Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles of the 90s 
A cover of a forgotten fifties folk tune, “Sally Free And Easy” is the track that makes explicit Flying Saucer Attack’s romantic purpose, tightly drawing the strings together which conn[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
What you hear is not a test – the Invisibl Skratch Piklz are junkyard jazz, the perfectly po-mo sound of pop culture in meltdown. One of the great ear-boggling pop statements, Vs Da Klamz Uv Deth is […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles of the 90s
“You’re talking about things I haven’t done yet!” You and anybody else. Terminator is a record that gets ahead of itself, hurled back from some pure-war future to explode into 1992,[…]

Ingratitude: a key critical quality I’d not much previously thought about, until I got the new CD by Toronto’s Pope Factory through the post. Standing dressing-gowned and bleary-eyed in the hallway of my parents’ house, slimly omino[…]

England under the knife: the second great British pop album of 1999 is a sick and bruised twin of the first. XTC’s Apple Venus painted England as a rustic, mystic utopia, where lives find rest and satisfaction in changeless countryside ritual. […]

What was the worst you were hurt? And was it as bad as this?
A simple piano figure echoes through the emptiest room in creation, its notes caked with dust and maybe regret, repeating until it stops being any kind of melody and becomes the sad up and […]

IT’S GOOD TO TALK
What is The Matrix? Mostly, an advert. The vehicle of communication, transport and ultimate liberation in this modern-and-knows-it film isn’t the dowdy, sinister computer but the telephone, specifically the Nokia mobile […]

The Chemical Brothers – Surrender
There’s very little that’s tougher to write about than enjoyable music. Should you blunder across a record that harrows your soul or corrodes your skull or scrapes your brainstem with iron claws, we[…]

This is a selection of the Funny Folk cartoons which ran on Freaky Trigger during 1999. Script and Art by Al Ewing except * where Script is by Al and Tom Ewing.
“Choke – it’s predicted DOOM – for ME!”
“I’ll &[…]

HEY BROTHER, POUR THE WINE
I wanted to write something about crooning and the figure of the crooner, the great crooners being the true dinosaurs of the rock era: old, cold-blooded, and powerful. Through one lens, the songs sung by Dino or Frankie or […]