(#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[…]
29 September 2014
How was I supposed to know that something wasn’t right?
It was a gilded age: the commercial zenith of the music industry at the end of the 20th century. In America, its apex as a money-making force came in 1999 when – adjusted for inflati[…]
8 March 2016
So the cruddiest number one of 2001 lands at the top in a week when a lot of people were not caring about music. And certainly, spending £1.99 on “Hey Baby” is one of the more aggressive ways you could find to not care about music. The song is a[…]
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[…]
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[…]
2 May 2008
I was aware of this song long before I heard it – as a young boy it was quoted at me by my Dad should I ever object to tidying my room. Since my room was rarely tidy, I became very familiar with the central notion of “No Charge”. […]
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 […]
21 May 2008
I give marks out of 10 to every song – based on whatever criteria you like, here’s your opportunity to say what you’d have given more than 6 to from 1976. Tick as many as you like.
Number One Hits Of 1976: Which Woul[…]
5 July 2013
BOXING?
A “heavyweight battle”, the NME cover-billed it. And if “Country House” vs Oasis’ “Roll With It” was a title bout, the music press were desperate to play Frank Warren.
Perhaps they had most at stake. It was, in a way, thei[…]
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 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[…]
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[…]
11 February 2018
Such was the grip of Pop Idol on the singles-buying imagination that two winners weren’t enough – bronze medalist Darius Danesh got a career too. But “Colourblind” is not just a participation medal. In Darius we see not one but two of the[…]