I. PANDEMIC

The People’s Pop Polls end this weekend after four years, three months, and something like 47 tournaments of almost 12,000 pop songs. They started in March 2020, a way of solving a very acute problem which turned into a way of so[…]

One thing about the streaming revolution in pop is that it gives us a pretty accurate tracker of the UK’s changing tastes in Christmas songs. Now, by “tastes in Christmas songs” it’s probably fairer to say “what goes on Christmas playlists�[…]

(The third part of the 3-part piece about the 1000th Number 1, the charts, and 20 years of writing about them. Part 1. Part 2. See also the pieces on #999 and #1000 on Popular.)

Here’s the thing, though. I still really like pop music.

When I […]

(This is Part 2 of a 3 part piece around the 1000th No.1. Part 1 is here but you might also want to read about the 999th Number 1)

Dr Manhattan is on Mars, some time before he leaves our Universe at the end of Watchmen to become a meme. It is 1958[…]

(This is part 1 of a 3-part piece designed to fit around the 999th and 1000th Popular entries, which will go up on the Popular site.)

Almost my first memory of the charts is of the charts being broken. Broken hearted; collapsed by shock and grief […]

The #FearOfMu21c selection struggle reaches its end – two years once again dominated by the pop polls and then bang up to date with the sounds of 2023. These have also been years of gradual personal improvement after 2019-2020 were bin-fires fo[…]

A bunch of things happened in 2020 but the most consequential (OK, the most consequential FOR ME) is that I started doing pop polls on Twitter. I think I can state at this point that there is nobody better at creating and running track-based Twitter […]

2016 is my moment of maximum disconnect with current music – aside from Lemonade I doubt I could even name an LP from that year. It was a tough time personally, too – the market research firm I worked for decided to beta-test an experimen[…]

More from the ‘lost years’ – these tunes are pretty much all ones which showed up on End Of Year lists, which were becoming my main point of contact with the contemporary ‘scene’. That’s not to say I didn’t f[…]

The next few years are my ‘lost’ ones – like a demographic cliche, I turned 40 and began steadily to lose touch with contemporary music, pop or otherwise. By mid-decade I was caring less about current music than at any point since 1[…]