(#1016, 3rd September 2005)
When I heard the news Oasis were reuniting, my first thought was, “thank God, an angle on the ‘Idle’ entry”. And in the heat of renewed Oasis mania it felt like this might even end up being their penultimate Num[…]
I still find McFly hard to appreciate, but in the comments for their previous No.1 I linked a piece by Ciara Moloney which made the strongest case I’d seen for them as songwriters and musicians. One of the questions this piece asked was why critics[…]
Earlier this week I asked a question on Bluesky: what is the earliest piece of media you find intentionally very funny? I wanted to leave the question open but used the “very” intensifier to make sure we weren’t just in the wry chuc[…]
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!
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Trance is the worst thing to happen to commercial dance music in my lifetime. Rubbish
Bad and unnecessary cover. But I gave this a 4 - there are much worse things to get annoyed by…
Takes that haven't aged well ;-)
18 January 2026
“Proof that one song is all it takes” as James Blunt’s Twitter biography put it. He knows what he’s known for, and in his post-superstar era he’s played his hand with great skill, cultivating a self-deprecating persona on social media as an[…]
23 October 2025
The pattern for recent hip-hop Number 1s on Popular – Nelly’s pair being the best example – has been the chart-topper as a kind of medal for services rendered, generally coming an album cycle after the artist’s more vital work. Mostly[…]
25 April 2025
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
12 February 2017
The biggest band in Britain grinds on, and as usual when an Oasis single toils its way by, their own past is the best stick to beat them with. In 1994, Oasis’ approach – putting great chunks of rock’s past in a smelter and using noi[…]
5 May 2011
Sixteen Listens For Sixteen Weeks: An Everything I Do Liveblog This song got to number one for 16 weeks, so I decided to play it 16 times in a row, writing as I went. Play 1: And we’re off. I’ve honestly hardly heard this in the last twen[…]
8 August 2008
On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain […]
30 December 2005
DIGRESSION:
For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project:
“This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous[…]
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[…]
26 May 2015
A theological detour. The rise of New Atheism – Dawkins et al. – seems to have made it somewhat infra dig for lifelong unbelievers like me to admit there are things we respect and admire about religions and the religious. But of course th[…]
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.[…]
8 October 2019
Looked at one way, this had to happen. Reality TV pop shows weren’t going away. Lightning had struck for Hear’Say, then again for Liberty X, then so often for Pop Idol that you’d think Zeus had the ITV voting lines on speed dial. The maths of i[…]
13 May 2008
In my teens I read a science fiction novel with a startlingly elegant twist. (I won’t mention the book’s name in case you come across it yourself.) It was about a brilliant scientist who vanishes: the book’s protagonist goes looking[…]
29 October 2010
Sinead O’Connor is one of the finest song interpreters not just because she thinks hard about the material and the feelings locked in it, but because she’s so good at placing songs into a situation. A great example of this is her version […]