The Freaky Trigger Pop Music Focus Group 1999
(Special Acknowledgement: The format and ideas of the FTPMFG are entirely ripped off from Phil Dellio’s Radio On poll format, which attracts critics of the calibre of the awesome Chuck Eddy, and can[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Happy Mondays were Manchester lads who mixed grit and wit with a pilferer’s ear for a tune – Oasis started out getting compared to them, but the similarities really aren’t that great. Noe[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
How remarkable and ridiculous that a band so utterly unsympathetic to dance music should make such a ravishingly danceable record. It’s almost as if FSOL have spent their careers since running away f[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
You can tell when you’re in the Midlands because there’s metal on all the taxi radios. There are parts of the country where the 90s didn’t happen, they just passed in a slow iron-grey dra[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Honestly, some songs don’t need much written about them. “California Love” is the summer pop anthem of the decade, and in summer who wants to stay in and analyse stuff? But, if you insist[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Britpop was a confidence trick. ‘Confidence’ because that’s what the music ran on, a massive surge of aggressive self-belief that catapulted it into the charts. Oasis especially tapped it[…]

Writing about “So Hard”, I suggested that the story of the Pet Shop Boys in the 90s has been one of decline management, which is of course a terribly English story, much more so than the stories of wealth and despair they used to tell. Th[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
You don’t come to the Pet Shop Boys for bite, but still: this sinks its teeth deeper than any other song the band has written. The scenario: a man is angry with his girlfriend. But for the first vers[…]

Death In Vegas – The Contino Sessions
It begins with a tremulously strummed guitar. It ends with a supercharged riff. There are many guitars throughout the songs in between: echoing, shimmering, feedback guitar; gently twanging feelgood guitar;[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Whatever did pop do before sampling? The history of recordmaking is the history of an increasingly efficient process, its end result maximum excitement for minimum effort. So you had records which were gen[…]