The FreakyTrigger 25 Best (London) Pubs of the 00’s : Intro

Pete Baran — 10 Nov 2009

Lists, lists, lists. Its what we do around here, and the end of a decade gives us ample opportunity to look back with fondness over a decade. Music, films, television were all thrown in the mix, and may pop up. But most important to us is the social.[…]

Do You Feel Real, And If So I’d Like To Know…

Tom — 30 Jan 2000

I. 

The cod-philosophical question at the centre of pop fandom is this: is pop a genre or a state? Not all records designed to be ‘great pop’ – in the sense of being good for the feet, the heart and the bank balance – […]

Girl Talk

Tom — 28 Jul 2009

Here’s something I did for fun yesterday: a graph showing the % of UK #1 hits with female lead vocals, year by year. (Shared male/female leads counted half)*.

(Click on it if you want it a bit clearer).
The red bars are the percentage of femal[…]

Blog ’92: Introduction

katstevens — 15 Aug 2007

On my eleventh birthday I received a copy of a tape called “Rave ’92” through the post from my sister Grace, who was away at university. It was the second tape she had made for me whilst she was away, (the first being a random mix o[…]

A Million Hearts

Tom — 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 o[…]

How to do a cover version

Tom — 10 Aug 2004

Distilled from several years of pop experience, here from the WORST to the BEST are ways to approach a cover version.
The Acoustic Guitar: i.e. “Any good song will sound great on an acoustic guitar”, runs the prized nugget of MOJO wisdom […]

The Strange Death of the UK Charts

Tom — 22 Jan 2009

This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.
(more…)[…]

Resisting Entropy – Mars Planets and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Food Science Day 2007 Experiment #1)

Tim — 3 Sep 2007

Mars Planets: the atomisation of the Mars Bar. An entropic dis-integration, the tendency of all things to become more chaotic, in confectionery form. I’m trying to resist the impulse to tie this stuff up to no-such-thing-as-Society atomisation[…]

Pop As Ghost

Tom — 9 May 2023

ABBA Voyage, The ABBA Arena

In Jim Steinmeyer’s fine history of stage magic, Hiding The Elephant, he goes into detail on the history of Pepper’s Ghost, the illusion that captivated Victorian London and revolutionised the tricknology of magic p[…]

The Cottage Industry Of Moments

Robin — 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, c[…]

My Own Private Record Club*

Tom — 10 Mar 2015

This is a post listing the records I’m listening to for my YEAR OF ROCKISM**, as outlined here (cut and pasted from Tumblr):
I’m going to listen to one album on a once-a-day basis for a week, a different one each week. Not in order to write a[…]

I Want To Know What Love Is – Eighties Revisionism

Tom — 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 ti[…]