Now we have the peachy new VOTING SYSTEM on every track you might think we don’t need these polls, but they’re a nice way of summing up each year as we end it, so they stay. Every track on Popular gets a mark out of 10 from me – her[…]

It goes almost without saying that this is outrageous bilge, with a stripe of cynicism as wide as Renato’s spangly lapels. Renato who, of course, was allowed to appear as himself in the video, where his Pooh-Bearish charms win the heart of a re[…]

Nothing became The Jam so much in their career as the manner of their leaving it. To quit when their cult – and Paul Weller’s icon status – was at its height? Unthinkable. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, it doesn’t seem quite that w[…]

Here’s another Spotify playlist for you: everything available that I’ve given 8 or more too. No Beatles, and some other annoying omissions (“Hot Love”! “Rhythm Stick”!) but at least Lord Rockingham and the Pigeon a[…]

Eddy Grant’s breakthrough with the Equals on “Baby Come Back” had come by upping reggae’s stomp quotient at the expense of its lilt. I don’t know a lot about his solo career but cuts like the slashing “Do You Feel […]

Another of pop’s remarkable acts of self-creation: in the video for “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me”, Boy George presents himself less as star, more as a kind of pop spirit, a dancing force of nature swaying through time and place, singular and […]

I swear I never even knew what drugs were…UNTIL I HEARD MUSICAL YOUTH. The rumour swept round school sometime after their Blue Peter appearance: the song isn’t about a “cooking pot” at all, it’s about… the other ki[…]

Before I talk about Survivor I’m going to talk about me a little. Skip down a few paragraphs if you don’t care.
There. Now, I was lucky enough to have a happy childhood. And from mid ’82 to late ’84 it was at its happiest. Not[…]

Thanks to Alan for introducing a HOTT NEW FEATURE to Popular. You can now give a mark out of 10 to each individual track*, thus CROWDSOURCING the overall opinion of the Popular massive and making the whole thing more interactive etc etc.
I think this[…]

(This entry is an edited version of this piece – it’s my favourite thing I’ve ever written for FT, about possibly my favourite Number One, and I felt I couldn’t improve on it.)
There is pop, and there is popular, and then the[…]