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CRAZY FROG – “Axel F”
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Popular: #1012, 4th June 2005
— 25 April 2025 Tom 23 comments

In 2004 I took on the worst project of my professional life; worst in the sense that it was miserable and time-consuming and also in the sense that I did it very badly. A certain mobile phone company wanted to know what their rivals were doing online[…]

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OASIS – “Lyla”
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Popular: #1011, 28th May 2005
— 14 April 2025 Tom 24 comments

The long twilight of Oasis is reaching its end, at least in Popular terms. The 00s took them from the kings of English rock to a drab fixture and finally a running joke, bigmouths promising a return to form which never comes. This is almost the last […]

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Omargeddon #54: Sworn Virgins
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— 17 Jun 2025 Bec Comment

As much as this idea totally whips, sadly, Sworn Virgins isn’t a concept album centred around the priestesses of Vesta, although it did inspire me to draft a fantasy longlist of musicians I’d like to see approach such a project.* As the very firs[…]

About Popular

I'm writing about every UK number one single, in order. It's taken a while, it'll take a while longer. Wander around in the archives, or join in with the marvellous bunch of commenters we've managed to attract - new voices always very welcome!

Popular is funded by the generosity of my Patreon patrons. They get early posts, exclusive material, and more. You could be one of them! Index of reviews and scores so far Popular FAQ

Latest comments on Popular

  1. There's a 2005 VW campervan on my street with Lyla written on the side. 60s nostalgia made unfussy and functional…

  2. Yeah but. It was of it’s time, we loved it at the time, and perhaps most key of all, they’ve…

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AKON – “Lonely”

4 April 2025

This is going to be one of those annoying reviews which takes the billion-view signature hit of a highly successful artist and picks away at production choices which – objectively! – have been extremely successful. “Lonely” is not a o[…]

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TONY CHRISTIE ‘ft’ PETER KAY – “Is This The Way To Amarillo?”

31 July 2024

The success of Elvis’ reissues – a promotional gimmick which actually managed to hack the charts – made a strong case that the new pop of 2005 simply wasn’t able to capture the wider public imagination. This record makes it inarguable[…]

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McFLY – “All About You”/”You’ve Got A Friend”

12 July 2024

McFly’s biggest hit, crossing the 500k sales barrier partly because it was the official Comic Relief single. The Carole King cover is doing most of the hard work on that front, with a video involving the lads helping out in Uganda, and the song sto[…]

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BRITNEY SPEARS – "Toxic"

20 January 2023

The first thing you notice about “Toxic” is the strings – urgent, stabbing, a shock of treble. The string bursts compress a riff into a couple of seconds, turning its curling snatch of melody into a red alert, a warning sign on a system out[…]

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LIMP BIZKIT – "Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle)"

10 August 2015

“Take my advice,” says Fred Durst on “My Generation”, “you don’t want to step into a big pile of shit.” Wise words. But shit comes in many forms. The spoor of Durst, the self-styled chocolate starfish, the anus, is compacted nuggets of […]

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ALL SAINTS – "Never Ever"

13 April 2014

You’re in the car with the radio on and no expectations, and suddenly you hear it: a song that stops everything around it, breaking through the playlist and announcing itself as a hit. More than a hit, a classic, a song you’ll be hearing for the […]

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THE VERVE – "The Drugs Don't Work"

23 March 2014

“Whenever we played that live there would be rows of grown men crying. It was almost like these guys couldn’t cry when they needed to cry, but that song operated like a pressure valve for them and it was okay for them to cry at a big rock con[…]

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THE BOOMTOWN RATS – "Rat Trap"

13 August 2008

“Rat Trap” is billed – in the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles, no less – as the first punk No.1. I couldn’t recall it – my memories of the Rats themselves were vague; Geldof I knew for later good works. So I a[…]

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BRITNEY SPEARS – "Oops!… I Did It Again"

4 March 2015

How do you follow “…Baby One More Time”? Perhaps you can’t. Britney Spears’ second album splits the job, starting with two songs that plainly exist in “Baby”’s shadow. One is an overt sequel, “Stronger” – eager, catchy dance[…]

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EMINEM – "Stan"

10 July 2015

“Stan” is a murder ballad. A song – not the first or last such Eminem recorded – about killing a woman. If this seems a strange way to look at it, it’s because the record takes pains to make its murder incidental. Its victim is name[…]

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THE MANIC STREET PREACHERS – "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next"

24 June 2014

“You can interpret the lyrics,” huffed a Nazi goon caught nicking this song for the BNP’s website, “any way you want.” The specific double meaning of “if I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists” eludes me, but it’s true enough […]

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SUGABABES – "Freak Like Me"

10 July 2017

At The Disco
A scene from Phonogram III: The Immaterial Girl, by Gillen, McKelvie and Wilson, published in 2015. It’s the early 00s, at a disco somewhere in the south of England. A group of people who love music so much it’s become their life and[…]

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WHITE TOWN – "Your Woman"

4 February 2014

In 1997, talking about music on the Internet means USENET, a Gormenghast of diverging and reconnecting fora whose goblin tribes gleefully rampage through each other’s chosen lairs: a thread will start on alt.music.prodigy, then careen into alt.[…]

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BEYONCÉ – "Crazy In Love"

24 January 2020

History in the making,” says Jay-Z in the intro, and he’s been proven right. As I’ve said before, there’s a temptation with Beyoncé to treat her big moments as inevitable steps in a process of becoming. Her control over her career and image […]

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PET SHOP BOYS – "Always On My Mind"

4 May 2010

In the comics series Phonogram, there’s a scene in which the – kind of horrible – pop DJ Seth Bingo and his indie collaborator Silent Girl are struggling to work a recalcitrant dancefloor into life. Their solution? “Play the B[…]

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