Another poll! If this one gets a good reaction I’ll go back and do 70s, 60s, etc ones.
Here are the 10 years of the 1980s – you pick your favourite pop year. The definition of pop is up to you – I’ve listed some of the songs w[…]

I give a mark out of 10 to every Popular entry – here’s your chance to indicate which of the hits of 1989 you’d have given 6 or more to (by whatever criteria you wish!). And use the comments box to discuss the year in general if you[…]

From the biggest-selling single of all time, to the ninth-biggest seller of 1989: charity hit glut illustrated in a single stat. Pete Waterman – pop’s Mr. Rent-A-Conscience with three charity chart-toppers to his name – stressed at […]

A Jive Bunny Christmas medley was at this point probably the most inevitable thing in the entire history of pop music, but that didn’t make its arrival any less painful. And honestly, little could have prepared you for how brazenly shoddy &#822[…]

The arrival of the modern boy band, as much due to demographics as sound. Though Maurice Starr’s concept – New Edition, but white – dates from the mid-80s, the band were an inititial flop. But by 1988 they were a better fit: this po[…]

For the second time, Coldcut give a leg-up to a vocalist via the medium of “featuring” – but while Yazz’ music with and without them wasn’t too different, the gap between “People Hold On” and “All Aroun[…]

Five weeks of “Swing The Mood” and six of “Ride On Time” were more than enough for Jive Bunny to get a follow-up into the shops, the charts, and back to number one: the creature was now a phenomenon. As one of the commenters o[…]

The controversy around “Ride On Time” now feels like a mixture of typical sharp practise and unusual naivety. Details are murky, but it seems production team Black Box had obtained sample clearance for Loleatta Holloway’s “Lov[…]

Where does one even begin?
How about this: back at the start of the “late 80s phase” of Popular I wrote about how the charts became a free-for-all between radically different visions of what pop was for: a futurist, bricolage-driven club […]

A theme we’ll come back to relentlessly when we reach the 00s: people assume reality pop talent shows are (or rather, ought to be) about talent, when in fact they’re about narrative. The records sell initially because we’ve accompan[…]