WESTLIFE - "Unbreakable" 31 Aug 2019 They’re perhaps not intended to be, but Greatest Hits albums are often a sign of a band’s waning vitality, a signal to the fans that the group are moving to…
WESTLIFE - "My Love" 4 Jun 2015 “My Love” is Westlife in their pomp - a seventh straight number one, leaving records trailing. They were as popular as they’d ever been, which is to say, not as…
WESTLIFE - "World Of Our Own" 4 Jan 2017 It’s taken them until their 10th number one, but Westlife finally bring us an original uptempo song. Within the band’s corpus “World Of Our Own” is a break from the…
WESTLIFE - "Queen Of My Heart" 24 Apr 2016 Back to 'Life, back to reality. The charts' burst of Autumnal energy fades, the novelties and classics depart, and it's a return to business very much as usual, the first…
WESTLIFE - "Flying Without Wings" 8 Dec 2014 If the abundance of Westlife could be narrowed down to a mere one signature hit, “Flying Without Wings” is it. Written by British ballad king Wayne Hector, it’s the one…
WESTLIFE - "Mandy" 1 Dec 2020 The tears are on their mind and nothing is rhyming. Sometime between previous single “Hey Whatever!” - a very non-Imperial number 4 - and this cover version, Brian McFadden decided…
WESTLIFE - "Fool Again" 23 Feb 2015 The fifth and final number one from Westlife’s debut, “Fool Again” is an unhappy ending on every level. For once, the lads don’t realise their mistake in time to turn…
WESTLIFE - "Uptown Girl" 10 Sep 2015 Features the best joke on a Comic Relief single - a girl gets bored of her “whitebread world”, and instead she chooses Westlife. But the video for “Uptown Girl” –…
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
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, […]
5 Jul 2013
#725, 26th August 1995 BOXING? A “heavyweight battle”, the NME cover-billed it. And if “Country House” vs Oasis’ “Roll With It” was a title bout, the music press were desperate to play Frank Warren. Perhaps they had most at stake. It was, in a way, their last great fight. Many other moments define Oasis. Blur […]
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 […]
5 Jan 2019
“Greetings! It’s me, 90’s summer dance craze The Macarena. I’ve never really gone away, as you must surely know: the muscle memory of hand flips and hip wiggles is ingrained into the very fabric of your DNA, to be passed down to your heirs and their heirs for many centuries hence, waxing on and waxing […]
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.
3 Apr 2017
So for a while myself and Pamela Hutchinson, of Silent London fame have been talking about doing a more regular podcast. And while we love talking about silent films, we also like new films too. And so The Sound Barrier was born over a Campari Spritz or four, we take a new release and we […]
20 Jun 2005
Last week saw the release of not one, but two films about previous films. And I don’t mean Batman Begins (which should be retitled Batman Starts for Essex). Inside Deep Throat, a documentary about the making of and the effect of notorious porn film Deep Throat. And Baadasssss!, Mario Van Peebles film about the making […]
29 Sep 2014
#817, 21st February 1999 How was I supposed to know that something wasn’t right? It was a gilded age: the commercial zenith of the music industry at the end of the 20th century. In America, its apex as a money-making force came in 1999 when – adjusted for inflation – $71 per head was spent […]
