So, I’m quite young-ish. Well, sort of. Teenagers still think I’m old and weird but I do qualify for a railcard and that. As a result, I have only really quite dim memories of Michael Jackson before he turned into a really odd person who […]

So I listened to the UK Top 40 on Radio 1 for the first time in – oh, I don’t know, years. Like a lot of the audience, I was ambulance-chasing: I wanted to see how the download-led charts would cope with a superstar death. I was hoping &#[…]

On a recent radio program I heard some old dude talking about how kids dance these days: “Just all by themselves! Jumping up and down with their hands in the air!” This guy goes to some good parties, I thought. “Not like in my day &[…]

If you take pop history from the emergence of Elvis to right now, the release of Thriller– the highest selling album there will ever be – sits at the midpoint. This coincidence nagged at me when I reviewed the album’s reissue, not v[…]

I have been very remiss in not pimping the reissue of Saint Etienne’s Foxbase Alpha in a grand 2CD deluxe edition. (A similarly deluxified Continental is also out: other records will follow across the year.) Not only is it one of my favourite 9[…]

This Friday, 29th May, sees the return of Poptimism, FreakyTrigger’s super special pop music club night. Now in its new home upstairs at the Horse by Lambeth North Tube, supplying the finest pop music and other surprises to a beer drinking hard[…]

Ages ago (1999, to be exact) I did a “Top 100 Singles Of The 90s” series here. While contemplating whether to go for a 00s one (and where to do it, if so), I decided to put a Spotify playlist of the old list together.
And here it is.
64 t[…]

Almost a year ago I wrote this post – “5 Point Plan For The UK To Win Eurovision”, defining “win” as “maybe come a respectable fifth”.
And here we are: a respectable fifth. So let’s see which bits of my[…]

Keri Hilson – In A Perfect World
It’s near impossible to hear or see Keri Hilson without Timbaland lurking somewhere on the sidelines. You almost want to distract him with a tin of biscuits or something to see what Keri would be like if l[…]

I asked a simple question – nicked wholesale from Steve M on Poptimists -“What’s your favourite current song and how did you first hear it?”
Here are the answers I got. (more…)[…]