The Human League – Reproduction and Travelogue
One thing we know about men who go into space: they come back changed. Quatermass’ astronauts return carrying a cold-war plague; Philip K Dick’s Palmer Eldritch comes back a hallucinopa[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Lyrically this seems negligible, even laughable: the first big gangsta piety hit, wherein Coolio delivers a stern message to the youth, to mend their ways and not follow his path of violence and bloodshed.[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s 
The sharp London boy dialogue which bookends Weekender‘s 12 minutes sounds like Billy Liar or some other bolshy, aspirational 60s youth fable. It’s that link as much as the length which tips […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Being as contrary as you possibly can is an excellent ground rule for a pop critic. An example: judging solely by the smug, pot-addled, nervelessly shuffling trip-hop being made mid-decade by Mo’Wax and […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
It is the fourth track on a four-track EP. There is no chorus, and barely any melody. The voice is flat and preoccupied, the lyrics muted to the point of being muttered, the whole song gives an air of term[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
The beat is preposterous, sheer melodrama, Spector meets Lloyd Webber uptown. The song tops it. “Prisoner Of The Past” is mock-epic of Broadway proportions, dwarfing everything on its puny pare[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
One thing about breakthrough-era Pulp is how vicious it all is: “Razzmatazz”‘s absurdist soap opera shenanigans are a couple of shades blacker and a couple of shaves sharper than most of […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles of the 90s
There’s something wearyingly earnest about Lauryn Hill, but then there’s something irresistibly peppy and kinetic about “Doo-Wop (That Thing)” which lets you forget all her chic aut[…]

Are You Scared To Get Angsty?
You don’t decide to listen to this kind of music: it chooses you. Indie kids are born not made, see, and one day at the crossroads, after the seventeenth pointless, exhausting infatuation, after the twenty-fifth re[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Even before they put their money where their matches were, the KLF, also known as the Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, furthermore known as the JAMMS, were the most brilliant pop-artists of the decade. They we[…]