ATB - "9PM (Til I Come)" 5 Nov 2014 The story of breathy trance* hit “9PM (Til I Come)” begins with producer ATB bringing his girlfriend to his studio to check out his instruments. And it continues with him…
Pop World Cup 2018 Group E Match 1 25 Jun 2018 No, you've not missed any matches. We're putting this year's games up as we get the entries in, and so it's a big thankyou to the prompt Group E gaffers…
AFROMAN - "Because I Got High" 20 Apr 2016 If rock criticism was a stoner, one of its endlessly repeated good-vibes stories would be Paul McCartney waking up and ‘discovering’ the melody to “Yesterday” in his head as “Scrambled…
Hour Of The Polls 30 Dec 2014 Just a last reminder - we are running two exciting POLLS this year, for the best tracks and best comics of 2014. You can still vote in them both! And,…
Manage A Team In The Pop World Cup 2018! 1 Dec 2017 Bozhe moi! IT'S BACK! The draw for the Football World Cup was made today, and so, for the fourth time, we're delighted to host the POP WORLD CUP. The point…
The Pop World Cup 2018: Fixtures and results 17 Jun 2018 About the Pop World Cup Group standings Group A Pos Team Pts Game 1 % Game 2 % 1 Russia - Artist name - Artist name - 2 Saudi Arabia…
New Popular Entries: Where And When? 28 Jun 2015 Hello - just a quick note to reassure people that we haven't gone back to the bad old days of no updates. My situation is as follows - I've been…
Unheard Album Project: February 2017 1 Mar 2017 These are 27 of the 28 albums I listened to for the first time in February as part of this project. (The 28th, Joanna Newsom's Divers, is not on Spotify:…
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 […]
5 May 2011
#667, 13th July 1991 Sixteen Listens For Sixteen Weeks: An Everything I Do Liveblog This song got to number one for 16 weeks, so I decided to play it 16 times in a row, writing as I went. Play 1: And we’re off. I’ve honestly hardly heard this in the last twenty years so I […]
24 Nov 2006
Tarmac? What kind of a brand is that, its just the pavement, right? Wrong my friends. Tarmac is a brand and an awe-inspiring dominant one at that. I love brands whose names are synonymous with their main product, it shows an awesome degree of brand dominance when the brand name becomes subsumed into language. But […]
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 […]
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 […]
20 Jul 2007
I semi-remember just two lines from the NME’s (Charlie Shaar Murray’s?) review of “Armed Forces” (secret unused title “Emotional Fascism”). One was that one of the other songs resembled ELP “jamming in the bottom of an oil drum”! The other — more germane to this post, as well as being true — is that “with […]
21 Dec 2009
Well, that’s that: the machine has been given a good beating and we can look forward to “Bulls On Parade” on the festive Argos ad next year. I will admit I didn’t think the RATM crew could do it: I was wrong. But as the dust settles on this most fractious and increasingly entertaining Christmas […]