BUSTED - "Crashed The Wedding" 1 Nov 2020 “You Said No” was an uneven mix of Busted’s charms and their weaknesses; “Crashed The Wedding” is all upside. All of Busted’s singles so far have played like episodes in…
BUSTED - "You Said No" 28 Dec 2019 While Busted enjoy a warm second career on the reformation circuit, time hasn’t always been kind to the hairy-palmed pop-punk they kicked off with. The line between cheekiness and creepiness…
Album-A-Day #5: Tarkus In Black Vinyl, Please 15 Feb 2019 This is a document of my album-a-day listening project. Each entry originally comes out as a tinyletter and subscribers to that get framing content and non-music miscellanea as well as…
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…
Send A Limousine Anyway 10 May 2015 1978: The Shooting Star It’s the spider I remember. In The Shooting Star, boy reporter Tintin is investigating an apocalyptic threat, a star on a collision course with our world.…
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…
The UPDATED Secret History Of Band Aid 12 Nov 2014 The Secret History Of Band Aid Everybody remembers Band Aid. And - despite everything - most people remember Band Aid 2. And now we have Band Aid 20 30. Which…
They Ask Me What The Use Is: Pop Conference 2017 5 May 2017 Last year’s Seattle Pop Conference, on Voice, was an epiphanic experience for me, reviving a part of me that had become burnt out since I stopped writing regularly about current…
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 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, […]
27 Sep 2001
What is “Panic” about? Dismissed and attacked since its release as small-minded, or snobbish, or even borderline racist, The Smiths’ anti-disco broadside continues to intrigue. On this thread, The Pinefox calls it a “yoking of two ideas” – a revolutionary fantasia and an attack on dance music – and claims that it’s the second of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
10 Mar 2015
This is a post listing the records I’m listening to for my YEAR OF ROCKISM**, as outlined here (cut and pasted from Tumblr): I’m going to listen to one album on a once-a-day basis for a week, a different one each week. Not in order to write about them or anything, unless I decide I […]
1 Jul 2013
This article by Laurie Penny on the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of the manic pixie dream girl trope is really good. I’m the same age as Laurie Penny, so was plagued by the same cultural stuff as her- I don’t know if it’s just egocentrism for my own timeline but I feel like the 90s marked […]
