It does no real work in the song, that “a-ha” – it’s an afterthought, another little hooky Easter Egg from a band committed to packing as much as they could into their tracks. No fault of ABBA’s, honestly, that for Briti[…]

Manhattan Transfer smooth out and slick up Art and Dottie Todd’s song to such a degree that it becomes a pastiche of imagined Frenchness – an accordion, bof alors! – as much as a fifties throwback: what’s sacrificed in the pro[…]

Another in the recent string of soft, sumptuously arranged ballads, and like the others this is something I can think myself into enjoying – the polished class of the instrumentation in particular – but find it hard to feel. Some of my re[…]

This is the first entry in Popular that I’ve written about extensively for Freaky Trigger before, in this long piece comparing different versions of the song. It’s one of my favourite longer FT pieces so this entry is very much an extrac[…]

Pretty much as soon as I finish one Popular entry, the next song earworms its way into my head as a memo to self – get thinking about this. With “Don’t Give Up On Us”, though, something odd’s been happening – I can[…]

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[…]

Thought of as a Christmas single, because of when it charted, this of course is actually a rare Number One hit that takes as its theme the Second Coming, which will be marked, according to Mathis, by everyone feeling quite nice for a little bit. Redu[…]

A recurring theme on recent Popular comments threads has been the idea that one track or another represents “why punk had to happen”: a feeling – easy, perhaps too easy, to identify in hindsight – that pop and rock had stagnat[…]

As I gradually learned more about music history it became apparent that there were a bunch of American bands who had enjoyed long careers in the 70s but who were close to invisible here. It seems to me that Britain has never really had an equivalent […]

A few years ago, Channel 4 did a rundown of the Top 100 Best Selling Singles. My friends and I settled down to watch, cheer, shout at Kate Thornton, &c. And there, first up at No.100, was “Mississippi”, bringing a mighty collective[…]