Hello everyone – a six-week hiatus is no kind of way to treat a blog, let alone one with such a strong and interesting community as Popular. There are plenty of factors here – family illness, a summer of dramatic and distracting events, c[…]

It’s hard to muster much love for “Please Don’t Go” – a barely adequate trot through a good song. “Begging” has never sounded so thoroughly rote. It’s a good example, though, of one of the nineties leas[…]

Right Said Fred were a rum proposition – solid light entertainment values in leather pants, with the mildest dash of sauce added. Jobbing musicians, no great shakes as singers but likeable chaps, so people gave them the benefit of the doubt and[…]

What people remember about “Stay” are its extremes – the teetering, cracking soprano of Marcella Detroit’s lead vocal, and Siobhan Fahey’s growled and throaty intervention on the bridge. The deliberate contrast laid the […]

Few types of music get less critical respect than the romantic ballad, and sometimes I wonder why. A tin ear for the form, an impatience with its slow unwinding of feeling? Or perhaps it’s just spite. After all, what good is the armoury of scor[…]

I give a mark out of 10 to every single on Popular. Here’s where you can tick the ones you’d give 6 or higher to – and talk about the year in general.
(My highest mark for 1991 was an 8 for the KLF, my lowest a 1 for Hale And Pace.)[…]

A double-sided tombstone – you get to choose how you want to remember Freddie Mercury. His finest – most famous, anyway – six minutes, or a new song that felt in context like a farewell note? Or perhaps neither of them really work? […]

There are fantastic number one records which are over and done with in two minutes thirty, which is how long “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” takes to hit its chorus. A streamroller chorus, to be sure, given a chest-thumping delive[…]

There’s an odd symmetry between this record and “The Fly”: Michael Jackson, like U2, was stratospherically famous and looking to make a push for new-decade relevance. Also like U2, the idea he hit on was making darkly personal songs[…]

Student idol Vic Reeves teams up with student favourites The Wonder Stuff for a student disco friendly cover of “Dizzy” which – going to University a year later – I unsurprisingly became utterly sick of. It was inescapable, or[…]