’s waited it out – thankyou so much for your patience, and I hope you like the new posts. Massive thanks to everyone who’s kept FT going in the absence of new entries, commenters and contributors alike.

Britain has a Pop Establishment as surely as it has a political one, and the charity tribute gig is its equivalent of a State Funeral. The line-up for the Freddie Mercury celebration at Wembley Arena is a curious thing, reflecting not just how much of a fixture Queen had become but how awkward it was to actually place them. On the one hand a bunch of hard rock and metal acts influenced by Queen, on the other a roll-call of British pop’s great and good, queueing up to try on Freddie’s stack heels.

George Michael’s turn is preserved here: he ringleads the remaining Queen members through “Somebody To Love” and “These Were The Days Of Our Lives”, and you also get three Queen-less cover versions from a recent tour. So it makes sense to look at this more as a George Michael record than anything much to do with Queen. This stuff dates from the zenith of the Respectable George phase, a public burial of the Wham! teenpop star. Michael’s need to be taken seriously could sometimes come off as chippy, but at the scale of international fame he was operating at grand gestures (calling your album Listen Without Prejudice) were probably needed. Even so this is the least exciting George Michael release yet.

Soulful singers who hit the arena tour level of success end up having to walk a tightrope between nuance and reach – the sound has to be big enough to fill the space, and that has implications for its intimacy. On this EP you can see Michael trying a few approaches to the problem. “Somebody To Love” enjoys the bigness, borrowing its phrasing from the original and trying to get the crowd involved. “Those Were The Days Of Our Lives” – pointlessly recast as a duet – tries to exploit the emotional power of stilling a huge audience. “Calling You” – very much a singer’s song, since it’s little but a repeated, agonised phrase – simply treats the space as empty: Michael’s projection of loneliness here gets deeper into me than anything else on the EP. As for the “Killer”/”Papa Was A Rolling Stone” mash-up, on paper it’s intriguing but in reality it’s mainly a recognition game, with progressively louder cheers as more people in the arena notice what’s going on. Michael doesn’t get the songs to talk to one another in any very resonant way, and he’s not helped by how plonking the “Killer” riff sounds, released from its claustrophobic studio home.

In fact, I’m left thinking this might have been a decent studio EP. The song choice – concealed loneliness, paranoia, regret, bittersweet reminiscence, and then loneliness again, naked this time – could have made it an interesting snapshot of George Michael at his most self-conscious and brooding. Instead it’s a picture of a good singer doing his best with the logistics of high-level stardom: what results is the very definition of worthy but dull.

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 to understand her parents’ choices and compromises. Even at three minutes it runs out of ideas, but it’s a lovely, wise little song and – like all early Bananarama material – it brims with can-do enthusiasm.

Bobby Bluebell co-wrote that song and then worked it up into a hit, making two major changes – one his own, one proven otherwise in court. The bit that’s not his is the violin hook, contributed by Bobby Valentino. It’s immediately recognisable and has the unfortunate effect of pitching the redone “Young At Heart” into an unwinnable comparison with “Come On Eileen” – another fiddle-driven song about coming to terms with your parents’ lives. Even so, Valentino’s wandering violin lines are the best thing about the reworked version – switching from punchy to wistful, corny but at least not leaden.

Which is more than you can say for The Bluebells’ other addition – that lumbering chorus. “YUNG! At heart! You’re so – YU-UNG AT HEART!”. Ken McLuskey is a non-singer in the grand indiepop tradition, but unlike his rough contemporary Edwyn Collins he doesn’t have the clarity, wit, or phrasing to make up for it – he smears his way through the verses, obscuring them in favour of that bellowed refrain.

Together, the fiddle and the chorus were hooky enough to catch Volkswagen’s attention and dredge the song up from 80s limbo to irritate a whole new audience. To be honest, “Young At Heart” sounded OK rubbing shoulders with Cabaret Voltaire and JoBoxers at the fag-end of a cheap compilation tape – it was only weeks in the spotlight that made me come to hate it. But my newfound dislike of the song never faded, and I sometimes wondered why – since some of the things it does (fiddles, fresh-facedness) might be winners in another context. Finally hearing the original doesn’t improve the song, but it at least puts its failures into a kind of focus.

Shaggy’s take on “Oh Carolina” acknowledges its debt to the past right away – sampling the intro from the Folkes Brothers’ 1960 original. Not just a nod of respect, it’s a canny move, as the crackling, wheezing shanty-town piano sounded like nothing else on 1993 radio, giving “Oh Carolina” instant cut-through.

But everything about Shaggy’s breakthrough hit is shrewd. His “Oh Carolina” is shooting for crossover smash and party smash at the same time, which means that every touch the production adds – bells, brass, “Peter Gunn” bass – is trying to bring new people into the tent. It’s shameless, but it works. The Folkes Brothers’ track is shockingly raw – Count Ossie’s drums mixed aggressively high, so the group’s lilting song gets buried under their clattering, peg-legged rhythm. And you could argue dancehall works best when it’s stripped down likewise – the novelty of the riddims and the swagger of the MC mixing confrontationally, without compromise. “Oh Carolina” is comparatively eager to please, but the theme park version of old Jamaica it conjures up is still a terrific place to spend a few minutes.

If anything lets the track down, it’s Shaggy – at the start of his career, pushing ragga MCing out to an international crowd, he sounds more hesitant than you remember, with growls scattered around the track but less of the gruff brio of later hits. Never the flashiest of MCs in any case, Shaggy here is having to spell out what ragga is and does for a big chunk of its new audience: at two decades distance, with that educational work done, his patience doesn’t seem so much of a virtue.

Delicious pop memory: Tony Parsons casting this song as an outrider of apocalypse on some late night culture or news show. He read out the lyrics slowly, in a tone of profound regret – how far had we fallen when this.. this thing could stand in for pop?

At University by now, I was watching with friends, sprawled in chairs round a communal TV. Whatever our opinion of the song, there was a general feeling that Parsons was being a chump: if you draw a line between then and now, you’d better be pretty sure you really know what the “now” side means. And he didn’t. Yes, as Spitting Image said, “There’s no lyrics!” – clever wording there, good one, but who exactly was coming to this looking for those?

Of course it wasn’t just the newly-old who detested this. Ray Slijngaard’s “techno techno techno techno” – cut and looped from a longer rap – set him up as the chart’s most effective troll, infuriating a lot of people who’d set value on their ability to parse dance music’s genrescape. Anything “No Limit” did or didn’t owe to techno had been pounded into irrelevance by the time it reached the public. What’s left – and this is what Parsons should have spotted more easily – is riff-driven, lizard-brain jump-around pop, closer in goonish spirit to “Sugar Sugar” or “Rock’n'Roll Part 2″ or “My Sharona” than anything Derrick May ever touched.

Though like the best trolls, Ray’s got enough material here to argue the point with: those echoey hi-hat hits and the union of steam-hammer bass and rubber-ball synths carry the industrial, piston-powered aggression of Belgian rave. There’s even a cowbell somewhere at the back. But it’s the aggression of Gladiators on Saturday Night TV, of piledriver jumps off bouncy castle walls – a thin cover for boundless, romping joy.

A year of few number ones, though it took me an age to finish. My highest marks were 8 for Shakespear’s Sister and Charles And Eddie; lowest was a 2 for Wet Wet Wet. Onwards!

If there’s a single technique which – however unfairly – defines 90s and 00s soul music for the British public, it’s melisma, and if there’s a single record that cemented that link, it’s “I Will Always Love You”, at number one for a whole winter, by the end of which it was fixed as either one of pop’s all-time great love songs or one of its most reviled dirges.

Certainly it took me a very long time to scrape away that reflexive distaste and try and listen to the record fresh. There’s no denying that Whitney Houston uses the song as a vocal gymnasium, but the repertoire she shows off isn’t just note-bending and belting. She goes hushed too, clips syllables when she needs to, and lets words drain out into sadness as often as she sets them spinning. As a rule she sustains the “I”s – an unwavering blast of strength – and goes to polysyllabic bits at the end of each “you”, which seems fair enough since the you is the lover she can’t hold onto and must walk away from. Like most songs damned as melismatic showboating there’s plenty of thought involved: technique is hardly ever ‘just’ technique.

Certainly this isn’t an especially naturalistic reading. It became fashionable back then to praise the Dolly Parton originals as being subtler and more moving than Whitney’s Olympian approach. Maybe they are: they’re great records, easy to listen to and more conversational than Whitney’s cover. Dolly sings the song’s terrific, heartbreaking opening couplet – “If I should stay / I would only be in your way” – with matter-of-fact sadness: it bounds the song, establishing the singer’s love as doomed. Whitney – famously taking the verse a capella – breaks the line into five distinct phrases, broken puzzle pieces she’s refusing to fit back together because doing so would mean giving up. Dolly’s version is a tragedy – her love is also her cross to bear; Whitney’s is an elemental struggle, each bludgeoning crescendo a deliberate raising of the stakes.

It’s no fault of her performance that the arrangement can’t do it justice. After the initial coup of the naked verse the music tracks her in the most blundering way possible – bashing and flailing where she’s steely and graceful. Houston’s vocals don’t need the key changes and the stomping drums and they certainly don’t need that sax solo, but for all her strength she’s helpless against a greater force: this is a blockbuster soundtrack single and that’s what such things sound like. It means – despite Whitney’s flawless precision – I still find this single more bullying than beautiful.

Classicist pop often sacrifices quality for vibe. Shakin’ Stevens might have had the moves down but if “Oh Julie” had fallen back through time to the 50s it would have simply got lost in a flood of better rock’n'roll. The secret shame of the traditionalist is that they’re parasites on the present: they need time to have changed, or they wouldn’t stand out.

But every now and then something turns up which shrugs this problem away. “Would I Lie To You?” is classicist alright – when I first heard it I knew nothing of soul history, nothing of Philly, doo-wop, 60s pop-soul or anything else it might be nodding to, but I recognised it as something reaching backwards. And it didn’t matter: “Would I Lie To You?” would have been a hit in 1974 too.

No secret why: this is an irresistibly sweet record. Charles and Eddie have no edge whatsoever, they come over as total nice guys, and they don’t even have the “secretly a prick” vibe most “nice guys” end up with. It’s dreaminess all the way down: if anyone’s going to end up hurt it’ll be them, but that’s an unimaginable outcome as long as the record’s playing.

So how do they stop it becoming saccharine? I think the key is that the chorus is such a massive sugar hit that on the verses they can relax, play around, enjoy each other’s company – flirt a little, basically. When they’re trading harmonies, finishing each other’s lines, swooping and sighing at one another the “girl” becomes simply a fictional convenience. It’s all platonic, for sure, but it’s no surprise their origin story (carrying the same record on the subway) was like something out of a music nerd rom-com: few other records demonstrate the joy of mutually loving and making music so prettily.

The “End Of The Road” video presented its directors with a logistical dilemma: in a vocal group, what do the other members do when it’s some other dude’s turn to sing? The solution was a sometimes hilarious extended essay in mooching: glum faces, shuffling, shaking heads, three bros feeling the intense purity of their buddy’s pain before it’s their turn to face the camera and plead.

At one point something happens that’s become very familiar: one of the Boyz (or Men) sings, and the others sit beside him straddling chairs. This sequence also serves as a tip-off as to this track’s key inheritors – they may be the best selling R&B band ever (and this song Motown’s biggest-selling hit, astonishingly) but Boyz II Men’s true legacy in the Popular story is the slow boyband: four or five lads on stools, emoting in sequence.

Boyband performances of male earnestness tend to plod, but Boyz II Men are stronger, churchier singers, happy to push “End Of The Road” into grotesquely impassioned territories. Feelings bulge out through the tune like muscles on an Image Comics superhero – by the time I get to the absurd spoken word sequence I’m thinking “they can’t mean this stuff!”. But they do! Of course they do – the whole point of this music is the chicken game it plays with sincerity.

Still, I’m basically the wrong age and the wrong gender for it, and even if I wasn’t “End Of The Road” seems to walk a precarious line. If you listen to the utterly gloopy LP version, two minutes longer, the extra material – mostly more of that unremarkable production – pushes the track into complete incoherence. The single version is just tight enough to work, or it would be if there wasn’t something rather gross about the content: “It’s unnatural / You belong to me” – it’s pressuring and patronising (that smarmy “your first ti-eye-ime”) and for all the bravura slickness leaves me with a rather nasty taste.

One-hit wonders can catch time in a bottle like no other records, since there’s barely any career context to distract you from your memories. “Sleeping Satellite” feels achingly 90s, but its mix of busker’s strum, baggy backbeat, and surprise-attack solos isn’t itself typical of any trend – except maybe a vague cosmopolitanism that encouraged such mild genre-blending in the first place. Its one-off cousins are 4 Non Blondes, Lisa Loeb, Natalie Imbruglia even – awkward sincerity throwing cool pop shapes.

But Tasmin Archer’s track has a heartfelt push to it even the best of those songs lack. Listening to “Sleeping Satellite”, for a long time I couldn’t work out why Archer was singing such palpable gibberish as if it meant something intensely important. She’s really trying to sell this thing – her enthusiasm and commitment is what keeps the track from gumming up, and what makes the sudden Hammond freakout work too. The fault was mine, though. “Satellite” comes draped in riddles and convolution but I’d never gone much further in than “I blame you…” and assumed this was a break-up metaphor. And not, say, a record about a generation’s post-1969 existentialist crisis. As Jarvis Cocker put it, later and more sardonic: “We were brought up on the space race / Now they want us to clean toilets.”

This, it seems to me, is part of what “Sleeping Satellite”‘s articulating: a sense of disappointment bordering on betrayal that having dreamed of the Moon – or indeed, because it got there – humanity now seems confined to a slowly boiling Earth. This is potent, raw stuff and very difficult indeed to cover effectively in a pop song. And in truth Archer doesn’t cover it effectively – the song’s ambiguous and flowery, its emotional kick comes from Archer’s self-belief more than anything you can read into it. But I have to say I like the idea that she tried.

Has an album ever spawned a weirder set of singles than Boss Drum? You got hands-in-the-air club confectionery (“LSI”), moody tribalism (“Boss Drum”), a twenty-minute spoken word piece by Terence McKenna – honestly, “Re:Evolution” alone would make it a contender. And then there’s this career-defining novelty, a cheeky but woeful pun stretched to song length, inventing Dickensian rave (and possibly more) along the way.

If The Shamen were ever serious about hiding “Ebeneezer Goode”‘s subject matter, their best hope wasn’t their bare-faced denials, it’s that no supposed Ecstasy song has ever sounded beerier than this one. The huggy spaciness of “Pro Gen”, “Omega Amigo”, and several summers of love is swapped out for a rammed pub party vibe: listening to it is like elbowing your way through a raucous crowd, and the bolshy “Eezer Goode! Eezer Goode!” chorus is more Oi than E. Something’s always happening – a twist of synth, a catchphrase, some smeared Happy Mondays-style guitar. The success of “Ebeneezer Goode” is generally pinned on a wish to tweak authority’s nose, but whoever scheduled this bustling, silly record to come out just before Freshers’ Week was a marketing demon.

Does it stand up? I think it’s surprisingly strong. It’s idiotic, yes, but it knows it’s idiotic and it sustains its conceit well and if you accept that you’ll have a good time with Eeezer and with this strutting, invigorating record. Back then, it made a star of Mr C and his preposterous geezer-hop: now, every second record in the charts boasts exaggerated London rapping. C isn’t the world’s most technically skilled MC, but that just made him more ripe for impersonation, and even if you couldn’t handle the flow you could manage a “naughty, naughty” or a “ya ha ha ha haaaa”. The sticking point might have been in assuming this single had much or anything to do with rave. With its good-time booziness, its music hall callbacks, its exaggerated characters, its student appeal and its cockney vim “Ebeneezer Goode” is really a cousin of and weird precursor to Britpop.

If you were to make a Eurodance drinking game, “Rhythm Is A Dancer” would have you under the table in one track. There’s Turbo B making a ninny of himself, of course, but also the wordless chanting, the house piano break, the echoed disco drums, the garbled english on the chorus, the vague mysticism, and most of all the general stateliness and spaciousness of it. Some dance music – the following Number One, for instance – sounded congested, like a party you’re having to shoulder your way through. But Eurodance always carried a sense of enormous vaulting spaces, the club as cathedral. That was the case in the Italo era – where the sparsity and echo in the track were often the source of cosmic or sci-fi metaphors – and it carried over into the lusher likes of Robert Miles. House music was just another ripple in that continuum of kitschy vastness.

The upshot is that “Rhythm” isn’t nearly as vulgar as I remember it – it’s higher minded, more spiritual, and being honest rather duller than I hoped it was. A lot of the memory of brashness comes from Turbo B and the – now notorious – “serious as cancer” lyric. It’s not a good line (according to a passing Steve M he nicked it off a US rapper anyway) but it’s certainly not helped by B’s delivery, hammering down the emphasis on “CAN-cer” as he’s running out of breath and room for the line. Terrible Euro-rap doesn’t always hurt a track – it can easily amp up the energy levels and make a song far more endearing – but Turbo B is too severe for that here. Even if he had hit on a good metaphor, serious is the last thing this record needs more of.

“Ain’t No Doubt” plants its emotional flag in territories claimed and mapped by Phil Collins – that master of gangrenous wrath and bitterness lurking below blokery’s rumpled jacket. It’s break-up pop of the shabbiest kind; lies, quarrels and wilful miscommunication played out raw in front of us. On TV Nail played hard bastards, for laughs or drama or both – some of the intrigue of his pop career must have been seeing a more sensitive element in him, but I doubt the straight-talking, bullshit-calling narrator of “Ain’t No Doubt” came as much of a shock to the fanbase.

What’s rather more surprising is the music. Most of Nail’s records were thoroughly trad: gruff, measured rock and soul stylings, workmanlike performances enlivened by the odd Knopfler guest-spot. “Ain’t No Doubt”, on the other hand, is a one-of-a-kind meeting of pub rock and swingbeat: ruminative, finger-pointing spoken passages broken up by a two-fisted funk chorus that lunges at you like a closing time drunk. It would be an odd record if anyone had recorded it, but this really isn’t the style you expect a 38-year-old TV star to pioneer.

Here’s the really strange thing: it kind of works. The lurching production is so awkward, its singer so ill-at-ease, it makes Nail’s spoken passages rawer – this is a man happy to humiliate himself if it gets the message about his partner’s perfidy across. Contrast his lumbering with the smooth replies from the ever-professional Sylvia Mason-James, quite at home in this setting: it’s as if Jimmy’s barged into the disco on a girls’ night out to shame his lady, and we’re onlookers peeping through our fingers.

It’s also an unintentionally funny record, of course, and probably the most imitated of the year. And in the end it’s not a thing you’d want to listen to much: I couldn’t stretch to calling it good. But it’s interestingly, admirably bad in a way most TV-star records aren’t.

I’ve always found it hard to get a handle on Erasure. I end up filing them in the same headspace as ELO: remarkably successful, remarkably long-lived pop craftsmen who are generally – as here – enjoyable but only very rarely hit any sort of emotional or even conceptual payday. After playing all four ABBA-esque covers I couldn’t help myself: I cued up the Pet Shop Boys’ “Where The Streets Have No Name / Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” medley and had forgotten anything I might have liked about Erasure within ten seconds.

But they were never a poor man’s PSBs – there was something intriguingly different about Erasure, the way their two halves never quite gelled: Vince Clarke’s sleek, tidy, heads-down synthpop and Andy Bell’s roaming, reaching vocals. On their best singles the clash was productive – a track like “Drama” seems lopsided and unwieldy but it absolutely works: both men are fizzing and they end up going in the same direction. More often the potential was missed: on their worse tracks one or the other seemed bored.

The problem with ABBA-esque is that they both seem scared to cut loose and play to their strengths instead of the songs. Bell is subdued, in the shadow of Frida and Agnetha’s pristine takes. Clarke fiddles around at the edges of the tracks but only on “Voulez-Vous” shows much sign of wanting to strip them down and refit them. The whole project roars to life exactly once, when MC Kinky takes over for thirty delightful, crass seconds in the middle of “Take A Chance On Me” and shows the song a little creative disrespect at last.

The “Take A Chance” video, on the other hand, caught the tone of the next several years of ABBA revivalism: wigs out, tunes ahoy, kitsch as you like. Like most great pop bands ABBA fitted their time so well that they were utterly vulnerable to shifts and revisions in the meaning of that time. This was the high point, the crossover moment, in a long-building rehabilitation of the 70s, an acknowledgement that if it was (as The Face sniffed) “the decade that taste forgot”, maybe forgetting taste was a pretty smart idea? The 70s were proudly naff, therefore ABBA were proudly naff. I’m not against that – it opened up the space for the other sides of them to be remembered, and it’s quite possible that without the Bjorn Again-Erasure-Gold domino topple I wouldn’t love them so much now.

But this EP seems overshadowed by the rediscovery it helped spark – Erasure’s versions, zesty at the time, simply don’t touch the originals on any level. The songs are terrific, of course, and the record is in a different world of care and effort than a KWS. But if a singer as florid as Andy Bell can’t have fun with “Lay All Your Love On Me” then somewhere an opportunity is being missed.

Some good news, though: from October I’m switching to working four days a week, leaving a day entirely free for writing (paid, unpaid, long-term projects). If nothing else, that should stablilise Popular – hopefully it’ll lead to other interesting things too.

In the meantime, I hope you’ve had a good Summer, and see you here for the rest of it.

It’s hard to muster much love for “Please Don’t Go” – a barely adequate trot through a good song. “Begging” has never sounded so thoroughly rote. It’s a good example, though, of one of the nineties least-regarded, most revival-immune style, the generic dance cover version.

Dance music is notorious for its stylistic interbreeding, its rapid mutation: a music constantly in flux. Tracks like “Please Don’t Go” are what happens when dance stands still: the basic chassis of house music turned into a plastic mould that can be applied to any old song. From KWS to Mad House’s Madonna versions, any given 90s chart seemed to have a handful of these things in it. Pundits now complain about the effects of instant access to (almost) anything on popular culture, but let’s not forget that when people can remember something and not access it, the resulting gap doesn’t always produce productive mis-rememberings. It also produces cheap knock-offs. “Please Don’t Go” isn’t quite as deathly as the king of the dance cover version, Undercover’s formica take on “Baker Street”, but it’s never memorable. That this nullity got five weeks at the top says more about the immobile singles chart than any double-digit run.

A quick shout-out, though, to its notional double A-Side, the unremembered “Game Boy”, which is as near as we’re ever going to come to a hardcore track in Popular. As ‘ardkore goes, it’s poor, a collection of five years of weary dance tropes in search of even one good hook – Beltram-style hoover noises, house piano, cut-up vocal samples, a dubby bassline, none of them sticking around long enough to make an impact. It reminds me more of cover-mounted CD-Rs (“100 Banging Sounds”) on computer music mags than any kind of clubbing experience. But it’s there.

Right Said Fred were a rum proposition – solid light entertainment values in leather pants, with the mildest dash of sauce added. Jobbing musicians, no great shakes as singers but likeable chaps, so people gave them the benefit of the doubt and let them sweat a novelty hit into two or three years of genuine fame. The Fairbrass brothers were everywhere for a while – the NME embraced them, Smash Hits lapped them up, the red-tops loved the silliness, the public seemed to enjoy the tunes, they bagged an Ivor Novello or two. Right Said Fred enjoyed a remarkable level of goodwill, which didn’t really fade until their second album came out and people realised there actually wasn’t room in their life for Black Lace with an extra member and half the hair.

But that was winter ’93, a world away from summer ’91 – particularly if you peddled the kind of family-fun pop “the Freds” did. Their comeback coincided with Matthew Banister’s arrival at Radio 1 – the moment the station stopped chasing reach and started pursuing influence – and Right Said Fred feel like the end of something: a band built for Radio 1 Roadshows in seaside towns, the kind of group Smashie and Nicey would love.

Does that make them awful? Not inevitably – though the line between dreadfully British and Britishly dreadful is a thin one. “Deeply Dippy”‘s problem isn’t being a silly, happy pop song. It’s never hitting the kind of swing its structure needs it to – that big brassy climax ought to be a joyful communal lift-off but even the group don’t sound like they’re having much fun as they try to gee the rest of us up. Fairbrass’ “See those legs, man.” is perhaps the least excited ad lib ever recorded. Like Shakespears Sister, there’s a feeling of a band playing with dynamics, trying to do something a bit different with their three minutes – and that’s admirable, but Right Said Fred can’t pull it off. “Deeply Dippy” ends up sounding more like forced jollity than good clean fun.