One of the many arguments offered as to why The X-Factor is a Bad Thing for pop is that Simon Cowell has taken the fun out of the race for Xmas No.1. It strikes me that this is a little rose-tinted – was anybody really that enthused with said &[…]

Suga Shikao, looking fiiiiiiiiiine in a red top and waistcoat, reads slowly from the pages of the day’s Metro – Japanese… Jpop… Superstar!! – and everyone at the ICA cheers. I say everyone. It is possible that I squealed at […]

I put one together on Spotify for my own entertainment over the holidays, but others might enjoy it too: my Xmas playlist. It includes jazz, pop, reggae, soul, R&B, hip hop, rock, funk and country, among other things. It’s nearly four hours[…]

One of the things that’s fascinating about the UK Top 40 is that a device designed to be a pure expression of popularity also works as a reflection of so many other things. People buy songs: if enough people buy a song it gets into the charts, […]

My list of my songs of the 00s is still counting down at @freakytrigger. Because it’s mostly YouTube links some of the tracks aren’t available to everyone looking, so here’s the first 50 on the list in raw form. (more…)[…]

Tom is away for a week again, so we dust down Repopulate to look at some of the less loved early posts and give them slightly more scrutiny. And I thought why not dust down the first UK Burt Bacharach number one? Also because the version rarely pops[…]

Well, I gave it a shot. But this is formally announcing that my tracks of the decade list was one project too far, so I’m discontinuing these write-ups. While I think some of the posts were good, and I enjoyed doing them all, I didn’t hav[…]

What exactly are good times, according to Chic? The lyrics refer to jitterbugging being involved, but it’s hard to believe many people on the dancefloor actually jitterbug to it (past tense of jitterbug: jatterbug?). The jitterbug isn’t a[…]

There’s a song on the radio, a catchy ear-worm of a song, and it’s been on the radio a lot now that you mention it. It drags you in, “now listen to my words” it commands. How might you react?

Reaction A “No colour[…]

You’d think that “Wanna Be Startin Somethin” would be the ideal way to open a movie about Michael Jackson. In This Is It, though — patched together from four or five rehearsals for the 50-concert extravaganza which famously ne[…]