Minor Popular milestone alert! This is the very latest song that I had no recollection of whatsoever before starting this project. Never saw the advert, never heard the record. So I’d have been really happy if this had been an unexpected deligh[…]

Brian Eno famously used to write his lyrics – or claim he did, at any rate – on the basis of sound rather than meaning: if the phonemes danced in service to the song, that was good enough for him and what they actually said could go hang.[…]

Written for the Seoul Olympics, “One Moment In Time” makes an age-old connection between sport and character – if you want to win, you have to suffer, be more than you thought you could be, and so on. Do this, and you might be rewar[…]

“Music’s become too scientific, it’s lost that spunk and energy that it had in the ’50s and ’60s. When I listen to most modern records I hear a producer, I don’t hear musicians interacting. And that quality, that missi[…]

Furrowed-brow gospel rock which risks being weighty in all the wrong ways. The title phrase is from a 1940s magazine cover, said by a cute li’l scamp in a “from the mouths of babes” moment. Transpose it to a rock song and you get a stodgy mix o[…]

All cover versions flirt with anachronism but in this case it’s baked in before the record’s even left the sleeve: that word “groovy”. Linguistically switched-on for 1965, the Mindbenders’ brightly confident original now[…]

It may have come out in time to lord it over the charts during the Second Summer of Love; it may have a production credit for Coldcut – but there’s nothing outrageously radical about “The Only Way Is Up”. It’s the fifth […]

Another summer hearthrob, another forgettable puddle of ice-cream and tears. Harmless Hawaiian himbo Glenn was promoted here as a kind of male Tiffany – same corn-fed origins and good-luck story. Like her, he’s not an especially good sing[…]

There’s a performance-based definition of one-hit wonders, but there should be an aesthetic definition too. There are poor groups who make one important single, who against all expectations Get It Right on a particular occasion and leave the st[…]

The Manual – the book Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty wrote after this record went to #1 – is an essential read. It tells you a lot about the music business in the late 80s, a bit about the country in the late 80s, and it has many sharp thi[…]