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10CC – "Rubber Bullets"
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Like “See My Baby Jive”, “Rubber Bullets” is a really dense bit of popcraft – a restless concentrate of hooks and ideas. 1973 seems to have been a moment in pop when this overload strategy was commercially viable: intell[…]

SUZI QUATRO – "Can The Can"
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I’m pretty sure that the ‘ideal’ time for a pop songle has been revised up in my lifetime, the “three minute single” granted an unwieldy extra 30 seconds, which would make “Can The Can” a shot at perfection &[…]

WIZZARD – "See My Baby Jive"
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At work today I was doing a bit of research on sweets, and found a site which boasted a “Bush Tucker Prize” jar – an enormous plastic thing designed to cash in on the I’m A Celebrity reality show. The jar was filled with jelly[…]

TONY ORLANDO AND DAWN – "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree"
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Tony Orlando, banged up for unspecified badness, whiles away his time inside by fooling about with his organ (Bontempi if I’m not mistaken) and dreaming of the yellow ribbon his lady-love will hang out to show she’s waited for him. But wh[…]

GILBERT O'SULLIVAN – "Get Down"
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A ‘first’ of sorts here – “Get Down” is, I think, the first record on the lists to feature on one of Sean Rowley’s Guilty Pleasures compilations, which are recontextualising 70s pop and making a pretty penny out of[…]

DONNY OSMOND – "The Twelfth Of Never"
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This is a lot better than “Puppy Love” – in fact it’s rather sweet, very much the kind of well-scrubbed record you wouldn’t (really) mind your young daughter caning on the family Dansette. Does it make the jump from &#8[…]

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SLADE – "Cvm On Feel The Noize"
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Something came up on the Sweet comments thread that tied in with a point I’ve been looking for a space to talk about, viz. what the “glam” in “glam rock” can possibly mean. Glamour? Well, of a sort – Bolan was glam[…]

THE SWEET – "Block Buster"
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Sometimes you hear a flaw, a niggle in a track you love and it gradually sours you on the whole. I am worried that this might be happening to “Blockbuster”. For tens, perhaps hundreds, of plays, I had enjoyed this most wholehearted of tra[…]

Popular '72
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This post will appear on the front page for a few days before sinking into its rightful place in the Popular Year Poll Archives.
Each song on Popular is given a mark out of 10. The year end polls are your opportunity to indicate which songs YOU would[…]

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LITTLE JIMMY OSMOND – "Long Haired Lover From Liverpool"
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My feeling – hard to pin down – is that this record is something new under the chart sun: the birth of a different kind of novelty hit. The “novelty records” that have featured on Popular before now have been so mostly beca[…]

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Latest comments on Popular

  1. You should have scoured the Internet for Yanou's take on this. Yanou being the classically trained musician/producer claims to have…

  2. I know "Stuck On You" sounds like Gordon Lightfoot, but which song specifically?

  3. There's a 2005 VW campervan on my street with Lyla written on the side. 60s nostalgia made unfussy and functional…

  4. Yeah but. It was of it’s time, we loved it at the time, and perhaps most key of all, they’ve…