Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
‘Hero Rock’ someone called it, and the name stuck for a while – a big, brainwashing chorus in front of a lumbering unrock rhythm section and gussied up by liberal use of the hired orchest[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Your ears are a commodity, Teddy Riley just bought them up. “No Diggity” is first of all capitalism in its slinkiest form, in every sense classy. A hymn to money, sex, upward mobility, “N[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
You find your pleasures unexpectedly. I listened to this single because I was working with Kirk Lake in a bookshop at the time and thought the title was kind of cheeky, all things considered. Wasn’t […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles OF The 90s
One of the good things about dance records is that you dance to them. The middle bit of “The Rockefeller Skank” – where the tune slows down like the dancefloor’s being slowly submer[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Pop myth of the nineties #1: the success of the post-Nirvana grease and gloom brigade somehow killed off dumb, peppy, air-punching AOR or its sappier balladic equivalent. Pop myth of the nineties #2: this […]

Position Normal – Stop Your Nonsense 
Pay attention: you should buy this record.
It’s best to get the message up front, right, because the click-happy, frames’n’flash graphics-or-bust internet audience is now thoroughly post-[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
It’s amazing how Tricky – more often than not a shambolic paranoid, the world’s worst advert for weed – raises his game when he’s got an enemy in his sights, rather than just […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
For them it’s a full-time job. British culture always likes a bit of rough, with every neurotic or paranoid popster from Morrissey to Tricky getting off on the no-nonsense style and attitudes of gang[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Slick, slinky and successful, Basement Jaxx pretty much define dance music good taste, ’99 vintage. But then ‘good taste’ is hardly what dance music is about. The ideas of sample connoiss[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Barely a Fugees track at all, but a polylogue of the hip-hop great and good, lining up in your speakers to guest star on a hot record, to pay tribute to Mohammed Ali, to recreate a piece of history. The be[…]