ROBBIE WILLIAMS AND NICOLE KIDMAN - "Somethin' Stupid" 18 Aug 2016 Robbie Williams quit a boy band because the grinning and flexing began to feel like a job, and feeling like a job meant feeling like a cage. He fled into…
BACK BACK BACK (Sort Of) 18 Aug 2016 Real life almost did for Popular this time - writing about the glittery 00s boom in 2016 felt like, well, writing about the jazz age in 1937 might have. Plus…
TAKE THAT - "Everything Changes" 1 Jan 2013 The fifth (of six!) single from Everything Changes, and yes, it shows. Breezy, disco-inspired, but this is the fussy, low-fat studio hack's version of disco which dotted pop albums through…
ROBBIE WILLIAMS - "She's The One" / "It's Only Us" 22 Dec 2014 And so the 90s drain away, with a plughole gurgle of third and fourth singles from hit albums, marking time before the Christmas and Millennium big guns are fired. “She’s…
ROBBIE WILLIAMS - "Eternity" / "The Road To Mandalay" 24 Jan 2016 The album cycle that began with “Rock DJ” a year before staggers to its end four singles later with “The Road To Mandalay”, a bitter squib of a song, pulled…
ROBBIE WILLIAMS - "Rock DJ" 14 Apr 2015 Back at “Millennium” I claimed that Robbie Williams’ wild success, his undeniable - and untranslatable - appeal as a pop star, said something wider about turn of the century British…
ROBBIE WILLIAMS - "Millennium" 4 Jul 2014 Expansive of theme, expensive of sample, “Millennium” is a self-conscious event single, carrying itself as if Number One was never in doubt. But while Robbie Williams was the biggest star…
GERI HALLIWELL - "Mi Chico Latino" 25 Nov 2014 When Geri Halliwell quit the Spice Girls in 1998, pop fans were more than usually curious as to what her next move might be. She had muscled her way to…
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
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 […]
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.
15 Aug 2007
On my eleventh birthday I received a copy of a tape called “Rave ’92” through the post from my sister Grace, who was away at university. It was the second tape she had made for me whilst she was away, (the first being a random mix of grebo, soul, indie and ‘Love Shack’ by the […]
25 Jul 2006
Or: Games I Have Known. For the sake of my patience and yours, I have mostly restricted this to games I either owned or played – ones where I read a friends’ rulebooks and only dimly remember have been ignored, with a couple of notable exceptions. If you want to know more about any of these, […]
22 Aug 2006
Despite a brief cameo by Michael Schumacher Car, the filum Cars steers clear of German cars. Oh, there’s a VW campervan, but that is a hippy, with a typical hippy accent (its your grandad’s idea of a hippy at that, straight out of early seventies films). Equally British cars barely get a look-in. So there […]
2 Jan 2001
On Skykicking last week, Tim touched, popwise, on the continuing cultural battle over what the eighties were or are or mean or meant. The story of mainstream rock and politics in the 1990s was among other things the story of a similar battle, that time over the sixties. On the one hand you had the […]
30 Dec 2005
#222, 20th August 1966 DIGRESSION: For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project: “This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous condescencion of prosperity’…the lives of the kind of people who spent the […]
