DREDD 3D, Punkpunk and the Aggro Style 30 Sep 2012 (Crossposted from my tumblr.) Right - I think it’s about time to share my thoughts on DREDD 3D. SPOILERS below the cut if you’ve not seen it, but then again,…
The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2017: #10 – #1 23 Feb 2018 Hi, I'm Edgar the computer from the flop film Electric Dreams in 1984. Yes, the one the song comes from. I was just a normal 16 bit computer until my…
The Sound Barrier Podcast: 8: The Phantom Carriage & A Ghost Story 15 Aug 2017 Spooky happenings over on Silent London this week, where the Sound Barrier Podcast dabbles in the supernatural, otherworldly and ectoplasmic. Or rather, a pair of meditative films which use death,…
A very old-fashioned kind of blogpost! 10 May 2013 I don't really know who east sky/taktophoto is (or are)*: but his/her/their tumblr republishes sets of images gathered from all over the place (always linked to, generally captioned as per…
WILL SMITH - "Men In Black" 17 Mar 2014 The ‘Greys’ – those spindly, abducting, UFO-piloting scamps - were the iconic early 90s monster. They’d bounced around pop culture through the Cold War but enjoyed a final, late heyday…
S CLUB 7 - "Never Had A Dream Come True" 6 Jul 2015 “Never Had A Dream Come True” is enjoyably drippy, but does nothing to shake my sense that S Club 7 are the blandest proposition of this pop era. Like their…
Of Was And When 24 Mar 2016 Rebel Rebel, by Chris O'Leary (Zero Books) One of the many remarkable things about David Bowie's career is that it came so close to not happening. Bowie seems like an…
About the Author
writer and editor bit by bit fashioning a history of the UK music press HERE https://www.patreon.com/marksink3r/posts
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 […]
8 Aug 2019
Hello Popular readers! After sixteen years, and suffering from (as you’ll have noticed) a much slower posting rate, I’ve come to a decision. I’m going to crowdfund this project, using Patreon. HERE’S THE LINK. This coincides with me leaving my day job and going solo, which opens up a lot of spare time. But billable […]
30 Dec 2005
#222, 20th August 1966 DIGRESSION: For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project: “This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous condescencion of prosperity’…the lives of the kind of people who spent the […]
1 Jan 2003
101. THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS – ‘My Elastic Eye’: ‘It sounds exactly like an elastic eye!’ said Fred S. I scoffed, but you know what? – it does! Though maybe more a clockwork one – but the wobbly fuzz-bass still sounds like it’s looking, even probing the track for something. Every music-box noise here is luxurious […]
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 […]
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 […]
19 Jan 2002
Everlasting Pop and Dexys Midnight Runners There is pop, and there is popular, and then there’s popular. And there’s also “timeless”. Sometimes when people say that a record is “timeless” – let’s pick on, oh, a U2 album – they mean it will be listened to and loved say twenty years from now. What they […]
5 Jan 2019
“Greetings! It’s me, 90’s summer dance craze The Macarena. I’ve never really gone away, as you must surely know: the muscle memory of hand flips and hip wiggles is ingrained into the very fabric of your DNA, to be passed down to your heirs and their heirs for many centuries hence, waxing on and waxing […]