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[…]

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[…]

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[…]

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[…]