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…
Refried Dough 24 Apr 2014 As you've probably noticed, the Popular archives are fairly extensive. I often think it would be nice to do something with them, so (among other slow-brewing schemes) I came up…
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
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 […]
14 Nov 2006
In The Beginning There Was Nothingness. IF ONLY. In The Beginning There Was The Word. NOT THE BIRD FROM L7 PULLING DOWN HER KECKS AGAIN. But neither of these are strictly true. Because the first book of the Bible Of Badness is Genesis. And if you were ever to question how bad this Bible could […]
22 Jan 2009
This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.
3 Sep 2007
Mars Planets: the atomisation of the Mars Bar. An entropic dis-integration, the tendency of all things to become more chaotic, in confectionery form. I’m trying to resist the impulse to tie this stuff up to no-such-thing-as-Society atomisation because that’s not how we do things, right? And Mars Planets are better to share than a proper big […]
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, […]
14 Apr 2007
Plenty of words have been written about the seminal Sex Pistols’ seminal gig at the seminal Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976. There has even been a whole book about it! Everyone knows that the gig was really very important indeed and that everyone who attended became a very extremely important person. HOWEVER does everyone know exactly […]
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 […]
15 Aug 2006
The Notorious Bettie Page is a film about the good old days of porn. You know, when it wasn’t exploitative, and all the girls portrayed within were not only fun loving conspirators in an art project, but believed in Jeebus too. Most film about porn are about the good old days. Inside Deep Throat told […]
