The success of Elvis’ reissues – a promotional gimmick which actually managed to hack the charts – made a strong case that the new pop of 2005 simply wasn’t able to capture the wider public imagination. This record makes it inarguable[…]

McFly’s biggest hit, crossing the 500k sales barrier partly because it was the official Comic Relief single. The Carole King cover is doing most of the hard work on that front, with a video involving the lads helping out in Uganda, and the song sto[…]

“Dakota” has a curious reputation. A lot of music fans I know see it as Stereophonics’ best song. That in itself is hardly unusual. But many of those people also see it as the band’s only good song. Which is odder – these guys have eigh[…]

There are meetings between genres where creative sparks fly and new hybrid forms can be glimpsed, like undreamed-of particles in a supercollider. There are also meetings between genres which feel more like high level EU summits – whatever happe[…]

There is a 2005 single, a huge hit, and many will tell you it’s producer Rich Harrison’s masterpiece. On that record, cut-ups of funk breaks are rearranged at oblique angles in a 21st century update of James Brown’s rhythmic modernism, buil[…]

While I’ve been writing about 2004 and 2005’s pop music I’ve also been helping my wife sort out her mother’s memorial service, so a song about a parent dying is – unfortunately – Relevant To My Interests right now. Not that I real[…]

I’m not sure how rap grudges and running battles came to be called beef but I love it as a word for them – juicy, red meat with inescapable macho connotations. The actual minutiae of rap beefs are strictly fans-only in most cases, playing out[…]

It’s an American trilogy! My original plan for the Elvis entries was to do them as a high concept piece inspired by (ripping off) Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote”. Since, in their wisdom, the Official Charts Company decided thes[…]

The singles market was weakest in January even in those happy times when Number 1 hits outsold model railway magazines – it’s one reason the Presley scam was successful, letting a fanbase of a little over 20,000 push their boy to the top when[…]

“The things I did and I saw / Would make the earth stand still” – Smiley Lewis

In the early days of Popular lack of research was part of the Method. Context was the enemy: the text was the text. My job was to see what, 50 or so years lat[…]