(This is part 1 of a 3-part piece designed to fit around the 999th and 1000th Popular entries, which will go up on the Popular site.)

Almost my first memory of the charts is of the charts being broken. Broken hearted; collapsed by shock and grief […]

The #FearOfMu21c selection struggle reaches its end – two years once again dominated by the pop polls and then bang up to date with the sounds of 2023. These have also been years of gradual personal improvement after 2019-2020 were bin-fires fo[…]

A bunch of things happened in 2020 but the most consequential (OK, the most consequential FOR ME) is that I started doing pop polls on Twitter. I think I can state at this point that there is nobody better at creating and running track-based Twitter […]

2016 is my moment of maximum disconnect with current music – aside from Lemonade I doubt I could even name an LP from that year. It was a tough time personally, too – the market research firm I worked for decided to beta-test an experimen[…]

More from the ‘lost years’ – these tunes are pretty much all ones which showed up on End Of Year lists, which were becoming my main point of contact with the contemporary ‘scene’. That’s not to say I didn’t f[…]

The next few years are my ‘lost’ ones – like a demographic cliche, I turned 40 and began steadily to lose touch with contemporary music, pop or otherwise. By mid-decade I was caring less about current music than at any point since 1[…]

Free from the grind of having to write about music on the regular, and at the time I’d have said “not a moment too soon”. Pop in 2012 felt directionless, the weakest year I could remember. Naturally now it’s contributed more t[…]

I felt out of touch with music in 2010: a tricky proposition, as I was filing columns on it three times a month. But the shape of it felt, and still feels, indistinct. I could hear interesting things but no longer felt confident in attaching them to […]

A post went round Twitter a while ago where people were getting all RETVRN-style “look at what we have lost” about the high tide of US indie rock in 2009, a period of pretty stupefying consensus as I remember it, which as we’ve alre[…]

2008 was a rough year, for the world, for me: I ended it with what I realised later was a breakdown, several weeks into a new job. I was fortunate: medication worked, though shredded my memory – that, and the loss of two hard drives from these […]