Introduction
Welcome to the Ninth Freaky Trigger pop music Focus Group.
What’s all this then? We took twenty recent hit singles (released between July and September in the UK) and got a focus group to rate them each out of ten and comment on th[…]

I was listening to Ultravox just before I downloaded this and imagine my glee when Pink’s new single starts with a hyper-authentic back-to-’81 tak-tak-tak bass sound. ‘Glee!’ I thought, ‘This is going to be like a Girls […]

What’s Wrong And What To Do About It is a weblog and a rather good one (it reminds me a bit of the long lost Blue Lines but a bit cheekier – I particularly liked the “Let’s Move Christmas” entry). More importantly though[…]

You can check out any time you want BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE: David Gedge is guest DJing at indie nitespot How Does It Feel To Be Loved? this Friday and yes dammit I am going. Well, maybe. I can always leave if it’s too frightening. Or never act[…]

I think it’s safe to say that Kevin Rowland means it (see Pete’s entry below). Meaning it is pretty much what Kevin Rowland does. There was a character in 2000AD called the Mean Machine, who had a dial on his forehead with numbers from 1 […]

Andrew Lloyd Webber is a populist composer, an unashamed Tory, and an easy target, so it’s hardly surprising that given the golden opportunity of his new art exhibition the Guardian enjoys a good old sneer. Bar a handful of old songs I have no […]

Popular: this is probably the most ambitious thing I have ever tried, so I rate its chances of success at about .2% (It’ll also take a good five years even if I do manage it.) Check back every so often, in other words, but it should be a fun li[…]

Quarks And Charms: the “Blogosphere” just keeps on grrrrrrrowing. (Though I prefer Simon R’s other coining, “music press in exile”, both for its chest-puffing qualities and the vision it summons of a bunch of squabbling,[…]

Striker vs The Sun – from the Striker comic’s official news website (via Parallax View). I’d resisted picking up a copy of Striker precisely because I’d assumed it was a News International publication – but no, it’[…]

Leakedalbums.com: the embryo of a very good idea indeed – systematically finding out which albums have leaked, pointing you at them and writing about them. So far the site seems fairly tethered to what a typical ILM reader (or as typical a read[…]