(#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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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”. […]
30 October 2016
The Queen Of The Damned soundtrack, released later in 2002, is a fearful pile of tosh, a body count of nu-metal second-raters which illustrates a dilemma the film didn’t totally resolve: just which children of the night was this thing aimed at – […]
27 March 2014
Every Popular entry starts with the same question: why this record? This time it’s especially loud. “Candle In The Wind ‘97” is the highest-selling single of all time in the UK, almost 2 million clear of its nearest competitor. This is as big[…]
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[…]
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[…]
4 July 2015
It’s hard not to let what Beyoncé Knowles was become swamped by what she is. A veteran, an icon, a woman enjoying a remarkable critical peak, an earner, second only to headphone mogul Dr Dre on current musical money lists – Beyoncé, as she […]
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 […]
6 April 2016
Between its two writers and its performer, “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” is the sound of over seven decades’ pop experience. It’s better heard as distillation than prediction. Maybe its bright, brisk pop-dance sensibility c[…]
29 December 2005
In Incredible Hulk comics there’s often a scene where the ’emerald man-beast’, cast out from human society, finds something of fragile beauty – a flower, maybe, or a baby deer – which he then accidentally crushes with hi[…]
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[…]