If you take pop history from the emergence of Elvis to right now, the release of Thriller– the highest selling album there will ever be – sits at the midpoint. This coincidence nagged at me when I reviewed the album’s reissue, not v[…]

I have been very remiss in not pimping the reissue of Saint Etienne’s Foxbase Alpha in a grand 2CD deluxe edition. (A similarly deluxified Continental is also out: other records will follow across the year.) Not only is it one of my favourite 9[…]

Ages ago (1999, to be exact) I did a “Top 100 Singles Of The 90s” series here. While contemplating whether to go for a 00s one (and where to do it, if so), I decided to put a Spotify playlist of the old list together.
And here it is.
64 t[…]

Almost a year ago I wrote this post – “5 Point Plan For The UK To Win Eurovision”, defining “win” as “maybe come a respectable fifth”.
And here we are: a respectable fifth. So let’s see which bits of my[…]

This is a PDF of the cover story on this month’s Research magazine, written by me about the ten current hottest thinkers in consumer behaviour (i.e. those dudes most often mentioned at research conferences).
It has been tested on non-researcher[…]

I asked a simple question – nicked wholesale from Steve M on Poptimists -“What’s your favourite current song and how did you first hear it?”
Here are the answers I got. (more…)[…]

This set of Wu-Tang Covers imagined as Blue Note covers, by designer Logan Walters, is both gorgeous and thought-provoking.
What kind of thoughts does it provoke? It makes me think about sleeve art, and how that art often ties records to a particular[…]

An interesting blog post about the recent discovery that our galaxy “smells of raspberries” (and rum, though whether man rum or lady rum is unspecified).
The blog asks: given the irrelevance of that ‘fact’ to astronomy, shoul[…]

Cluetrainers In The Age Of Conversation
This post is my contribution to the “Cluetrain Plus Ten” project, in which 95 bloggers provide commentary on each of the 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto. I chose Thesis 15, which runs as follows:

&#8[…]

Just sayin’ like
“Rock N Roll Waltz”
“A Woman In Love”
“Just Walkin’ In The Rain”
“Jailhouse Rock” (!!)
“It’s Only Make Believe”
Oh – and also, if you missed it, you […]