The best thing about “I Wanna Sex You Up” is its bounce – the first swingbeat Number One (and so the first modern R’n’B number one in some sense) is full of springy confidence. Compare it to the New Kids’ hits from[…]

The best of the year’s many film-tie ins, Cher goes at this girl group classic like a charging rhino. On the original – more restrained than this, obviously, but still a belter by 1964 standards – Betty Everett plays a self-righteou[…]

A treatise on individualism from Nik Kershaw, the pop philosopher who brought us “The Riddle”? Expectations raised! And “The One And Only” absolutely does not disappoint. “No one can be myself like I can / For this job I[…]

When I tell people I’m doing this blog they usually ask me what my favourite ever number one is. I have a stock answer – “Come On Eileen” – which is true often enough to pass muster. They also sometimes ask me what the worst number one ever[…]

March 1991. I’m coming to the end of five years as a scholarship boy at a top boarding school. It’s been – oh yes – an education. I’ve bullied, I’ve been bullied, I’ve hidden myself away, I’ve learned a[…]

Like The Beatles and the Daleks, The Simpsons were a craze before they were a cultural fixed point. “Do The Bartman” is the 1991 equivalent of a moptop wig, part of a deluge of merchandising which might have killed a lesser show off. Inst[…]

“Faceless”. I don’t know who first used this particular epithet against dance music’s pop takeover, but the concept stuck. Facelessness became a stick used to beat the new music with – by suddenly-old DJs, faux-concerned[…]

An upcoming Popular special event!
Coming up soon – we’ll have to just tolerate spoilers here – is Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)”, which as every schoolkid knows is the longest-running number one […]

Freddie Mercury was dying. Very few of the people buying “Innuendo” knew it – most would have heard the rumours that the singer had AIDS, or seen the constant tabloid speculation around the ‘ailing rocker’. But they woul[…]

Time has not been especially kind to Enigma: “Sadness Part 1” sounds today like an almost parodically generic chillout track. Its mysteries have evaporated – what remains is a ponderous mix of particularly banal elements. Gregorian […]