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 […]

John Otway plays every year at Glastonbury in the Cabaret tent, but no one ever goes to see him. He had a novelty hit single called ‘Cor Baby That’s Really Free’ in the late ’70s and has reputedly been living off that in a rat[…]

I often ask myself that too. Especially on “Adult nite” (Thursday),
which is like a singles bar — except that there’s no booze allowed and they play too much Motley Crue and everyone’s on quads (old-skool rollerskates, n[…]

I’m in love with Honey Lantree, and anyone who cares about pop should love her too. Look at the cover of The Honeycombs ‘I Can’t Stop’ – she’s above the boys, looking to the left and slightly upwards, red lipstick[…]

A Manifesto, by Various Geezers
Geezaesthetics was coined by ILE’s Jerry The Nipper as a one-word summary of our critical stance. What did he mean? Only he knows (printing this is at least partly a nudge at him to tell us!) – we took it as an[…]

by Tim Finney
Part 1: The Scene
I’m obsessed, I know; I bang on about it endlessly, analysing minute shifts and gradations, imagining radical mutations that only exist in my head, devoting reams of print space to nothing much in particular. And[…]

EVERY TIME IT HAPPENS IT HAPPENS SO FAST
A hot Friday night, Summer 1985. Inertia everywhere – there’s not a lot left here for me, in 6 weeks I’ll be gone, leaving for London. But tonight something special – Factory Records ar[…]

1
The weather matters. Saturday 1st June: 8pm, and the sky out of my window is still fading pale blue, weightless, benevolent. A jubilee weekend of rain would be a symbolic down: but then, we are long used to finding a meaning in the rain. Not just w[…]

The Qt Of Blood Technique
Having spent the latter half of 1999 away from tape making due to self-imposed mix detox, the acquisition of a CD burner during that year’s Yuletide sent me back into the hobby with a mad frenzy. I didn’t fall of[…]

Emergency Ward
Art‘s “Ugly People with Fancy Hairdos”–just the intro, please, none of that “we’re all boat people” stuff–is one of the most vicious songs I’ve ever heard, a sneering indictment of […]