WESTLIFE - "Mandy" 1 Dec 2020 The tears are on their mind and nothing is rhyming. Sometime between previous single “Hey Whatever!” - a very non-Imperial number 4 - and this cover version, Brian McFadden decided…
WESTLIFE - "Unbreakable" 31 Aug 2019 They’re perhaps not intended to be, but Greatest Hits albums are often a sign of a band’s waning vitality, a signal to the fans that the group are moving to…
WESTLIFE - "My Love" 4 Jun 2015 “My Love” is Westlife in their pomp - a seventh straight number one, leaving records trailing. They were as popular as they’d ever been, which is to say, not as…
WESTLIFE - "World Of Our Own" 4 Jan 2017 It’s taken them until their 10th number one, but Westlife finally bring us an original uptempo song. Within the band’s corpus “World Of Our Own” is a break from the…
WESTLIFE - "Queen Of My Heart" 24 Apr 2016 Back to 'Life, back to reality. The charts' burst of Autumnal energy fades, the novelties and classics depart, and it's a return to business very much as usual, the first…
WESTLIFE - "Flying Without Wings" 8 Dec 2014 If the abundance of Westlife could be narrowed down to a mere one signature hit, “Flying Without Wings” is it. Written by British ballad king Wayne Hector, it’s the one…
WESTLIFE - "Fool Again" 23 Feb 2015 The fifth and final number one from Westlife’s debut, “Fool Again” is an unhappy ending on every level. For once, the lads don’t realise their mistake in time to turn…
WESTLIFE - "Uptown Girl" 10 Sep 2015 Features the best joke on a Comic Relief single - a girl gets bored of her “whitebread world”, and instead she chooses Westlife. But the video for “Uptown Girl” –…
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
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 […]
10 Jul 2000
The Pokemon Phenomenon This piece was going to be an unabashed paean to Pokemania, explaining what a cracking game it was and how the mass tweener hysteria which greets every fresh Pokegame, cardset, pillow-case, or doily was a good thing inasmuch as ten-year-olds are natural obsessives and it wasn’t like they were wasting their time […]
23 Apr 2000
My first encounter with the exotic was on the Magic Mill at Thorpe Park, a South-East England theme park which from appearances had originally been based around a cramped zoo or city-farm set-up. At some point in the late 70s it had seemingly panicked, though, and parked itself up in order to survive. With its […]
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.
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 […]
20 Apr 2020
Update: See list of all previous Peoples Pop Polls, their winners and more here As you’ll know if you follow me on Twitter, I’ve been using the quarantine to run pop polls – there’s a UK Number 2s one about to enter its third round right now. This has been a delightful distraction for me, […]
1 Apr 2001
freaky trigger : all cure, all the time everyday – beach kyoto paris siam : : i love the cure : : cure artefacts How To Join In Cure Discussions Cure Reviews Cure Articles Other Cure Articles Cure Albums of the 90s Cure Singles of the 90s Cure Links E-Mail every week Am I Bob […]
13 Jul 2018
What if a World Cup lasted ALL YEAR? That’s the experiment we appear to be running with this year’s PWC, and a grand experiment it is too. Here we are with the fourth match, group C, which even features a team that is STILL IN the football tournament. France are one of the great exponents […]
