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[…]

ELTON JOHN – "Candle In The Wind '97" / "Something About The Way You Look Tonight"

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[…]

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[…]

EMINEM – "The Real Slim Shady"

30 March 2015

Never has the “early, funny stuff” cliche held such weight in pop: we’re at a stage now where the new stars coming through are still heavyweights now, and the sclerotic Marshall Mathers of the mid-10s haunts this swaggering, sparkling kid. But […]

GIRLS ALOUD – "Sound Of The Underground"

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[…]

BRYAN ADAMS – "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You"

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[…]

U2 – "Beautiful Day"

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[…]

THE BEATLES – "Eleanor Rigby"/"Yellow Submarine"

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[…]

JJ BARRIE – "No Charge"

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”. […]

OASIS – "The Hindu Times"

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[…]

BAZ LUHRMANN – "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)"

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[…]

KYLIE MINOGUE – "Can't Get You Out Of My Head"

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[…]