KYLIE MINOGUE - "Slow" 28 Apr 2020 I'm raising money for domestic violence charity Refuge by running a People's Pop Poll on Twitter, which starts in May. If you can spare any money, please consider donating (and…
KYLIE MINOGUE - "Spinning Around" 26 Mar 2015 Most comebacks risk being overshadowed by the past. To find its distinct identity, “Spinning Around” has to battle the future. The second phase of Kylie’s career pivots on one single,…
Popular '01 19 Aug 2016 I give a mark out of 10 to every entry. These polls are your chance to say which records YOU would have given 6 or more to. Not quite as…
#1: La la la la la la-la-la 1 Sep 2020 This bracket is for what you might call ‘pure pop’, though in the 2001 context that has very uncomfortable overtones, since the stuff in here - Kylie, Steps, Sophie Ellis-Bextor,…
KYLIE MINOGUE - "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" 6 Apr 2016 Between its two writers and its performer, "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" is the sound of over seven decades’ pop experience. It's better heard as distillation than prediction.…
Sclerotica 30 Jan 2015 Before I start writing about Number Ones again, a quick bit of stattery around the current state of the charts. This is an extremely wonkish post, so reader beware. The…
2021: Son Of Poll! 8 Jan 2022 Thanks to getting Covid (again!) I've made only slow progress on the poll track write-ups - in fact I only finished this selection after all the matches ended (oops). YouTube…
GABRIELLE - "Rise" 6 Feb 2015 It’s not only teenagers who can take pop as a model for their circumstances. At the time “Rise” was in the charts I had a friend who related to it…
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
24 Jan 2010
Here at Freaky Trigger we have realised that January has been a bit slow with output. A new year can put new strains upon our writers and what with Tom’s Guardian column and me embarking on a year without cinema, pickings have been slim. What was needed was something that would galvanise all the writers, […]
8 Aug 2008
#426, 23rd September 1978 On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain and returns to the comfort of his hotel where a woman […]
18 Aug 2006
The man who invented the Gala Pie is a hero of mine. Not just because he took one of natures nicest foodstuff (namely the pork pie) and made it even better. He made it better by the addition of the hard boiled egg. But not just any old hard boiled egg. No, not only did […]
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 […]
13 Feb 2000
England is DIFFERENT (or SPECIAL if you want to be polite) to everywhere else for many reasons, but one is because our music “industry” (it’s not an industry – making baked beans is an industry, and nobody does THAT in their spare time, writes fanzines about it or has them poured over themselves at weddings. […]
4 Feb 2014
#757, 25th January 1997 In 1997, talking about music on the Internet means USENET, a Gormenghast of diverging and reconnecting fora whose goblin tribes gleefully rampage through each other’s chosen lairs: a thread will start on alt.music.prodigy, then careen into alt.music.spice-girls via alt.music.misc, while Discordians and trolls plot to spread it still further. Still, there […]
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 […]
