The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2016: #10-#1 27 Jan 2017 "Call me Ron. I'm a straightforward sort of pup, me - what you see is what you get. But when I'm not out clubbing with my six older brothers, I…
BEYONCÉ - "Crazy In Love" 24 Jan 2020 History in the making,” says Jay-Z in the intro, and he’s been proven right. As I’ve said before, there’s a temptation with Beyoncé to treat her big moments as inevitable…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2016: #30-#21 13 Jan 2017 Greetings! I'm the Toilet Duck and I'm here to solve all your problems! It's easy (*quack*) when I'm on your team. With my catchy tunes and the help of my…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2016: #20-#11 20 Jan 2017 TASH-BED: Hi everyone! It's us, the singing Bedingfield siblings! Remember us? You must remember us. DAN-BED: Summon Tash and she will appear! TASH-BED: We've been keeping busy for the last…
The People's Pop Poll: Day 4 8 May 2020 These are the groups for Day 4 of the People’s Pop Poll! Obviously it contains SPOILERS for the day’s matches so if you’d prefer to be surprised read no further!…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2017: #10-#1 28 Jan 2018 "Wotcher me old muckers. I'm Nena's 100th Red Balloon, the one edited out of the final version of the song because I 'wouldn't scan proper'. We only come in packs…
It's The EDM Of The World As We Know It 27 Jun 2012 It is time for me to get back in touch with The Kids, by listening to the UK Top 40 and putting it in order of how much I like…
AALIYAH - "More Than A Woman" 30 Oct 2016 The Queen Of The Damned soundtrack, released later in 2002, is a fearful pile of tosh, a body count of nu-metal second-raters which illustrates a dilemma the film didn’t totally…
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 Jun 2018
No, you’ve not missed any matches. We’re putting this year’s games up as we get the entries in, and so it’s a big thankyou to the prompt Group E gaffers of Serbia, Brazil, Switzerland and Morocco. It’s a group of veteran pop managers in the dugout this match, but only two can progress beyond the […]
19 Jan 2002
Everlasting Pop and Dexys Midnight Runners There is pop, and there is popular, and then there’s popular. And there’s also “timeless”. Sometimes when people say that a record is “timeless” – let’s pick on, oh, a U2 album – they mean it will be listened to and loved say twenty years from now. What they […]
13 May 2008
#394, 4th September 1976 In my teens I read a science fiction novel with a startlingly elegant twist. (I won’t mention the book’s name in case you come across it yourself.) It was about a brilliant scientist who vanishes: the book’s protagonist goes looking for clues to what happened, and becomes close to the scientist’s […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
30 Jan 2000
I. The cod-philosophical question at the centre of pop fandom is this: is pop a genre or a state? Not all records designed to be ‘great pop’ – in the sense of being good for the feet, the heart and the bank balance – make it to the Top Forty, or anywhere near. But not […]
