Last year I wrote up some trends in the way British people listen to Christmas music now – as expressed via the medium of the streaming-era Christmas charts, which offer a fairly accurate barometer of passive festive listening.

So what happe[…]

This is not my best-loved time of year: it’s cold, dark and tainted by too many unhappy holiday memories. All the decorations remind me of when I was very young, and how I dreaded the annual construction of our plastic fir tree, anticipating my dad[…]

The UncoolTwo50 is over – well, the voting phase is – but the posting continues. These are the final 10 near-misses.

60. PUBLIC ENEMY – “By The Time I Get To Arizona” (1991)

I learned too late that this record is NOT[…]

23. MYLENE FARMER – “Libertine” (1985)

Events overtook me – they overtook everyone – and two weeks ago, when I posted this song to Bluesky, seems a very long time indeed. I’ll try to reconstruct this ancient era.

W[…]

If I really wanted to – and I don’t – I could fall down a rabbit hole reading various essays and blog posts about the death of the album. But for the sake of simplicity (and laziness), let’s say the first knell sounded shortly after t[…]

Re-rewind! Pausing midway through the main blurbs to go back and fill in another 10 of the nearly-made-its…

70. ORLANDO – “Just For A Second” (1996)

We’re now into the section of tracks which had a real, honest-to-goodne[…]

27. THE WATERBOYS – “Church Not Made With Hands” (1984)

This feels, to me anyway, like my most idiosyncratic choice – a 1984 single that’s very very much in their “The Big Music” phase, which is neither an ethos or a so[…]

31. ERIC B AND RAKIM – “Paid In Full” (1987)

It’s been heartening to see a lot of people picking this, though opinion has been fairly evenly split as to whether the original album cut or the Coldcut “7 Minutes Of Madness” rem[…]

35. HAPPY MONDAYS – “Kinky Afro” (1990)

At the suggestion of Bluesky’s own Jel I have been allotting each song in my UncoolTwo50 list a BAGGY RATING, indicating how they align with the most important (to me) micro-scene of my tee[…]

39. THE KLF – “Last Train To Trancentral” (1991)

I think the mystique of the KLF had probably gone about as far as it could – once you have a full length book treating the group as essentially a magical working you’re runni[…]