This post is being cross-posted to my website Freaky Trigger (freakytrigger.co.uk) and to my Patreon, and also being promoted on the Peoples Pop account on Twitter as it concerns the FATE of all three. The post goes into the details of it all but for[…]

Writing this proved to be an extremely slow process for all sorts of tedious reasons, but here are my notes on DAY 3 of the 2021 poll. Now long since completed but you can listen along on YouTube here – some true greats in this stretch.

 
Day[…]

Thanks to getting Covid (again!) I’ve made only slow progress on the poll track write-ups – in fact I only finished this selection after all the matches ended (oops). YouTube playlist here:

Here they are though! 
Day 2 – 5 Discove[…]

Here are my listening notes/capsule reviews on the first day of this year’s round-up poll. If you want to take part the polls are here and there’s a link to the Spotify playlist too.

5 Discoveries from Day 1:

Arooj Aftab – “Mohabbat”
[…]

*Four Letter Word Song Titles, that is.
As you all know I spend a lot of my pop time these days running elaborate Twitter tournaments.  These have a lot of matches and it can be tricky keeping track of what’s going on, so this is an experiment[…]

It was sometime this Summer that I decided to do a Christmas poll in December, which later expanded to include other Winter festivals.
I didn’t think the idea through because it was a long way off – and I also felt there was a real chance I w[…]

This is the third time I’ve run a poll event based on a single year – 1980 follows 1990 and 2001, and they’ve all presented different challenges in terms of building out brackets that are fun, fair (well, fair-ish) and tell a story about wh[…]

The final bracket spotlights the great hopes of indie rock – at least as far as the NME was concerned – The Strokes. Googling magazine covers for the lead-in illustrations to the poll brought home a couple of points. The first is how quic[…]

It’s the electroclash bracket! Er… kind of. Maybe half the tracks here would have some claim on that hotly contested genre, but the vibe of this bracket is “what might have been played at a hipster club night?”. Did I go to hipster club night[…]

For the fifth poll in a row – it’s become a tradition! – we have a bracket dedicated to non-English language pop. This started as simply a couple of groups in the People’s Pop Poll in May, but it’s grown as we’ve done the polls. I[…]