SUGABABES - "Hole In The Head" 5 Mar 2020 “Hole In The Head” has three tough acts to follow. “Overload”, the one which perfectly introduced the Sugababes and their core idea - talk-to-the-hand teenage moodiness as a girl group…
SUGABABES - "Freak Like Me" 10 Jul 2017 At The Disco A scene from Phonogram III: The Immaterial Girl, by Gillen, McKelvie and Wilson, published in 2015. It’s the early 00s, at a disco somewhere in the south…
GEORGE MICHAEL - "Fastlove" 3 Nov 2013 “All that bullshit conversation, baby can’t you read the signs?”. This is a curious record: there’s little in pop like the way “Fastlove” marries seductive form – the discreet grind…
The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2016 20 Dec 2016 “Hi I am Red Skelton, exceptionally annoying star of the 40's and 50's - trust me there was no comic turn I could flatten, or subtle humour I couldn't mug…
SHAGGY feat. RIKROK - "It Wasn't Me" 8 Sep 2015 One of the things dancehall does supremely well is project authority. The genre is born in competition – between soundsystems, between MCs. While rappers jealously guard their beats, dancehall MCs…
PWC14: Group E Finale (France, Honduras, Switzerland, Ecuador) 9 Apr 2014 Welcome to the Group E finale! Here's how things stand. France (managed by Jessica) have qualified with 6 points, and will top the group unless they come last here. Honduras…
STEPS - "Heartbeat" / "Tragedy" 30 Aug 2014 This is the first Popular entry I’ve written in the Southern hemisphere. And while it wasn’t a big hit down under – or, I think, anywhere except the UK –…
MICHAEL JACKSON - "Earth Song" 31 Jul 2013 "The environment" is something of a pop graveyard, and no surprise. Beyond specific conservation efforts, the problems we've created seem simply too vast for us to cope with as a…
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
15 Sep 2013
Ten years ago tomorrow, I started writing a review of Al Martino’s “Here In My Heart”. I’d never heard the first UK Number One, and thanks to P2P networks I had the chance. Somewhere between starting the blog entry and finishing it, I thought of reviewing all of them. I had no idea how long […]
17 Jun 2018
It’s here! The opening game of the Pop World Cup finds the four teams of Group A raising the curtain on the tournament. Pop football veterans Russia and Uruguay meet two Arab states – Egypt and Saudi Arabia – with less of a record at this level. Who will prevail? You decide. Spotify playlist and […]
10 Nov 2009
Lists, lists, lists. Its what we do around here, and the end of a decade gives us ample opportunity to look back with fondness over a decade. Music, films, television were all thrown in the mix, and may pop up. But most important to us is the social. From a site that is run by […]
10 Jan 2012
Hi, I’m Lauryn Hill circa my breakthrough role in Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit, and it is a real pleasure to be able to present to you the top ten FreakyTrigger tracks of the year. When my mother told me I couldn’t join the choir run by a fake nun, I got really […]
1 Jan 2002
British Bubblegum Pop 1968-1972 “Sunday morning, up with the lark, I think I’ll take a walk in the park, Hey hey hey, it’s a beautiful day …” Daniel Boone, “Beautiful Sunday”, 1972 British bubblegum pop, circa 1968-1972 – as distinct from its more worldly and sophisticated American equivalent – is a pure insight into a […]
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 is because of something being imposed by our hosts to stop continued spam comment attacks. We’ve taken the actions requested (updating wordpress etc) but there’s […]
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 […]
4 Sep 2009
#543, 15th December 1984, video “Do They Know It’s Christmas” is significant in one way, and insignificant in another. First, it raised a lot of awareness and money and established the pop single as an excellent mechanism for doing those things. This was significant. Gargantuan “supergroups” like this fell out of favour but charity records […]
