A quick recap!
This is a series of posts “liveblogging” the Pitchfork 500, reflecting the book’s dual purpose as criticism and playlist. The ground rule is that I do the writing in real time as I listen to the music: no edits after […]

This post is simply a way of getting all my Pitchfork columns linked to in one place so I can put it on the sidebar.
Poptimist #1: Music Hall, the Beatles, the power of the crowd.
Poptimist #2: Spoilers in music, MP3 blogs, the delights of conversati[…]

Introduction
Several years ago I did a thing on Freaky Trigger called “Thousand“: this involved playing through the 1,000 MP3s I’d collected at that point – a very small number it seems now – and writing about them in re[…]

A bunch of FT writers and close associates have NEW BLOGS (or bloglike entities) which demand some of your attention: (more…)[…]

With Rubicon and Persian Fire, Tom Holland proved himself a master of narrative history with a sizeable weakness for relating the ancient world to the modern. His third history blockbuster, Millennium, dials back the parallels but finds its narrative[…]

I’m sure there’ll be a lot about Woolies on various blogs today: time here simply to note its role in the early 00s pop boom. For some value of “boom”: the singles market in the time just before downloads was a) tiny and b) do[…]

Ironically, since I started this mean and low-down project earlier in the week, the quality of PR emails I’ve got has risen sharply and includes stuff that actually sounds pretty cool, such as Trail Of Our Vinyl, a project looking to uncover th[…]

To celebrate our Popular feature reaching the 80s, here is an exciting NEW SERIES of Freaky Trigger posts where we look back at that decade through the lens of A Decade Of i-Deas: the encyclopaedia of the ’80s, published by i-D magazine in 1990[…]

A nice memoir from the in-staff Psygnosis writer who created the WipeOut Universe. Expect my own memoir of playing WipeOut when Popular gets to the Prodigy’s “Firestarter” (NB I was rubbish at it but I loved it anyway).

“That[…]

I’ve talked about In The Night Garden – one of the BBC’s current flagship childrens’ programmes – enough in the pub to justify a post focusing on it and its strange cosmology. The show is produced by Ragdoll, who are sta[…]