(#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!
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
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[…]
16 January 2005
The sound of the atom splitting. Break open the basic unit of pop music, the hook, and we discover a mess of gimmickry, noises and ideas so primeval you can often barely describe them, let alone hum one. Find one strong enough and you can top the cha[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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.[…]
5 November 2014
The story of breathy trance* hit “9PM (Til I Come)” begins with producer ATB bringing his girlfriend to his studio to check out his instruments. And it continues with him ignoring her and working on an awesome guitar sound until he looked at his […]
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 […]
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[…]
29 October 2014
“Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” is an artefact from the Pre-Cambrian of social media, a fossil ancestor of today’s viral hits. You could go further: by making the jump into offline culture, it’s a kind of missing link to them. Native[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]