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FreakyTrigger
  • UncoolTwo50 V: That Sounds Like Something Out Of A Dream
    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[…]
  • UncoolTwo50 XV: Then I Felt Just Like A Fiend
    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[…]
  • Omargeddon #47: Doom Patrol
    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[…]
  • UncoolTwo50 IV: Through The Speaker Boxes, Loud’s My Diagnosis
    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[…]
  • UncoolTwo50 XIV: You’re All Fakes Run To Your Mansions
    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[…]
  • UncoolTwo50 XIII: We Are Far Too Young And Clever
    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[…]
Popular
  • TONY CHRISTIE ‘ft’ PETER KAY – “Is This The Way To Amarillo?”
    The success of Elvis’ reissues – a promotional gimmick which actually managed to hack the charts – made a strong case that the new pop of 2005 simply wasn’t able to capture the wider public imagination. This record makes it inarguable[…]
  • McFLY – “All About You”/”You’ve Got A Friend”
    McFly’s biggest hit, crossing the 500k sales barrier partly because it was the official Comic Relief single. The Carole King cover is doing most of the hard work on that front, with a video involving the lads helping out in Uganda, and the song sto[…]
  • STEREOPHONICS – “Dakota”
    “Dakota” has a curious reputation. A lot of music fans I know see it as Stereophonics’ best song. That in itself is hardly unusual. But many of those people also see it as the band’s only good song. Which is odder – these guys have eigh[…]
  • NELLY ft TIM McGRAW – “Over And Over”
    There are meetings between genres where creative sparks fly and new hybrid forms can be glimpsed, like undreamed-of particles in a supercollider. There are also meetings between genres which feel more like high level EU summits – whatever happe[…]
  • JENNIFER LOPEZ – “Get Right”
    There is a 2005 single, a huge hit, and many will tell you it’s producer Rich Harrison’s masterpiece. On that record, cut-ups of funk breaks are rearranged at oblique angles in a 21st century update of James Brown’s rhythmic modernism, buil[…]
  • U2 – “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own”
    While I’ve been writing about 2004 and 2005’s pop music I’ve also been helping my wife sort out her mother’s memorial service, so a song about a parent dying is – unfortunately – Relevant To My Interests right now. Not that I real[…]

  4. The nuclear threat wasn’t so widespread in 1980, compared to the 1983/84 era, when it really became unavoidable, via tv…

  5. 1980 seems to be the first year when nuclear war anxiety creeps into the U.K. music scene. Kate Bush, The…

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