ROOM 5 ft OLIVER CHEATHAM - "Make Luv" 18 Dec 2019 The sound of a subgenre on its deathbed. We’ve had some good times with filter-disco, or French touch, or whatever you want to call this woozy sound. At its best…
USHER - "You Make Me Wanna..." 21 Apr 2014 Another piece of the present slots into place: if you leave out charity records, this is the first artist we’ve met to also have a Number One in the 2010s.…
GEORGE MICHAEL - "Jesus To A Child" 15 Aug 2013 Writing this post could have felt awkward. I have been very lucky: I've never had to face the premature loss of a loved one, and having never been tested by…
Popular: The 90s 2 Jan 2015 This is another one of our decade polls, where we ask: which year was best for pop? Pick one only! Using the Popular vault of scores as a guide, I've…
Lost Property Office 1: CSI: Max Factor 7 Mar 2012 Welcome to the new FreakyTrigger podcast (in association with SOAS Radio), a whimsical trip through the lost and found of life. We've been thinking of various audio projects for a…
What's Going On With The FT Comments? 17 Oct 2019 Hi all - We know some of you have had serious issues with the FT comments, both in terms of logging in on existing IDs and creating new ones. This…
Seasonal slatternry returns: Brandy Cream Cauliflower Cheese 1 Jan 2016 Some years ago I decided to apply the theory that putting brandy-inclusive dairy products into a bacon sandwich would definitely not make things any worse. This year I have taken…
BOYZONE - "All That I Need" 6 May 2014 This is one of the two Boyzone records I couldn’t well remember. So, it’s not the slow cover version, or the fast cover version. It’s not the one by Andrew…
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 Jan 2003
101. THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS – ‘My Elastic Eye’: ‘It sounds exactly like an elastic eye!’ said Fred S. I scoffed, but you know what? – it does! Though maybe more a clockwork one – but the wobbly fuzz-bass still sounds like it’s looking, even probing the track for something. Every music-box noise here is luxurious […]
17 Nov 2003
I notice elsewhere, in my absence, some young scamp over on NYLPM has started a concept piece, some say think piece entitled the Alphabet Of Pop. Now no-one knows more than myself the beauty of lists, as my Week Of Wank and Breakfast Of Banality proves. Its cheap easy journalism and also gives one a […]
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 […]
1 Jan 2019
Hello and happy new year! It is I, Cameron Mackintosh, the world’s most powerful and most 80s theatre producer. Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, CATS – I’m kind of a big deal guys!!!!! Thanks Cam! On the principle that every drunk idea at Pete’s flat is a good idea, today now presenting the […]
4 May 2010
#601, 19th December 1987, video In the comics series Phonogram, there’s a scene in which the – kind of horrible – pop DJ Seth Bingo and his indie collaborator Silent Girl are struggling to work a recalcitrant dancefloor into life. Their solution? “Play the Blondie!” – a copy of “Atomic” which literally glows as it’s […]
8 Jun 2010
Here we are, at last. Here we stand at the summit of Pop Football achievement, looking back at 63 matches: some wonderful, some perplexing, some illuminating, very few boring. We’ve heard so much pop, enjoyed so many marvellous moments, and we have 30 losing managers to thank for all their research and taste. Never mind […]
24 Nov 2006
Tarmac? What kind of a brand is that, its just the pavement, right? Wrong my friends. Tarmac is a brand and an awe-inspiring dominant one at that. I love brands whose names are synonymous with their main product, it shows an awesome degree of brand dominance when the brand name becomes subsumed into language. But […]
12 Mar 2010
People in the Popular comments boxes are talking about “the canon”. I’m always quite curious as to which bits of the canon have ‘taken’ with a broadly pop-positive audience such as we have here. So here’s a poll, very easy to fill in, just say which of the Top 50 albums OF ALL TIME EVER […]
