Freaky Trigger
Est. 2000
Est. 2000
Tom Ewing's Popular
Reviewing every UK #1OASIS – “The Hindu Times”
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The Sound Barrier podcast + NYLPM + POLLS + #totp chat
Related Posts
- 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… 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.
Featured Posts
I WAS A GOBLIN: Encyclopaedia Goblinica
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, […]The Freaky Trigger Top 100 Tracks Of All Time: No. 57 ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS – “Oliver’s Army”
20 Jul 2007 I semi-remember just two lines from the NME’s (Charlie Shaar Murray’s?) review of “Armed Forces” (secret unused title “Emotional Fascism”). One was that one of the other songs resembled ELP “jamming in the bottom of an oil drum”! The other — more germane to this post, as well as being true — is that “with […]MICHAEL JACKSON – “Billie Jean”
18 May 2009 #516, 5th March 1983 Michael Jackson came to the title “King of Pop” in the style of a medieval ruler, carving out his realm piece by piece across a hard year of campaigning. He won some of his new subjects when he performed this song as part of a Motown anniversary special: others when he […]Dead Again: MP3s And The Dissolution Of Pop
26 Apr 1999 The mode of the music changes, the city quakes, or at least those blocks of primer-than-thou office space quake that house the HQs of worldwide record companies. The reason, apparently, is MP3 technology, which you all know about and most of you use, and which has been the subject of acres of ruminative, pessimistic music […]SINEAD O’CONNOR – “Nothing Compares 2 U”
29 Oct 2010 #641, 3rd February 1990 Sinead O’Connor is one of the finest song interpreters not just because she thinks hard about the material and the feelings locked in it, but because she’s so good at placing songs into a situation. A great example of this is her version of “Chiquitita”, warm and homely where ABBA’s is […]The Strange Death of the UK Charts
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.The Bible Of Badness: GENESIS
14 Nov 2006 In The Beginning There Was Nothingness. IF ONLY. In The Beginning There Was The Word. NOT THE BIRD FROM L7 PULLING DOWN HER KECKS AGAIN. But neither of these are strictly true. Because the first book of the Bible Of Badness is Genesis. And if you were ever to question how bad this Bible could […]Girl Talk
28 Jul 2009 Here’s something I did for fun yesterday: a graph showing the % of UK #1 hits with female lead vocals, year by year. (Shared male/female leads counted half)*. (Click on it if you want it a bit clearer). The red bars are the percentage of female leads for each year. The line is a trendline […]FreakyTrigger on
