Poptimism is back! Back! BACK! This Friday, upstairs at The Horse Bar on Westminster Bridge Road, just across from Lambeth North tube. FREE entry, 7 ’til Midnight, hopefully the first of many.
If you don’t want to miss out on future Popti[…]

This lacklustre ad for a festival (via Popjustice Twitter) for some reason reminds me of nothing less than how Trad Jazz bands used to advertise their niche wares in the late seventies. Much like much of the worst excesses of CAMRA, the affair seems […]

Two important bits of business:
For Popular fans – friend of the blog (and real actual pop star) Bob Stanley is curating the Britain Learns To Rock! season at the Barbican, which starts tomorrow with Fan Fever and Calling All Cats, two of the f[…]

This video for The Fall’s “Wings” (embedding sadly disabled or I’d post it direct) is not only a rare promo of one of their finest songs, it’s also a forensic examination of a pub in 1983. Perhaps even the kind of pub Ma[…]

Another round of the Top 40 singles as seen through the lens of Twitter (previous instalment here). Rules: I take (roughly) the most recent substantive comment about each track, searching for title first then artist. The result? A snapshot of what th[…]

Having spent a fair chunk of my blogging time yesterday talking about rating scales, this Financial Times piece came as an eye-opener.
“Practice does not help. Neither, surprisingly, does varying the gaps in the scale: it’s no easier to disti[…]

Here’s a post from Hitsville raising an interesting point about Metacritic scores. The case looks pretty clear-cut: movie critics are harsher and more discerning than music ones.
Harsher, yes. More discerning? Well. Allow me to get all research[…]

A quick recap!
This is a series of posts “liveblogging” the Pitchfork 500, reflecting the book’s dual purpose as criticism and playlist. The ground rule is that I do the writing in real time as I listen to the music: no edits after that (except[…]

As we are naval gazing here at FT, with our ten years celebrations, I though I would have a little trip through the related links on the sidebar. A magical mystery tour which took me to an article I wrote back in 2006 regarding the oddness of the phy[…]

24. The Orb – Blue Room
It was a dark day when my tape of Rave’92 broke. Repeated rewinding and pausing had caused a hole to develop in the tape, and my rubbish cassette player refused to play it unless I wound it back manually and flippe[…]