Listening to this song you realise that at some point the idea that a rock record should sound like a bunch of people in the same place playing the same music at the same time was completely abandoned by record producers. Not in the name of experimen[…]

Madonna’s appropriation move into Latin pop is a tightrope walk between corny and respectful: on the one hand an arrangement which packs in every Hispanic signifier bar a finishing “Ole!”, on the other a performance that has far more authority,[…]

A newspaper is a version of the world, and a successful newspaper builds a world that not only reflects the real one, it infects it. In its 80s heyday The Sun was not only the highest circulation daily paper in Britain, it had a cultural weight that […]

The marvellous italo-house keyboard break in the middle of “Respectable” gives the game away: Stock Aitken and Waterman were Britain’s premier pop Europhiles. Their late-80s heyday is as near as UK pop has come to European Union &#8[…]

Sometimes Britain hounds and ogles its flawed celebrities, sometimes it wills their redemption, often a little of both. Boy George’s turn of fortune from Britain’s top pop export to Britain’s most famous junkie was sudden enough and sad enough […]

If the Levi’s Jeans advertisers counted as a single artist they would have six Number Ones – more than Bowie or Britney, as many as Queen, Rod or Slade. Their biggest successes came as tastemakers picking new music hits in the mid-90s, bu[…]

“I Knew…” is step three – after the solo ballads and ditching the boy racer – of George Michael’s repositioning as an artist with credibility. In the pop landscape of 1987, getting Aretha Franklin onto your single […]

Future shock? If you’d been told before the fact that a Chicago house record was going to hit number one in the UK, you might well have put your money on the showy, song-driven side of house providing it. A record like Marshall Jefferson’[…]

AND ABOUT BLOODY TIME. Finally finished 1986 – I know there’ve been slower years but this one really has dragged – thanks for yr patience. Here’s a poll, and add your usual lists, reminiscences, discussions of the year etc in […]

“Reet Petite” would have fit right in on an advert: I scratched my head for a while trying to remember which it came from. No luck – so I went and looked it up, and of course it wasn’t on one at all. It got to number one on the back o[…]