Errol Brown brought angst to the dancefloor as regularly as Michael Jackson ever would, but Hot Chocolate’s neuroses were way more effortful, dredged up from some inner coil of dissatisfaction. The rising riff on “So You Win Again&#8221[…]

A key player in Popular to come steps lightly onto the scene: Michael Jackson (with brothers) was already a star but his ball-of-energy performances on the Jackson Five’s hits had always just missed out on the UK #1. On “Show You The Way […]

For a long time all I knew of “Lucille” was the mournful swing of its chorus, and it struck me as quintessential country – catchy, corny, sentimental. Listened to in full, though, it’s a stranger creature, an uncomfortably unr[…]

Did it get to number one? I don’t know. Would it have made any difference either way? It might have accelerated the opprobrium, naturally there would have been questions in the house, a headline or twenty… but in this case a close call was en[…]

Rod at bay: both cuts of this double-A side find Stewart on the defensive, licking wounds inflicted in failed relationships. The subdued, pretty, “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” is much the more effective (even if its clumsy heart-heart rhyme g[…]

This is one of the last songs I didn’t know at all before starting the project: unlike the very last (and surprisingly late) one, it’s a little gem. There’s a YouTube clip with Tony Blackburn introducing Williams on Top Of The Pops,[…]

It does no real work in the song, that “a-ha” – it’s an afterthought, another little hooky Easter Egg from a band committed to packing as much as they could into their tracks. No fault of ABBA’s, honestly, that for Briti[…]

Manhattan Transfer smooth out and slick up Art and Dottie Todd’s song to such a degree that it becomes a pastiche of imagined Frenchness – an accordion, bof alors! – as much as a fifties throwback: what’s sacrificed in the pro[…]

Another in the recent string of soft, sumptuously arranged ballads, and like the others this is something I can think myself into enjoying – the polished class of the instrumentation in particular – but find it hard to feel. Some of my re[…]

This is the first entry in Popular that I’ve written about extensively for Freaky Trigger before, in this long piece comparing different versions of the song. It’s one of my favourite longer FT pieces so this entry is very much an extrac[…]