Every Popular entry has a mark out of 10 – here’s where you get to choose which you’d have given 6 or above to (and make any general comments on the year in the comments boxes, of course). The highest 1983 mark I gave was 9, for Mic[…]

Aged ten I didn’t have much time for the wounded, crafted dignity of the Flying Pickets. I probably wouldn’t have had time for Yazoo either, if I’d even remembered them. “Only You” was distilled adulthood, and not the ki[…]

Billy Joel pays tribute to the music of his childhood, and so inevitably there’s something childish about “Uptown Girl”: its instant singability makes it sound like a Grease outtake, except there was more sex and chemistry in Grease’s flirtat[…]

How to sell a contradiction: “Karma Chameleon” is a song about frustration and confusion that consciously transforms itself into colourful frippery, and by doing this it gets its hooks into you even deeper. And such hooks! Though true to the song[…]

UB40, I was aware, made reggae. Therefore reggae sounded like what UB40 made. I can’t have been the only one who made this logical mis-step, and I expect I wasn’t the only one who spent a decade-plus assuming they disliked reggae because […]

I have built a Facebook Page for Popular. I will freely admit that I have not much idea of what I will USE it for: I’m thinking links to the entries, alerts to particularly interesting discussions developing on older entries, and any other mate[…]

At first listen – and honestly at tenth listen – “Give It Up” seems like another disco carriage clock hit: thanks for all the hard work boys, now have a number one. On the other hand, if you want a splashy summer hit you could[…]

In the mid-90s I worked in the Music And Video Exchange chain in Notting Hill Gate. Paul Young’s No Parlez holds a special place in my affections from those years – not because we ever knowingly played it, but because it was the undispute[…]

A blowsy wreck of a single, this, keys and sax and guitar and Rod all fighting for the same earspace over an aggressively chuntering rhythm. What you really notice is how one-note and shot Stewart sounds – his great strength as a vocalist, that[…]

I guess the mid-paced slog of a rhythm which dominates “Every Breath You Take” is meant to suggest its narrator’s implacability – the unresting patience of a stalker. Rock is a generally lively medium though and it takes some […]