Continuing an attempt to work out my favourite 50 21st Century singles for a music challenge. As before, what I’m doing is trying to reduce my longlist (>200 tracks) to a more manageable shortlist. It’s proving a challenge.

JAY-Z &#[…]

This Autumn I’m taking part in Arron Wright’s #FearOfMu21c challenge – a bunch of people selecting and listing their 50 favourite singles of the 21st Century, one a day.

It’s the sequel to last year’s #Uncool50 challenge (see below),[…]

Boat Life, Tsuge Tadao (tr. Ryan Holmberg), Floating World Press

Tsuda Kenta is a fiftysomething novelist who splits his time between thwarted attempts to write and equally ineffectual assistance with his family’s clothes shop. One day, […]

I am making a concerted effort to both seek and recognise joy, in whatever form it takes, as often as possible. As such, I am recognising the shit out of the sheer unmitigated joy experienced at the Mars Volta’s Troxy show and the ripples of yay th[…]

Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men Vol 2

Adapted from my Goodreads review. Collects X-Men 101-110 (July 1976-January 1978)

One of the weird things about the initial Claremont/Cockrum run on the X-Men comic is that the X-Men – still con[…]

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[…]

The Wrestling, Simon Garfield (2nd edition)

With hindsight this book had a massive impact on me when I read it back in 1996. Not that it rekindled any childhood desire to take up the grapple game – I may be a big lad but I wince at combing o[…]

What’s next for the Pop Polls?

So, we’re almost at the end of the Modern Qualifiers on the new People’s Pop site. It felt like a good time to take stock of what’s working well and what isn’t in my efforts to move the PPPolls off Twit[…]

I waited ten years for a new Mars Volta record, and when it finally arrived, I began anticipating a follow-up ORL solo release. But wait – there’s more Volta! Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazón is a total reworking of the self-titled album as ac[…]

Uncanny X-Men Masterworks Vol 1

When I clicked on Giant Size X-Men 1 in Marvel Unlimited it definitely wasn’t with the intention of starting a large-scale re-read of the 70s and 80s X-Men. I had a vague urge to find out exactly how different and[…]