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…
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…
GARY BARLOW - "Forever Love" 31 Dec 2013 One of the advantages of having this project take far longer than imagined is that I get to see the reputations of artists tilt and upend as the years go…
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
1 Jun 2002
1 The weather matters. Saturday 1st June: 8pm, and the sky out of my window is still fading pale blue, weightless, benevolent. A jubilee weekend of rain would be a symbolic down: but then, we are long used to finding a meaning in the rain. Not just we aesthetes (‘I’m happy when it rains’; ‘You’re […]
13 Aug 2008
#428, 18th November 1978 “Rat Trap” is billed – in the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles, no less – as the first punk No.1. I couldn’t recall it – my memories of the Rats themselves were vague; Geldof I knew for later good works. So I approached “Rat Trap” cold but with a frisson of definite […]
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.
3 Sep 2007
Mars Planets: the atomisation of the Mars Bar. An entropic dis-integration, the tendency of all things to become more chaotic, in confectionery form. I’m trying to resist the impulse to tie this stuff up to no-such-thing-as-Society atomisation because that’s not how we do things, right? And Mars Planets are better to share than a proper big […]
2 Feb 2001
The Usual Excuses Bowery Electric’s “Freedom Fighter” is bewitching and worrying, and not just because it was made by a band I’d put down as America’s most useless. In fact the beat Bowery Electric use on “Freedom Fighter” sounds as familiar as ever, but that for once works in the song’s favour, in the same […]
20 Apr 2020
Update: See list of all previous Peoples Pop Polls, their winners and more here As you’ll know if you follow me on Twitter, I’ve been using the quarantine to run pop polls – there’s a UK Number 2s one about to enter its third round right now. This has been a delightful distraction for me, […]
8 May 2018
Eight episodes are now up: Hazel Southwell and Mark Sinker talking through the story of the UK music press from two very different angles (bcz I am old and she is not), to help start the conversation around my upcoming book. pod 1: the pilot! pod 2: uh merry memories of the nme! pod 3: […]
1 Sep 2002
Spiders: creepy, crawly little critters which seem up to no good – hanging in the corner of your room, leaving webs around just to make a mess – definitely with their own agenda. Not the most obvious creature to base a film on. Yet Hollywood returns to the theme of spiders every ten years or […]
