Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
If you asked me to pick just one figure to stand as the most underrated act of the decade, Acen Ravzi would be it. His series of 12″ singles, tossed out into the seething dance marketplace of ’[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Like a lot of teenage guys, I wanted to form a band. I didn’t have much idea about the instruments the band would play, but I thought maybe there should be a lot of them. I knew my band ought to play[…]

Almost the first issue of the NME I bought had a Stuart Maconie album review in it which ended something like this: “There are only two possible marks for this record. One is zero and the other is (10)“, and I think that cheap move was th[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Kids, I swear, it was a grass-roots musical revolution out there! While the NME nobs sipped Chardonnay in their Wapping skyscrapers and cossetted their chinless audience with flaccid guitar nostalgia, the […]

Hook Road Car Park, Epsom – 24th October 1999
The cars drag themselves through the 7am rain like a parade of slugs, into the multi-storey. It’s cold, everybody’s wearing cheap waterproofs or knackered jumpers, most people have an ex[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
White pop critics who dig certain kinds of hip-hop get hit time and again with the accusation that the reason they’re into it is some secret Stagger Lee fantasy of the badass black male. As good libe[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Why did they bother? If ever a project was born to fail, Orlando was it. Campy vocal flounce and shameless pop bounce, and lyrics which made the Manics (say) sound like the straight-talking bluff-artists t[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
The clocks go back and the nights start to pull in around you. It’s dark when you get to work and dark when you leave, so you start to feel that wintry melancholia nipping at your edges, and you star[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
It was one of those stardust radio moments, the kind the thing was invented for: in my kitchen, 1994, and the room filling up with the most dynamic pop I’d ever heard, the hammering music finely bala[…]

Why? The Beta Band is the most troublesome record of 1999 – its makers disown it, its few disciples adore it, a whole lot of people hate it, and a whole lot more like me just don’t know what to make of it, but keep playing it anyway. Whil[…]