Passing Through: this week’s new Freaky Trigger article is by Jerry The Nipper – a piece on heartbreak, making sense of it, and Baxendale. If you don’t like Baxendale then you should read it anyway – I don’t enjoy Baxendale and I think it’s a great piece.
Also up, rescued from the archives, is this piece on Westlife, by me from January 2000. Re-reading it now I disagree with a lot of things – the binary opposition of genius-producer and conveyor-belt pop; the totally ignorant assessment of the 50s – and the notion that guitar-based boybands wouldn’t do well was purest mentalism (also – Thunderbugs successful???). BUT the writing has a kind of breezy confidence I wish I could recapture, and it’s pretty much right about Westlife and the appeal-of-boybands stuff is still quite good. So there.