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[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
A synthesis, but what a synthesis: the plummy ballerina swoop of Kate Bush, the exotic drift of Liz Fraser, and – the real genius touch – the sensible suburban pleasantness of a hundred Sarah R[…]

8 October 1999, London
No pop in this record collection: 1977 is billed as a trip through 22 years of “music and anarchy”, part club, part gig, part showcase for organisers Satellite Records. Sounds like a good night out – sounds li[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Paranoid android: Tricky’s voice here is a mechanical, throaty burr, counterpointed by capering, maddened howls and shrieks. The beat, choppy and tense, whips him along, goading him into telling his […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
It was raining, and I’d just been dumped – good time to get into the Palace Brothers, I reckoned. “Come In”, An Arrow’s lead track, did the business: a minor miracle of econom[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
‘Hero Rock’ someone called it, and the name stuck for a while – a big, brainwashing chorus in front of a lumbering unrock rhythm section and gussied up by liberal use of the hired orchest[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Your ears are a commodity, Teddy Riley just bought them up. “No Diggity” is first of all capitalism in its slinkiest form, in every sense classy. A hymn to money, sex, upward mobility, “N[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
You find your pleasures unexpectedly. I listened to this single because I was working with Kirk Lake in a bookshop at the time and thought the title was kind of cheeky, all things considered. Wasn’t […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles OF The 90s
One of the good things about dance records is that you dance to them. The middle bit of “The Rockefeller Skank” – where the tune slows down like the dancefloor’s being slowly submer[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Pop myth of the nineties #1: the success of the post-Nirvana grease and gloom brigade somehow killed off dumb, peppy, air-punching AOR or its sappier balladic equivalent. Pop myth of the nineties #2: this […]