We’ve got used to seeing R&B singers in command of their tracks – the beats and music arranging themselves around a star’s performance, discreetly ensuring the best possible setting for their voice. That’s especially been the case for[…]

“Land Of 1000 Dances” is not a census, it’s a promise – that as long as there is music and there are dancefloors, fresh dances will be found. The pleasure of so much pop lies in those new moves, the routines which attach themselves to[…]

The first thing you notice about “Toxic” is the strings – urgent, stabbing, a shock of treble. The string bursts compress a riff into a couple of seconds, turning its curling snatch of melody into a red alert, a warning sign on a system out[…]

The history of number ones is a history of answers to the question – “Who has the power to make hit records happen?” The labels? Radio stations? TV? The fans? Balances shift this way and that, but some constants remain, and one of them is l[…]

Busted’s success belied an identity crisis. This manifested most obviously in Charlie Busted’s visible discomfort at playing the early funny stuff (let alone the later funny stuff), but it ran deeper than that. Were they a British boy band who ha[…]

Sam Nixon and Mark Rhodes are one of the genuine success stories of reality TV pop. From the neutral’s perspective a large part of that success is that after this brief fling pop and ‘Smark’ left one another well alone. Instead theirs is a […]

Legend has it that when U2 were finished making The Joshua Tree, they went to Kirsty MacColl, and asked her how the album should be sequenced. MacColl put the tracks in the order she liked them best, from her favourite to the worst (we don’t know w[…]

Each reality TV show number one so far asked and answered different questions about the format, as it grew and mutated well beyond its originators’ designs. Hear’Say were a dramatic proof of concept – lash a story to a record and it could s[…]

Mental illness and pop music are hardly strangers, but few bands made it as central to their work as Tears For Fears, named after a concept minted by experimental psychiatrist Arthur Janov, whose ideas ripple and echo throughout the group’s first t[…]

From one reality TV hit to another – “Changes” wouldn’t have existed without The Osbournes, an everyday story of a loveably decayed rock star and his no-bullshit manager-wife. The show’s surface dynamics played into some hoary old stere[…]