In the ancient times, when I was old enough to know better but young enough to believe it didn’t matter, when LiveJournal was the central focus of my socialisation, at this time of year my reading feed was dominated by a popular end-of-year survey.[…]

Sunday, 29th December 2024I marks the 25th anniversary of the first Annual Between Christmas And New Year Pub Crawl and so we are heading to Southwark to sample some pubs with fascinating architecture, maybe have a drink (alcohol optional) and then a[…]

Last year I wrote up some trends in the way British people listen to Christmas music now – as expressed via the medium of the streaming-era Christmas charts, which offer a fairly accurate barometer of passive festive listening.

So what happe[…]

This is not my best-loved time of year: it’s cold, dark and tainted by too many unhappy holiday memories. All the decorations remind me of when I was very young, and how I dreaded the annual construction of our plastic fir tree, anticipating my dad[…]

The UncoolTwo50 is over – well, the voting phase is – but the posting continues. These are the final 10 near-misses.

60. PUBLIC ENEMY – “By The Time I Get To Arizona” (1991)

I learned too late that this record is NOT[…]

23. MYLENE FARMER – “Libertine” (1985)

Events overtook me – they overtook everyone – and two weeks ago, when I posted this song to Bluesky, seems a very long time indeed. I’ll try to reconstruct this ancient era.

W[…]

If I really wanted to – and I don’t – I could fall down a rabbit hole reading various essays and blog posts about the death of the album. But for the sake of simplicity (and laziness), let’s say the first knell sounded shortly after t[…]

Re-rewind! Pausing midway through the main blurbs to go back and fill in another 10 of the nearly-made-its…

70. ORLANDO – “Just For A Second” (1996)

We’re now into the section of tracks which had a real, honest-to-goodne[…]

27. THE WATERBOYS – “Church Not Made With Hands” (1984)

This feels, to me anyway, like my most idiosyncratic choice – a 1984 single that’s very very much in their “The Big Music” phase, which is neither an ethos or a so[…]

31. ERIC B AND RAKIM – “Paid In Full” (1987)

It’s been heartening to see a lot of people picking this, though opinion has been fairly evenly split as to whether the original album cut or the Coldcut “7 Minutes Of Madness” rem[…]