Continuing an attempt to work out my favourite 50 21st Century singles for a music challenge. As before, what I’m doing is trying to reduce my longlist (>200 tracks) to a more manageable shortlist. It’s proving a challenge.

JAY-Z &#[…]

This Autumn I’m taking part in Arron Wright’s #FearOfMu21c challenge – a bunch of people selecting and listing their 50 favourite singles of the 21st Century, one a day.

It’s the sequel to last year’s #Uncool50 challenge (see below),[…]

Boat Life, Tsuge Tadao (tr. Ryan Holmberg), Floating World Press

Tsuda Kenta is a fiftysomething novelist who splits his time between thwarted attempts to write and equally ineffectual assistance with his family’s clothes shop. One day, […]

Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men Vol 2

Adapted from my Goodreads review. Collects X-Men 101-110 (July 1976-January 1978)

One of the weird things about the initial Claremont/Cockrum run on the X-Men comic is that the X-Men – still con[…]

Just a bit of CROSS PROMOTION with the Peoples Pop part of the site, where we’ve launched a new! feature – The LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY TRACKS!

It’s a music discovery game. You listen to a themed 12-song playlist each week and pic[…]

The Wrestling, Simon Garfield (2nd edition)

With hindsight this book had a massive impact on me when I read it back in 1996. Not that it rekindled any childhood desire to take up the grapple game – I may be a big lad but I wince at combing o[…]

What’s next for the Pop Polls?

So, we’re almost at the end of the Modern Qualifiers on the new People’s Pop site. It felt like a good time to take stock of what’s working well and what isn’t in my efforts to move the PPPolls off Twit[…]

Uncanny X-Men Masterworks Vol 1

When I clicked on Giant Size X-Men 1 in Marvel Unlimited it definitely wasn’t with the intention of starting a large-scale re-read of the 70s and 80s X-Men. I had a vague urge to find out exactly how different and[…]

ABBA Voyage, The ABBA Arena

In Jim Steinmeyer’s fine history of stage magic, Hiding The Elephant, he goes into detail on the history of Pepper’s Ghost, the illusion that captivated Victorian London and revolutionised the tricknology of magic p[…]

TALK TALK – Laughing Stock (1991)

Written as a “Designated Champion” essay for the Best Album Of The 90s tournament on Twitter.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s 1991 and there’s this band, minor in their gen[…]