“Caught Out There”. “I’m A Slave 4 U”. “Like I Love You”. “Milkshake”. “Rock Your Body”. All productions by the Neptunes, all Top 5 hits here, all early-00s pop landmarks, still accorded due reverence. None of them, however, are[…]

Maybe it was the pressure of reality TV pop, which plastinated the process of hitmaking and made it part of the show, but there’s a deliberate self-awareness creeping into pop around this point: a cluster of hit songs about stardom, the biz, the ra[…]

“Baby Cakes” appears at least 3 years after UK garage dipped back underground to begin its mutation into grime, and 5 years after “Sweet Like Chocolate” took the sound and blew it into a big sugary hit-bound bubble. Not that a garage track wa[…]

The story of the 2004 Thunderbirds film is the story of many well-loved British properties that land up in Hollywood. You can trace its progress through development hell like the stations of the cross. There’s the original treatment, pie-eyed in it[…]

The closest pop cousin to Mike Skinner might be Kevin Rowland – both Midlands-born anatomists of the heart, both deep in love with Black American pop, both wrestling their own voices into shapes that could stand in awkward but honest imitation […]

The difference between a great pop-house record and a generically competent one can seem inscrutable. It’s not that the great ones are hard to detect – “Lola’s Theme” is like “Ride On Time” or “Dreamer”, the house beat smoothly […]

“Yeah!” casts a long shadow, and the truth is I’d mostly forgotten its follow-up, the intended lead single for the Confessions LP before Lil Jon muscled it out the way. So “Burn” was a pleasant rediscovery: it’s hardly the genre-bursting,[…]

I’m delighted we have some proper McFly fans in the comments crew – genuinely delighted, as I bounce off their chunky power-pop almost entirely and I would truly like to know what I’m missing. Maybe Tom Fletcher’s one of those songwriters[…]

Some songs are so glutted with outside context you can hardly hear them. Everything about “Everytime”, from its Justin-fallout meta-text to its Britney-as-martyr video, arrives coated in meaning, strands of significance encircling and cocooning t[…]

If the hits of 2004 have a theme, perhaps it’s men’s hurt feelings. Busted, Eamon, Mario, and more to come, like a damburst of male confusion, spite and woe. The year’s most enduring hit – in chart terms the most enduring hit of any year […]