DANIEL BEDINGFIELD - "If You're Not The One" 20 Sep 2019 There’s a trope – more apocryphal than actually seen, these days – of the serious songwriter who dismisses the crap in the charts as mere formula and hints that, were…
DANIEL BEDINGFIELD - "Gotta Get Thru This" 31 May 2016 Like disco and Philly soul before it, UK garage mixed upfront celebration with flashes of heartbreak, only lightly concealed. The carrier for 2-step’s bittersweet accents was often its string or…
DANIEL BEDINGFIELD - "Never Gonna Leave Your Side" 5 Feb 2020 To make one Westlife-esque ballad may be regarded as a misfortune. To make two looks like… a bad mistake, as it turned out. Songwriting cameos aside, this is the last…
WILL YOUNG - "Leave Right Now" 24 Mar 2021 Eg White, the songwriter on “Leave Right Now”, had an intriguing half-career out in the far suburbs of British pop. His album as part of Eg And Alice, 24 Years…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2016: #20-#11 20 Jan 2017 TASH-BED: Hi everyone! It's us, the singing Bedingfield siblings! Remember us? You must remember us. DAN-BED: Summon Tash and she will appear! TASH-BED: We've been keeping busy for the last…
GARETH GATES - "Unchained Melody" 19 Jan 2017 Making sense of Simon Cowell requires negotiating a maze of banalities – a host of things which are, like judges’ verdicts on a reality show, obvious and lacking insight, but…
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
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 […]
23 Mar 2014
#773, 13th September 1997 “Whenever we played that live there would be rows of grown men crying. It was almost like these guys couldn’t cry when they needed to cry, but that song operated like a pressure valve for them and it was okay for them to cry at a big rock concert.” – Richard […]
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 […]
21 May 2012
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.
22 Jan 2009
This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.
15 Dec 2009
One of the things that’s fascinating about the UK Top 40 is that a device designed to be a pure expression of popularity also works as a reflection of so many other things. People buy songs: if enough people buy a song it gets into the charts, or to #1. Simple! But so simple that […]
10 Aug 2004
Distilled from several years of pop experience, here from the WORST to the BEST are ways to approach a cover version. The Acoustic Guitar: i.e. “Any good song will sound great on an acoustic guitar”, runs the prized nugget of MOJO wisdom which results in Travis mauling “…Baby One More Time”. Culprits throw up their […]
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 […]
