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 […]

“Answer? I hardly know ‘er!” – hard not to feel for Eamon having his hit both confirmed as a novelty so immediately and gazumped so effectively. Whether Frankee and Eamon were exes or strangers before their tracks came out hardly matters […]

“Swear Word Song Hits Number One” ran the BBC News Headline, and as summaries go, it does the job. By 2004 standards, 4 weeks at Number 1 felt endless: no denying “Fuck It” was big. But was it clever? We were only a decade on from Sagat’s c[…]

McFly were Busted friends and affiliates, and refreshed the earlier band’s ailing formula with sixties pixie dust – chanted do-do-doo harmonies and a sunshine disposition conjuring a spirit of Monkee business. But their retro aesthetic isn’[…]

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[…]