Top 100 Songs Of All Time
20 January 2012
Some time in the mid-70s, I went on a school trip to the Ludlow Festival, to see (I think) Cymbeline: six kids crammed in the back of a teacher’s little van, five in their late teens actually studying it for A-level, and me, experimenting and showing off. So naturally they were all having fun amiably teasing me, and hit on POP as a topic to trip me up. As a gamble — early version of a dodge I make to this day — I declared my Young Person’s admiration for my dad’s favourite singer: Eartha Kitt. Which paid off — they’d none of them never heard of her, and with no comfy take, to needle or muddle me with, preferred to chuckle a bit at my weird obscure tastes and went back to earnest Sabbath-chat.
Funny thing is, I grew up and through a life writing about and categorising music, exploring and improving histories, and still Eartha feels more like a handy prevarication move than a name to conjure with: someone people kind of know about, for sure, and maybe like (maybe a LOT), but without a set place, or role, or handy symbolic meaning. more »
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT • 6 Comments
2 January 2012
“What were the skies like when you were young?”
I think everyone hears a record in their youth which suddenly reveals a whole new world of possibilities. It could be a three minute punk song, where simplicity and lyrical fervour suddenly make the business of writing your own songs seem possible. Maybe hearing the Aphex Twin opened a world of atonal computer music, bedroom techno that saw no instuments at all. Or think of the kid coming home from yet another tedious trumpet lesson hearing the joyous release of Two Tone and looking in a whole new way at his instrument. more »
Pete Baran in FT • 10 Comments
6 March 2011
What to say about this reggae supersmash not already said by Tom, and the army of comment crew enthusiast over on Popular. Ever angle of this amazing one hit wonder has been touched up, a worthy ten and a record that still sounds fresh as light as the day it was birthed upon the charts. The twin guns of confidence and sass bounce this along as such a terrific little pop gem that it really is very very hard to find anything to say except its really, really good.
So instead why not look at the conspiracy theories which swirl around the song. From the sabotage of the BBC Top Of The Pops orchestra to the misspelling of Althea on a record sleeve, its a song with a fair share of odd stories attached to it. more »
Pete Baran in FT • No Comments
27 January 2011
Poor Rosalia, the only Puerto Rican in West Side Story who seems to actually like Puerto Rico. In contrast to Maria, who prances around the bridal shop pretending to be Miss America (despite the competition being open only to members “of good health and of the white race” at the time), and Anita, whose witty and leggy defence of their adopted home is the basis of the catchiest song in the show and indeed FREAKY TRIGGER’S #10 BEST SINGLE OF ALL TIME, Rosalia is OK with Puerto Rico. In the play script she is described as “quietly dressed and not too bright”, which might explain why she doesn’t really have a problem with the Sharks’ homeland (although it does not explain why the costumers for the 2009 revival gave her such stupid hair). But Puerto Rico, according to Rosalia, is kind of okay. You know, it’s pretty. There are some nice tropical breezes and pineapples there. Maybe sometime she’d like to go back and visit.
NOT SO FAST, IMMIGRANT! You’ve made your choice and you can never go back!
[pic: also, in America, girls don't wear ponytails on top of their heads. Join us in the first world, chiquita!] more »
Kerry in FT • 8 Comments
21 January 2011
Any 13-year-old from 1995 will tell you that the following are vital if you are to be in any way cool:
- attitude of complete indifference to all events
- inside-out knowledge of everything that happened on telly last night, especially Friends
- Rimmel Black Cherry lipstick
- copy of Sugar magazine (RIP :`()
- some trendy jeans
more »
katstevens in FT /New York London Paris Munich • 3 Comments
3 January 2011
We’re big fans of Busted here at FreakyTrigger; speculative futurism, analysis of authority in the education system, asking people to dance at the disco and Thunderbirds are all highly relevant to our interests and I’m confident that if Charlie hadn’t thrown a strop to go and attempt to gain that elusive approval from Biffy Clyro that seems to be the prize on the X Factor these days then I’m confident their third album would’ve contained a song about the long egg continuum. more »
Hazel in FT • 5 Comments
25 October 2010
Goldfinger by Ash is a bit of a dirge, and amlost certainly one of those songs named because somewhere along the line it sounded to someone somewhere a bit like Goldfinger by Shirley Bassey. Its unclear from their performance, and the song where in the gestation period of the song it was, but they were still in school at the time they wrote it. Safe to say the song contains no luscious horns, no pussycat Bassey growl and no references to King Midas, or the oddly low temperature of anybody’s fingers.
Ash have never been asked to write or perform a Bond theme. more »
Pete Baran in FT • 2 Comments
20 May 2010
There are a number of songs on this list that, in the cold light of day* it has been hard to find someone who will champion enough to write about it. One even got booted off of the list for that reason. A similar situation has arisen with The Futureheads version of The Hounds Of Love. To a sober mind it is hard to work out why this robust but one joke gag on one of Kate Bush’s best tracks should have made any list of the Top 100 Songs of All Time. Especially with Kate’s own Wuthering Heights wuthering considerably lower down.
To explain it, and to excuse saying much more about it than calling it “a robust but one joke gag on one of Kate Bush’s best tracks” it probably would make sense to explain again how this list was made. Since in the next couple of months we will finally make it to number one after this six year journey, let us go back to a room above the Jeremy Bentham pub on the 29th December 2004 more »
Pete Baran in FT • 11 Comments
30 April 2010
I’ll tell you what pop’s missing at the moment and that’s rivalries. Not feuds, we have plenty of feuds, there’s a feud a day on Twitter I think. Feuds are great but the emphasis is on the stars themselves and what they think or feel. Rivalries are different. They’re about the fans, about what stars mean on a social level.
The great necessary thing about rivalries is that if you’re an outsider they should baffle you a bit. Take That and East 17 – seriously? What’s the difference? They’re both boy bands right, both manufactured, you shouldn’t be listening to either of them, you should be listening to oh, I don’t know, Consolidated or something. And isn’t the rivalry all a hype thing anyway? I had those conversations a few times in 1993.
But hype is the brassiere of pop rivalries more »
Tom in FT • 8 Comments
13 April 2010
Be My Baby always existed. Clearly to me it always existed, it is ten years older than me. But there is something about Be My Baby which feels like it always existed, its has the primal chord, the ur-drumbeat, that wall of sound and in the heart of it Ronnie Spector’s hics, tics and wonderfully strident voice. You get the feeling they could have shut down pop music then and there and called it a good job well done, and a plenty of people would have said fair enough.
(By the way I love that London Records reissue sleeve: way to go to miss the point).
This perceived perfection is the problem with Be My Baby. Not that it is too good. But in marrying Spector’s production to this wonderful mid-tempo stompathon it unwittingly gave us the template for “proper pop”. You know, the pop that never really existed, the pop that people are always talking about when they are sniffy about S Club 7*. more »
Pete Baran in FT • 7 Comments
« Older
Some time in the mid-70s, I went on a school trip to the Ludlow Festival, to see (I think) Cymbeline: six kids crammed in the back of a teacher’s little van, five in their late teens actually studying it for A-level, and me, experimenting and showing off. So naturally they were all having fun amiably teasing me, and hit on POP as a topic to trip me up. As a gamble — early version of a dodge I make to this day — I declared my Young Person’s admiration for my dad’s favourite singer: Eartha Kitt. Which paid off — they’d none of them never heard of her, and with no comfy take, to needle or muddle me with, preferred to chuckle a bit at my weird obscure tastes and went back to earnest Sabbath-chat. 
