Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles of the 90s
Of course it would take this supremely thoughtful pop group to realise the naive potential of handbag house and then alchemise it into a single which is both their and handbag’s most ravishing five m[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles of the 90s
The only thing I ever read about Jo was that she was 18 and lived in Brixton. I’ve made half-hearted enquiries since but to be honest I like her anonymous and unheralded: if I found out she ended up […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles of the 90s
Some of Freaky Trigger‘s younger readers may be disturbed to learn that the Prodigy, those tough-minded harbingers of a glorious urban-electronic future where we all quote Goering and learn how to sn[…]

The E Brothers Guide To Jukebox Etiquette 
As Dr Johnson once put it :”When a man is tired of jukeboxes, he is tired of Life by Simply Red”. Or was that Don Johnson? Whichever, his sage words merely underscore the quite tectonic importance of th[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles of the 90s
It was around the turn of the 90s that people started to take the Pet Shop Boys seriously. Acceptance and praise increased their range and life expectancy, but it trashed their trump card: this was a band […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
If you remember one thing from my review, let it be this: DO NOT purchase the Speedy J album which has some impostor unremixed version of “Patterns” on, it is wretched. Having heard it I can of[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Hip-hop might not be my territory, but I knew enough to realise I was hearing something special here, a music that couldn’t be more different from the bleary Wu-Tang swagger or icy gangsta slickness […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
An acid house love song? Not quite, soaked in 303 buzz though “Missing The Moon” is. It’s just another early-90s example of bands allowing the new music to seep into their existing sound […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
The first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” it was in a pub, on a jukebox, Christmas 1991. The violent, half-exciting sound of a stagnant music trying to tear itself out of its own rotten […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
The central puzzle is that with New Order you have lyrics that most songwriters would look at as senseless knock-offs, and a voice that most singers would call insultingly blank, and when you put the two t[…]