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[…]

 
I’ve rarely liked listening to other people have fun and “My Ding-A-Ling” is no exception. You can’t deny they’re having it, though, except maybe the people who won’t sing, pursued by Chuck Berry with a slightly[…]

 
Singer-songwriters – today’s crop, certainly – tend to attempt universality through earnestness. Not so Gilbert O’Sullivan, whose remarkable “Alone Again Naturally” is determinedly low-key, the small thoughts of[…]

 
When I started Popular I wrote an introductory piece which nicked Raymond Williams’ ideas of emergent, dominant and residual trends, and argued that the charts were fascinating because they’re a quasi-artificial space in which all thre[…]

“How can I be sure, in a world that’s constantly changing?” – this is one of the great pop questions. Who’s for real? Who’s leading me on? Who isn’t going to take me down? Will I still love you tomorrow? Here’s a teenpop idol singing […]

“Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-YEAH!” – that’s the point of this single, really: the coda where Noddy stops saying weer crazee and simply goes (goez?) crazee-er, his voice finally catching up with the runaway train drumming that’s been g[…]

“You Wear It Well” reuses a few of the tricks that “Maggie May” employed so well – the eavesdropped lyrics, addressed to an older lover; the doubled drumbeats that keep the track moving – and Martin Quittenton&#82[…]

 
My first French teacher was a great heap of a man who I remember for his sweat patches and his bitterness and the way he changed the seating plan in the class around every few weeks, based on test results. If you came first, you got to sit front a[…]

The badness of this track is no fault whatsoever of its singer: Donny’s performance sells the song, and by the end he sounds honestly desperate for his love to be real. The problem is that Osmond sounds too young – he was 15 but his voice[…]

If I’d taken five weeks to write the last Slade entry I’d have marked it higher – I don’t like what I didn’t like in “Cuz I Love You” any better but I respect how it’s lingered as a baleful presence in my h[…]