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[…]

The Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps, Kai Ahsante Wilson (2015)

A fantasy novella that gestures at vaster conceptions than its slim length can contain, Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps is at once a rich broth of engagingly florid prose, a pointed lesson in the us[…]

Welcome to the new look Freaky Trigger, which is now 3 sites in a server-shaped trenchcoat.

Popular – my ongoing reviews of UK Number 1 hits, which now has its own dedicated site.

The People’s Pop Polls – arriving from the flaming[…]

The creations of AI art are truly dreamlike, which is to say, they’re only interesting if they’re yours. The endless scroll of a MidJourney Discord server is an index of desires, dreams, whims, and commercial needs, all compliantly rendered by th[…]

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[…]