Freaky Trigger is a website dedicated to smart, informal writing about pop culture – music, film, TV, food and drink, books, art, science and anything else we fancy writing about. We’re not particularly cutting edge, but we’re generous, affable and curious.
We started Freaky Trigger in 1999 – it was purely a music site for the first few years, gradually expanding its remit. Until 2005 it included the much-loved music blog NYLPM, whose contents form part of the site’s extensive archives.
WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE GET UP TO
Freaky Trigger is a team effort – most of us are based in London, and most of us socialise together on a fairly regular basis. More than 100 people have written for FT in the ten years we’ve been running, and the site has around 20 contributors. Tom Ewing is the site’s founder and publisher, Pete Baran and Mark Sinker are editors, Alan Trewartha does the back-end stuff (and wrote the Widget Logic plug-in which the site uses), and Steve Mannion (aka Ghost Food) designed it. The site is hosted on a Positive Internet server. We use and endorse WordPress.
FT rolls happily along on a diet of whatever its contributors want to talk about, but we do generally have a few bigger projects on the go. The most prominent is Tom Ewing’s Popular blog, which reviews every UK #1 single from the beginning. We’re also currently counting down our Top 100 Tracks Of All Time and talking about every MR James ghost story.
BEYOND FREAKY TRIGGER
We also produce shows for radio: we’ve done three series of an eclectic show for Resonance FM called Freaky Trigger And The Lollards Of Pop, whose content reflects the magpie approach of the website. Mark Sinker and Eli Sessions have also produced two series of A Bite Of Stars, A Slug Of Time, And Thou – a highly acclaimed show celebrating the history of the science fiction short story.
We ran a club night known as Club FT and then Poptimism throughout the 00s, in Oxford and then London. This included the occasional ‘Club Popular’ night at which only UK number 1 singles were played. Poptimism spin-offs also included Kat and Pete’s Hand Pump The Volume and Club Action nights.
Most years we perform a series of culinary experiments in London under the banner of Food Science Day, in memory of friend and contributor Liz Daplyn.
ADVERTISING, CONTENT AND REVIEW POLICY
If you just want to start a conversation with us, skip this section and go to the next one. If you’re promoting something, please read it. Thanks!
Advertising and PR: We have no advertising on Freaky Trigger (apart from unavoidable ones via using google for search) so please don’t bother asking us to run any. We also don’t source content from PR agencies or pluggers so don’t offer us any virals or “exclusive” content – but by all means let us know about awesome things you’re doing.
Reviews: Most of our reviews are of films, food and drink products, books, etc. rather than music, and we’re not an MP3 blog. So don’t worry about sending us free CDs and music, but if you have other freebies you want to offer us, get in touch. Alcohol and pork products especially welcome.
Contributors: We’re not currently actively looking for new contributors so if you’re desperate to write for Freaky Trigger your best bet is to move to London and come to the pub with us a lot! This doesn’t apply if you’ve written for us in the past, or if we’ve invited you to write for us (drunkenly or otherwise!).
All Freaky Trigger content is copyright the contributors. Link to it, quote it, don’t nick it please.
CONTACT DETAILS
We’d love to hear from you about the site or any content on it. We have thriving comments boxes and welcome new voices there, or we’re at freakytrigger@gmail.com if you want to email us. If you want to get in touch with an individual writer, use the site address and we’ll pass your details on.
We’re on Twitter (@freakytrigger).
We’re always happy to hear about freelance writing, radio or DJing opportunities. And we’re always happy to entertain visitors to London who like the website in any of a vast array of Trigger-approved drinking spots.
Thanks for visiting!