911 - "A Little Bit More" 4 Sep 2014 The formation of minor boyband 911 is a telling vignette of how pop in the late 90s was working. The general boyband narrative is one where a managerial Svengali recruits…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2018 2 Dec 2018 "Greetings, I am the renowned, cross-eyed clairvoyant, Mystic Meg. I'm here, to predict, in a deliberately awkward intonation, that the numbers 3826546, and i, and the colour "bergerac", will be…
Bedtime Story Watch I 27 Nov 2012 At the weekend I finished reading The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe to my kids - audience L (almost 6) and D (3 1/2) liked it, or maybe they…
GARETH GATES ft THE KUMARS - "Spirit In The Sky" 17 Dec 2019 This is Comic Relief getting back to its roots - a familiar song, disrupted by the comic turn. I never watched the Kumars, and the clips I looked at for…
21 Lists 26 Jul 2017 A list in which the descriptions match the wrong entries. A list in which the order is determined drunk and the descriptions are written sober. A list in which the…
2 Jan 2001
On Skykicking last week, Tim touched, popwise, on the continuing cultural battle over what the eighties were or are or mean or meant. The story of mainstream rock and politics in the 1990s was among other things the story of a similar battle, that time over the sixties. On the one hand you had the […]
3 Mar 2005
stick with the beasts we got plz #1: the CENTAUR centaurs are classically portrayed as noble and amazing (if occasionally super-horny): but i have always found em ANNOYING!! i. look at them they are top-heavy at the front = when they gallop they will fall on their faces ii. they have TOO MANY LIMBS = […]
20 Jun 2005
Last week saw the release of not one, but two films about previous films. And I don’t mean Batman Begins (which should be retitled Batman Starts for Essex). Inside Deep Throat, a documentary about the making of and the effect of notorious porn film Deep Throat. And Baadasssss!, Mario Van Peebles film about the making […]
2 Feb 2001
The Usual Excuses Bowery Electric’s “Freedom Fighter” is bewitching and worrying, and not just because it was made by a band I’d put down as America’s most useless. In fact the beat Bowery Electric use on “Freedom Fighter” sounds as familiar as ever, but that for once works in the song’s favour, in the same […]
20 Aug 2004
How Old Is Superman? One of the seemingly undefined aspect of the Superman mythos is that of his ageing. Those who fall on the side of his omnipotence in everything (the superhearing, superbreath, superhair bunch) probably think as a preternatural godhead he will live forever. Look, he has been banging around in the comics for […]
15 Dec 2009
One of the things that’s fascinating about the UK Top 40 is that a device designed to be a pure expression of popularity also works as a reflection of so many other things. People buy songs: if enough people buy a song it gets into the charts, or to #1. Simple! But so simple that […]
26 Apr 1999
The mode of the music changes, the city quakes, or at least those blocks of primer-than-thou office space quake that house the HQs of worldwide record companies. The reason, apparently, is MP3 technology, which you all know about and most of you use, and which has been the subject of acres of ruminative, pessimistic music […]
