Popular

TUBEWAY ARMY - “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”

“I don’t think I mean anything to you.”: it’s a sulky break-up song in android drag. But what drag! There’s a muscley, unpleasantly compelling crunch to the synthesisers on “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” - the song is built on awkward, thrilling mechanical lurches rather than Kraftwerkian glide or Moroderish thrust. It’s futuristic, but this future setting is audibly shabby, an exhausting and dispiriting time to live: you suspect it rains a lot there. Numan himself shifts from distanced scene-setter to hurt suburban boy - the everyday whine of his voice cutting through the future he’s trying to establish, its baffled pique reminding you what these robot worlds get built to cover up. … read on …

ANITA WARD - “Ring My Bell”

“Ring My Bell” is a disco masterclass in how to use the treble - the bell itself (sounds like it’s off a bicycle!), the laserbeam bleeps, Anita Ward’s impishly breathy voice, and the skritch-skratch guitar in the middle of the stereo pan, halfway between a mouse and a typewriter. … read on …

BLONDIE - “Sunday Girl”

I prefer Blondie when they’re poking their noses where they didn’t seem to belong, applying their touch of devastating cool to disco or rap or reggae and getting clean away with it. “Sunday Girl”, delightfully frilly though it is, doesn’t floor me in the same way. In a way its weirdly reminiscent of the Grease singles, a pastiche of something I can’t quite put my finger one - except this doesn’t come alive for me until the last twenty seconds or so, when Debbie Harry suddenly gets some snarl in her voice and the handclaps and guitars start to surge… and then it’s over. Pretty, thoroughly pleasant, beautifully crafted, but too pert to excite.

Popular Drinks Update

Tuesday’s Popular birthday drinks will be in the HEAD OF STEAM DORIC ARCH (same pub!) at Euston Station. A very familiar pub to most of you, I’m sure, but a good one - real ales, TV and quiz machines for those who want them, and most importantly for me I’ll be at the St Pancras Novotel for a conference all day beforehand.

Hope to see a few of you there!

ART GARFUNKEL - “Bright Eyes”

Who wrote “Bright Eyes”, and why they wrote it, I don’t care. I know, but I don’t care. You can talk about all that stuff Because all “Bright Eyes” means for me is this: … read on …

Popular Birthday Drinks

I suddenly realised last night that next Tuesday (16th September), Popular will be 5 years old. The workrate hasn’t always been what it could have been but this still deserves celebration, so anyone wanting to join me for a brief pint - details to be announced, but it’ll be somewhere in central London - would be very welcome. Will  Spoiler Bunny attend? Depends on whether he survives the next number one…

GLORIA GAYNOR - “I Will Survive”

It’s not unusual for songs to become cultural fixtures, but it’s a little rarer for their emotional use to be so generally prescribed: “I Will Survive” is so ensconced as the go-to cry of defiance for the jilted girl that it feels more ubiquitous than it actually is. I can’t remember the last time I heard “I Will Survive” on the radio, or at karaoke, and it’s almost impossible to imagine it ever being used seriously on TV or in a film now. But none of that lessens its familiarity. … read on …

THE BEE GEES - “Tragedy”

The Bee Gees at this point were surely the world’s biggest act: “Tragedy” sounds it, absurd explosion noises and all. It’s a disco epic to file alongside tracks like the Jackson’s “Can You Feel It” but also it’s pop at its most maximalist, a cousin to the largest productions of Steinman, Horn, Martins Max and George - or at the other end of the quality scale, the sickly pomp of a Be Here Now.

Pop on this Roman scale doesn’t seduce, it bludgeons, and you either feel the blow or duck it. For me “Tragedy” is impressive, dramatic, thoroughly enjoyable but not really as effective as the earlier Bee Gees disco tracks - it’s missing the glide of “Night Fever”, the swagger of “Staying Alive”, the paranoia of “You Should Be Dancing”, and replacing them with scale, which doesn’t always age so well. To be sure, somewhere in “Tragedy” there’s an astonishing song capturing a soul - and an era - in meltdown. But I have to stretch to feel it, it doesn’t come over for me naturally, except perhaps in the Gibbs’ panicky falsettos on the chorus, pitched close to unbearable. Though for all that, “Tragedy” has an undeniable decadent power.

BLONDIE - “Heart Of Glass”

Most of the great records we’ve encountered on Popular find modern-day imitators - but often these imitators aren’t bands I choose to listen to. If a thrusting young beat combo wants to make their own version of “Hot Love” then they have excellent taste, and I wish them every joy of it, but I’ll just sit that one out, ta. “Heart Of Glass”, though - and the rest of Blondie’s hits - are a blueprint for a lot of the pop records I’ve enjoyed most this decade: Ellis-Bextor, Annie, Richard X, Girls Aloud would all murder to have this in their back catalogue (by some kind of marrying-your-grandmother time paradox). … read on …

Something else to read

Something I occasionally get asked is “what about No.1 albums?”. And I think, yes, what about them? The album charts present a different version of pop’s story in this country - some might say a more accurate version. Wouldn’t it be good, then, if someone were to tackle writing about them? Why yes, it would be! And if that someone had a remarkably thorough knowledge of pop, plus the proven blogging stamina to write exhaustively and insightfully about albums of pretty much any genre…. ?

Well, as it happens Marcello’s started a new blog project doing just that. I’ll be reading it, I’m sure you will too. Best of luck to him!

As for Popular, apologies for the slight gap: I’ve been very busy interviewing for and accepting a new job, celebrating that, and tying up loose ends from the old one. In the middle of all that I’m off to France on holiday from Tuesday - it is a wireless enabled holiday but I would say things will be slow moving here until a week or so into September, though I’m hopeful of another entry before I leave. I’m still determined to get well into the 80s by the year’s end, so I will pick up the pace again then. In the meantime, there are 430 old entries to bang on about, the rest of Freaky Trigger to read, and of course Mr Carlin’s new project. See you soon!