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 […]

Do You Feel Real, And If So I’d Like To Know…

30 Jan 2000 I.  The cod-philosophical question at the centre of pop fandom is this: is pop a genre or a state? Not all records designed to be ‘great pop’ – in the sense of being good for the feet, the heart and the bank balance – make it to the Top Forty, or anywhere near. But not […]

PASSION VICTIMS

12 Feb 2002 There’s too much love to go around these days How much do you think I like music? Sometimes I get e-mails, angry about this or that, telling me I don’t like it at all. Sometimes I’m inclined to agree. Every now and then a poster pops up on our discussion board, I Love Music, and […]

Gnome Man’s Land

11 Jan 2016 I wrote a thing for here about David Bowie and how I felt about him and what he meant to me, but then Pitchfork kindly decided they wanted to run it, so it’s below. (Original title: He Could Be Dead, He Could Be Not, He Could Be You). And to any other good pieces I […]

YOU SAD BASTARD! – Carter Reconsidered

1 Sep 2002 I don’t think much of the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’ but there’s guilt and there’s guilt, isn’t there? There’s guilt for something you might be doing wrong – breaking some invisible law of taste, maybe – and that guilt you can and should kick aside. But then there’s guilt for the things you have done, […]

Resisting Entropy – Mars Planets and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Food Science Day 2007 Experiment #1)

3 Sep 2007 Mars Planets: the atomisation of the Mars Bar. An entropic dis-integration, the tendency of all things to become more chaotic, in confectionery form. I’m trying to resist the impulse to tie this stuff up to no-such-thing-as-Society atomisation because that’s not how we do things, right? And Mars Planets are better to share than a proper big […]

WHITE TOWN – “Your Woman”

4 Feb 2014 #757, 25th January 1997 In 1997, talking about music on the Internet means USENET, a Gormenghast of diverging and reconnecting fora whose goblin tribes gleefully rampage through each other’s chosen lairs: a thread will start on alt.music.prodigy, then careen into alt.music.spice-girls via alt.music.misc, while Discordians and trolls plot to spread it still further. Still, there […]

King William’s College Kwizz 2019. FT Round 1

28 Dec 2019 REASON: Welcome one and welcome all, to the FreakyTrigger wing of a KWIZZ (quiz) sat for a hundred and blimey years by Isle of Man schoolkids. (“Please return your answers to the Principal’s Office by Monday 13th January.”) RHYME: Themed sets of 10 questions each — a new one every day (or so). COLLABORATIN’ COMMENT […]