The history of Britain’s summer hits and the history of British holidaymaking go together like sand and towels. The key factor is the balance between function and description, place and pleasure in pop – these days the summer hit template[…]

On the I Love Music message board, someone just asked for a definition of “schlock”. I answered, because I wanted to be in the pub and not at work, “anything that you only like when you’re drunk”. I don’t like this[…]

I used to hate this song. If you’re a reader who skips to the mark first you’ll have realised that I still don’t like it much, and you might want to check the bit in bold for the rationale. But I used to hate it. I identified it as […]

A song about wimpiness and non-intervention, whose subject seems to infect its delivery: close harmony as a coccoon, a kind of pretty disengagement from the beastly world. It’s a cover version of a record that’s only three years old but i[…]

In a sense the UK’s relationship with the Eurovision Song Contest mirrors its attitude to ‘Europe’ as political entity: a conflicted, pendulum-swing mess of amused contempt, cynical superiority, desperate attempts to play catch-up a[…]

The sort of song “Something Stupid” is depends very much on who’s singing it. Sung as a solo it’s a more bitter than sweet dispatch from that relationship relegation zone known as the ‘long game’, the limbos betwee[…]

“Release Me” spent 56 weeks on the UK charts, but its position in modern pop history is as a footnote – the single that kept The Beatles’ “Penny Lane”/”Strawberry Fields Forever” off number one, an inju[…]

Of course this isn’t her song (that would be “Downtown”). It’s Charlie Chaplin’s song – the royalties from it helped pay for the final, flop film it starred in – which may explain why it sets its cap so firml[…]

My feelings about the Monkees and their music are entirely entangled with my feelings about their TV show, and childhood TV in general. Pop music wasn’t a big deal in my house growing up, and I had no real idea of the Monkees as ‘a band&#[…]

I give marks out of 10 to every single on Popular. Here’s where you can say which entries you’d have given 6 or above to, and discuss the year in general in the comments. Here we have 1966, a year of many high marks including the project&[…]