Arriving a few weeks after Britney, “Blame It On The Weatherman” could be a sad afterthought, forgotten jetsam from a swept-away moment like Frank Ifield’s “I’m Confessin’”, his last number one released into the teeth of Beatlemania. In[…]

There could be no Comic Relief without a Comic Relief single, but finding a way to do it successfully was more troublesome than it looked. Even though this is the third Comic Relief record in a row to get to the top, the last two had been a team-up o[…]

How was I supposed to know that something wasn’t right?

It was a gilded age: the commercial zenith of the music industry at the end of the 20th century. In America, its apex as a money-making force came in 1999 when – adjusted for inflati[…]

To get it out of the way: a dodo, a rhea, an emu, a penguin. “Fly Away” has the same chance of getting off the ground as any of them – a stolid, earthbound tramp of a song, anchored by a riff and a groove that does too much to be actually heavy[…]

Whatever Jimmy Destri meant when he wrote “Maria”, it isn’t a song about a woman: it’s a song about men’s reaction to women – lust, fantasy, resentment, projection and ultimately psychosis. Debbie Harry – the most gazed-upon pop sta[…]

The micropolitics of “featuring” credits on dance records is a fascinating world. Duane Harden – who wrote and sang the words to “You Don’t Know Me” – gets no sleeve credit on the UK release, but did on the US. Rightly so – his angry,[…]

Whatever else boybands call to mind, they rarely make me think of being a boy. Mostly, they are a man’s idea of a girl’s idea of boys, and sometimes – by design, or an accident of casting – some of the pungency of boydom makes it through that[…]

The formation of minor boyband 911 is a telling vignette of how pop in the late 90s was working. The general boyband narrative is one where a managerial Svengali recruits rosy-cheeked poppets who emerge three or four years later, a little wiser, hope[…]

Norman Cook had ridden across 1998 in triumph, building his Fatboy Slim persona into a dependably gonzo pop brand. On “The Rockefeller Skank” he’d pushed his machines hard enough to break them, the track unspooling into a chaos of jammed sample[…]

This is the first Popular entry I’ve written in the Southern hemisphere. And while it wasn’t a big hit down under – or, I think, anywhere except the UK – “Tragedy” moved one of my marvellous Australian hosts to asset that it was the great[…]