The root of puerile is puer, the Latin for boy, and the word still has that resonance: childish but in the snickering, smutty, swaggering way of the tweenage boy, that pre-adolescent phase when bodies are a source of mystery and fascination at the sa[…]

This is a short entry, because I don’t want to give a mediocre R.Kelly penned (and featuring!) record much more attention than it deserves, which is basically none. Ja Rule’s shrewdness in picking collaborators has since become more widely unders[…]

Guy Chambers’ ex-Westlife rescue mission spelt opportunity for his more famous writing partner. Robbie Williams had already been a star when he found Chambers, and what the songwriter brought him was structure, giving a young man the chance to turn[…]

“To lose one Number 1 to a no-name producer, M’sieu Bangalter, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two seems like carelessness.” “Call On Me” shares an origin with Spacedust’s workout-based “Gym & Tonic” – a canny music[…]

In the Industrial Revolution of 00s pop, Westlife were the darkest and most satanic of mills, an inexorable manufactory turning out ballads by the yard. When I started Popular the signs their reign was ending weren’t as obvious as they seem in hind[…]

“Caught Out There”. “I’m A Slave 4 U”. “Like I Love You”. “Milkshake”. “Rock Your Body”. All productions by the Neptunes, all Top 5 hits here, all early-00s pop landmarks, still accorded due reverence. None of them, however, are[…]

Maybe it was the pressure of reality TV pop, which plastinated the process of hitmaking and made it part of the show, but there’s a deliberate self-awareness creeping into pop around this point: a cluster of hit songs about stardom, the biz, the ra[…]

“Baby Cakes” appears at least 3 years after UK garage dipped back underground to begin its mutation into grime, and 5 years after “Sweet Like Chocolate” took the sound and blew it into a big sugary hit-bound bubble. Not that a garage track wa[…]

The story of the 2004 Thunderbirds film is the story of many well-loved British properties that land up in Hollywood. You can trace its progress through development hell like the stations of the cross. There’s the original treatment, pie-eyed in it[…]

The closest pop cousin to Mike Skinner might be Kevin Rowland – both Midlands-born anatomists of the heart, both deep in love with Black American pop, both wrestling their own voices into shapes that could stand in awkward but honest imitation […]