I was absolutely forbidden from watching the first series of The Young Ones, in 1982. I relied on awed playground rumour of its violence and uproar. I was a little scared of it. Second time around, in 1984, I could watch it but not in the living room[…]

There’s something grotesque about “Chain Reaction” – Miss Ross, voice as slender and cut-crystal as ever, strapped into the musical equivalent of an Iron Man battlesuit, a chrome-plated machine that turns human reflexes into battlefield ordna[…]

The intro to “When The Going” is one of pop’s more excruciating: a piggledy pile of drum hits never resolving into a beat while Billy O huffs and puffs “Tough! Tough! T-T-Tough! Huh!”, clearly with no better idea than us[…]

“I fear the crazed and lonely looks the mirror’s sending me these days”: its showiness may be several cartwheels away from “West End Girls”‘ austerity, but the second number one of 1986 shares a little of the first[…]

Talk about intelligence in pop and you quickly find yourself on slippery ground. Behind every successful record there’s someone, somewhere with a good brain but the smarts required vary by case: initiative, speed of thought, low cunning, political […]

Repopulate happens while Tom is away to try and chivvy more comments on some of our older entries that may seem poorly represented. The original haloscan comments have been lost, so we did have a lot to say about these tracks, they are just lost in t[…]

I give every entry on Popular a mark out of 10, and at the end of each year’s worth of entries you get the chance to vote for any YOU would have given 6 or more out of 10 to.
My highest rated tracks were Madonna and Dead Or Alive, with 9 each. […]

The Christmas we get, we deserve: sometimes a Christmas song can reveal a group’s nature more than any other formal exercise. Slade’s raucous bacchanal; Wizzard wanting the whole year to be overloaded with tinsel; Wham turning the season […]

The chiming, soft-focus keyboards that open “Saving All My Love For You” suggest late-night romance, low lights and the chink of glasses. This is a bluff and a lie: “Saving” isn’t a song about romance, it’s a song […]

Wham!’s first single for a year followed the “Wake Me Up”/”Freedom” model – a Motown template airbrushed for the mid-80s, brisk and bright and shiny-toothed. But something’s changed – George Michael&#82[…]