Hook Road Car Park, Epsom – 24th October 1999
The cars drag themselves through the 7am rain like a parade of slugs, into the multi-storey. It’s cold, everybody’s wearing cheap waterproofs or knackered jumpers, most people have an ex[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
White pop critics who dig certain kinds of hip-hop get hit time and again with the accusation that the reason they’re into it is some secret Stagger Lee fantasy of the badass black male. As good libe[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Why did they bother? If ever a project was born to fail, Orlando was it. Campy vocal flounce and shameless pop bounce, and lyrics which made the Manics (say) sound like the straight-talking bluff-artists t[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
The clocks go back and the nights start to pull in around you. It’s dark when you get to work and dark when you leave, so you start to feel that wintry melancholia nipping at your edges, and you star[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
It was one of those stardust radio moments, the kind the thing was invented for: in my kitchen, 1994, and the room filling up with the most dynamic pop I’d ever heard, the hammering music finely bala[…]

Why? The Beta Band is the most troublesome record of 1999 – its makers disown it, its few disciples adore it, a whole lot of people hate it, and a whole lot more like me just don’t know what to make of it, but keep playing it anyway. Whil[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
A synthesis, but what a synthesis: the plummy ballerina swoop of Kate Bush, the exotic drift of Liz Fraser, and – the real genius touch – the sensible suburban pleasantness of a hundred Sarah R[…]

8 October 1999, London
No pop in this record collection: 1977 is billed as a trip through 22 years of “music and anarchy”, part club, part gig, part showcase for organisers Satellite Records. Sounds like a good night out – sounds li[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Paranoid android: Tricky’s voice here is a mechanical, throaty burr, counterpointed by capering, maddened howls and shrieks. The beat, choppy and tense, whips him along, goading him into telling his […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
It was raining, and I’d just been dumped – good time to get into the Palace Brothers, I reckoned. “Come In”, An Arrow’s lead track, did the business: a minor miracle of econom[…]