The singles market was weakest in January even in those happy times when Number 1 hits outsold model railway magazines – it’s one reason the Presley scam was successful, letting a fanbase of a little over 20,000 push their boy to the top when[…]

“The things I did and I saw / Would make the earth stand still” – Smiley Lewis

In the early days of Popular lack of research was part of the Method. Context was the enemy: the text was the text. My job was to see what, 50 or so years lat[…]

(You might also like to read Part 1 of a 3-part piece loosely about the 1000th No.1. I should probably say that piece contains SPOILERS as to the identity of the 1000th No.1, my apologies if that had been a source of pleasurable suspense for you.)

[…]

The 24 Number 1s between Sam & Mark and Girls Aloud are the longest Popular has been Reality TV free since Hear’Say’s first hit. You might have been fooled into thinking its heyday was over. You would have been quite wrong.

The X Factor is[…]

“The 2000s remakes all got a bit too clever”, sniffed SAW’s Mike Stock years later. A touch of bitterness there perhaps – the people involved with this were as likely to rep for Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records as Band Aid II &#[…]

Girls Aloud were two bands uneasily sharing one career. They were the TV competition winners who kept one foot in the light entertainment paddock, reliably putting out a cover version whenever a telethon required it. And they were the pop band &#8211[…]

For me Bono’s most likeable – if sometimes excruciating – trait is how candid he is about his ambitions and excitement over each record his band makes. The Wikipedia pages for U2 records are always breadcrumb trails of aspirations, as o[…]

The root of puerile is puer, the Latin for boy, and the word still has that resonance: childish but in the snickering, smutty, swaggering way of the tweenage boy, that pre-adolescent phase when bodies are a source of mystery and fascination at the sa[…]

This is a short entry, because I don’t want to give a mediocre R.Kelly penned (and featuring!) record much more attention than it deserves, which is basically none. Ja Rule’s shrewdness in picking collaborators has since become more widely unders[…]

Guy Chambers’ ex-Westlife rescue mission spelt opportunity for his more famous writing partner. Robbie Williams had already been a star when he found Chambers, and what the songwriter brought him was structure, giving a young man the chance to turn[…]