Apologies to anyone who wanted to, you know WRITE, about this subject. We couldn’t find anyone on the internet who was interested. In fact, for the life of us we’re not even sure how this entry managed to get this high in the list. We suspect an orchestrated internets campaign on USENET.
What’s the deal with Belle and Sebastian? Loads of people idolise them, perhaps as many despise them. I’ve always just heard pleasant but inessential indie-pop with catchy-ish tunes and fairly lame vocals (though I get that it’s kind of the point), sometimes merry, sometimes wistful but never, to these ears, exciting. “Like The Beatles if they’d all been Paul” is how I once, snidely, dismissed them. This isn’t a ‘why bother with wimpy indie-pop’, I get why people dig that, but why their wimpy indie-pop over anyone else’s?
#2: My head's to the wall and I'm lonely 1 Sep 2020 A bracket dominated by indiepop - some established at this point, some emergent, some doing things a little differently. There was a lot of this stuff about in 2001; it…
STEPS - "Heartbeat" / "Tragedy" 30 Aug 2014 This is the first Popular entry I’ve written in the Southern hemisphere. And while it wasn’t a big hit down under – or, I think, anywhere except the UK –…
Canoe: Dig It? 3 Dec 2017 La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman Philip Pullman has an enviable knack of getting critics to dwell on the high-flown literary allusions in his books - Paradise Lost in the…
ROBBIE WILLIAMS - "Eternity" / "The Road To Mandalay" 24 Jan 2016 The album cycle that began with “Rock DJ” a year before staggers to its end four singles later with “The Road To Mandalay”, a bitter squib of a song, pulled…
The Freaky Trigger Readers’ Poll 2016 15 Dec 2016 "Hello readers! It's me, last year's winner, Missy Elliott! Although 2016 has been an eventful year, I definitely hadn't forgotten about my triumphant song at all. Definitely not. And neither…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2017: #20-#11 18 Jan 2018 "Hi there, I'm the Heart of the Ocean, a fictional diamond necklace made famous by Britney asking whether I'd been chucked in the Atlantic Ocean or not when actually I…
GERI HALLIWELL - "Lift Me Up" 15 Dec 2014 Geri Halliwell may have broken away from her former band, but she knew a good release schedule when she saw one: the singles from Schizophonic form a rough parallel to…
1 Jun 2002
1 The weather matters. Saturday 1st June: 8pm, and the sky out of my window is still fading pale blue, weightless, benevolent. A jubilee weekend of rain would be a symbolic down: but then, we are long used to finding a meaning in the rain. Not just we aesthetes (‘I’m happy when it rains’; ‘You’re […]
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 […]
30 Dec 2005
#222, 20th August 1966 DIGRESSION: For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project: “This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous condescencion of prosperity’…the lives of the kind of people who spent the […]
10 Jan 2012
Hi, I’m Lauryn Hill circa my breakthrough role in Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit, and it is a real pleasure to be able to present to you the top ten FreakyTrigger tracks of the year. When my mother told me I couldn’t join the choir run by a fake nun, I got really […]
5 Jan 2019
“Greetings! It’s me, 90’s summer dance craze The Macarena. I’ve never really gone away, as you must surely know: the muscle memory of hand flips and hip wiggles is ingrained into the very fabric of your DNA, to be passed down to your heirs and their heirs for many centuries hence, waxing on and waxing […]
1 Oct 2002
Introduction It was about 2 in the morning and I was trying to get a handle on Alexander the Great. I had a final exam coming up and I’d missed half the syllabus – and something else was missing; a way into the man’s head. Alexander had single-handedly destroyed the world’s largest Empire and put […]
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 […]
Best post ever.
Apologies to anyone who wanted to, you know WRITE, about this subject. We couldn’t find anyone on the internet who was interested. In fact, for the life of us we’re not even sure how this entry managed to get this high in the list. We suspect an orchestrated internets campaign on USENET.
This song is great, I’m sure I voted for it. I last heard it playing in Starbucks and they cut the song just before the word “wanks”.
Presumably they don’t know what an arab strap is otherwise they’d forego the whole song. FWIW this is my favourite Belle & Sebastian song.
No, Punka was robbed.
What’s the deal with Belle and Sebastian? Loads of people idolise them, perhaps as many despise them. I’ve always just heard pleasant but inessential indie-pop with catchy-ish tunes and fairly lame vocals (though I get that it’s kind of the point), sometimes merry, sometimes wistful but never, to these ears, exciting. “Like The Beatles if they’d all been Paul” is how I once, snidely, dismissed them. This isn’t a ‘why bother with wimpy indie-pop’, I get why people dig that, but why their wimpy indie-pop over anyone else’s?
Which Steps song was in contention?
It was the Best Newcomer award wasn’t it? Rather than an award based on an individual song? Or is my memory playing tricks on me?
Wonderful post and astute comments from #1,#3 and #4. Brilliant song imho.