(#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[…]
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[…]
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 – […]
10 August 2015
“Take my advice,” says Fred Durst on “My Generation”, “you don’t want to step into a big pile of shit.” Wise words. But shit comes in many forms. The spoor of Durst, the self-styled chocolate starfish, the anus, is compacted nuggets of […]
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[…]
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 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[…]
24 June 2014
“You can interpret the lyrics,” huffed a Nazi goon caught nicking this song for the BNP’s website, “any way you want.” The specific double meaning of “if I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists” eludes me, but it’s true enough […]
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[…]
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 […]
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[…]
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[…]