When I tell people I’m doing this blog they usually ask me what my favourite ever number one is. I have a stock answer – “Come On Eileen” – which is true often enough to pass muster. They also sometimes ask me what the worst number one ever[…]

March 1991. I’m coming to the end of five years as a scholarship boy at a top boarding school. It’s been – oh yes – an education. I’ve bullied, I’ve been bullied, I’ve hidden myself away, I’ve learned a[…]

Like The Beatles and the Daleks, The Simpsons were a craze before they were a cultural fixed point. “Do The Bartman” is the 1991 equivalent of a moptop wig, part of a deluge of merchandising which might have killed a lesser show off. Inst[…]

“Faceless”. I don’t know who first used this particular epithet against dance music’s pop takeover, but the concept stuck. Facelessness became a stick used to beat the new music with – by suddenly-old DJs, faux-concerned[…]

An upcoming Popular special event!
Coming up soon – we’ll have to just tolerate spoilers here – is Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)”, which as every schoolkid knows is the longest-running number one […]

Freddie Mercury was dying. Very few of the people buying “Innuendo” knew it – most would have heard the rumours that the singer had AIDS, or seen the constant tabloid speculation around the ‘ailing rocker’. But they woul[…]

Time has not been especially kind to Enigma: “Sadness Part 1” sounds today like an almost parodically generic chillout track. Its mysteries have evaporated – what remains is a ponderous mix of particularly banal elements. Gregorian […]

Name acts didn’t put out singles in January. Whether this wisdom was cause or effect of the month’s traditionally low record sales I’m not sure. But the start of the year was a time for rewarding the stoicism of singles that had hun[…]

That was a lot more of a slog than I thought it would be! As ever, here is where you get to tick the records YOU would have handed 6 or more to. And hopefully by the end of the week we’ll get stuck into 1991, probably the most all-over-the-plac[…]

There was a great deal of talk about entryism in the 1980s – it was said of many excellent bands, and Hue And Cry too, that pop hooks would be a Trojan Horse for subversive notions of situationism, socialism and continental philosophy to slip i[…]