JAMIROQUAI - "Deeper Underground" 29 May 2014 Another early 90s press darling scores another late 90s number one – except the reaction isn’t “Wow” this time but “what kept you?”. Within a year or two of turning…
The People's Pop Poll: Day 6 10 May 2020 These are the groups for Day 6 of the People’s Pop Poll! Obviously it contains SPOILERS for the day’s matches so if you’d prefer to be surprised read no further!…
The People's Pop Polls 20 Apr 2020 Update: See list of all previous Peoples Pop Polls, their winners and more here As you'll know if you follow me on Twitter, I've been using the quarantine to run…
GERI HALLIWELL - "It's Raining Men" 2 Dec 2015 Living with my parents over summer ‘95 I read the Independent, cover to cover, largely as a way to delay writing job applications. I become a small-scale fan of Bridget…
The People's Pop Polls 26 Jul 2020 This is the homepage for the People's Pop Polls on Twitter (@peoples_pop). I started doing them during the first COVID-19 UK lockdown as a distraction for me and others. They…
SPICE GIRLS - "Goodbye" 12 Aug 2014 “Viva Forever” had been the Spice Girls’ unofficial break-up single – its themes (and wistful qualities) well able to shoulder the job of seeing Geri Halliwell off. What need for…
Game of Thrones S04E10: The Children 23 Jun 2014 Well, friends – here we are at the end of the series. Most of the loose ends have been tied up, and I take back last week’s grumble regarding frustrating…
BOB THE BUILDER - "Can We Fix It?" 17 Jul 2015 Her career catalysed by her inclusion on “Stan”, Dido’s soft-spoken, ruminative pop became a familiar sound in early 00s Britain. On her second album, Life For Rent, she hit on…
About the Author
Tom invented Freaky Trigger on a bus journey in the mid-90s. A page about what he's up to can be found here
28 Jul 2009
Here’s something I did for fun yesterday: a graph showing the % of UK #1 hits with female lead vocals, year by year. (Shared male/female leads counted half)*. (Click on it if you want it a bit clearer). The red bars are the percentage of female leads for each year. The line is a trendline […]
15 Aug 2007
On my eleventh birthday I received a copy of a tape called “Rave ’92” through the post from my sister Grace, who was away at university. It was the second tape she had made for me whilst she was away, (the first being a random mix of grebo, soul, indie and ‘Love Shack’ by the […]
12 Mar 2010
People in the Popular comments boxes are talking about “the canon”. I’m always quite curious as to which bits of the canon have ‘taken’ with a broadly pop-positive audience such as we have here. So here’s a poll, very easy to fill in, just say which of the Top 50 albums OF ALL TIME EVER […]
9 Jul 2010
So we get a winner, down on Brewer Street in Soho, the Glasshouse Stores was voted the number one pub of the noughties by those of us who voted. A nice pub sure, but so much better than the others? To find out why it scored so highly I thought I would canvas a number […]
1 Jul 2013
This article by Laurie Penny on the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of the manic pixie dream girl trope is really good. I’m the same age as Laurie Penny, so was plagued by the same cultural stuff as her- I don’t know if it’s just egocentrism for my own timeline but I feel like the 90s marked […]
2 Feb 2001
The Usual Excuses Bowery Electric’s “Freedom Fighter” is bewitching and worrying, and not just because it was made by a band I’d put down as America’s most useless. In fact the beat Bowery Electric use on “Freedom Fighter” sounds as familiar as ever, but that for once works in the song’s favour, in the same […]
17 Jun 2018
It’s here! The opening game of the Pop World Cup finds the four teams of Group A raising the curtain on the tournament. Pop football veterans Russia and Uruguay meet two Arab states – Egypt and Saudi Arabia – with less of a record at this level. Who will prevail? You decide. Spotify playlist and […]
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 […]