Tom Ewing’s Bit
THE RAPTURE
Almost everybody else I was with hated the Rapture. I loved them. I know the songs on the much-leaked album quite well, but that wasn’t why. The thing was, by Sunday afternoon I was sick of Glastonbury, I just […]

Tonight we went to see Junior Senior do their thing at HMV. By the time we got there they only had one song left, ‘Rhythm Bandits’, which they’ve dollied up a bit for single release. There wasn’t the same vibrancy and love in […]

Top Fact About Daniel Bedroomeyes gleaned from this entertaining Guardian interview – he has hypermobile shoulders! When oh when will the first pop star with Alien Hand Syndrome step forward and end the stigma?[…]

Brad Paisley-Celebrity
Brad Paisley’s hot new single (number 4 on Billboard Modern Country Charts), Celebrity, is kissing cousin to the Buck Owens classic Act Naturally,which was a cover of a Beatle’s tune, the only problem is that no one[…]

THE CORAL – “Pass It On”
I’m still fond of what the Coral do but on current form there will come a point two or three singles down the line when the band give in and actually start playing the spoons on a record.[…]

Paul Morley’s new book is out, and flicking through this morning I quite by chance discovered that NYLPM gets a mention, as [one of] “the best places to go for writing about modern – past and present – music”. The comple[…]

Nobody’s a virgin these days, and just as well — as schticks go Britney’s was one of the worst, a smokescreen working to hide (you might almost think on purpose) the fact that some of the best pop records of the time were being issu[…]

Introduction & Nos. 20-16
Welcome to the Eighth Freaky Trigger pop music Focus Group.
What’s all this then? We took twenty recent hit singles and got a focus group to rate them each out of ten and comment on them. You were allowed to play […]

He’s mostly forgotten now, but for mandatory plays of the wonderful I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday, and as the answer to the trivia question of whose was the first record played on Radio 1, but I think Roy Wood was a truly great pop star[…]

AMY STUDT – Misfit
What Pete misses in his comments below, correct though he is about the quality of Studt’s songwriting, is the best enunciation of the word ‘arse’ in the charts at the moment. There’s no lame ‘ass[…]