Friday Poll Special – The Great Britpop Sorting Hat!

28 Jun 2013 We are now firmly into the BRITPOP YEARS on Popular, oh yes, so it’s time to consider its musical legacy in the only language we truly understand, viz. a ticky-box poll. We have selected 32 bands who someone, somewhere, might possibly have once described as Britpop. Tick all the ones you like and by science […]

How Old Is Superman?

20 Aug 2004 How Old Is Superman? One of the seemingly undefined aspect of the Superman mythos is that of his ageing. Those who fall on the side of his omnipotence in everything (the superhearing, superbreath, superhair bunch) probably think as a preternatural godhead he will live forever. Look, he has been banging around in the comics for […]

The Sex Pistols At The Manchester Free Trade Hall: THE TRUTH

14 Apr 2007 Plenty of words have been written about the seminal Sex Pistols’ seminal gig at the seminal Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976. There has even been a whole book about it! Everyone knows that the gig was really very important indeed and that everyone who attended became a very extremely important person. HOWEVER does everyone know exactly […]

Are you local?

13 Feb 2000 England is DIFFERENT (or SPECIAL if you want to be polite) to everywhere else for many reasons, but one is because our music “industry” (it’s not an industry – making baked beans is an industry, and nobody does THAT in their spare time, writes fanzines about it or has them poured over themselves at weddings. […]

Dead Again: MP3s And The Dissolution Of Pop

26 Apr 1999 The mode of the music changes, the city quakes, or at least those blocks of primer-than-thou office space quake that house the HQs of worldwide record companies. The reason, apparently, is MP3 technology, which you all know about and most of you use, and which has been the subject of acres of ruminative, pessimistic music […]

Pop World Cup 2018 Group E Match 1

25 Jun 2018 No, you’ve not missed any matches. We’re putting this year’s games up as we get the entries in, and so it’s a big thankyou to the prompt Group E gaffers of Serbia, Brazil, Switzerland and Morocco. It’s a group of veteran pop managers in the dugout this match, but only two can progress beyond the […]

The Sound Barrier Podcast: 1: The Lost World / The Lost City Of Z

3 Apr 2017 So for a while myself and Pamela Hutchinson, of Silent London fame have been talking about doing a more regular podcast. And while we love talking about silent films, we also like new films too. And so The Sound Barrier was born over a Campari Spritz or four, we take a new release and we […]

The Strange Death of the UK Charts

22 Jan 2009 This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.