Brazenly unconvincing love-lost flummery by the same people who wrote the previous Number One. Baldry, wearing his serious bluesman’s hat, later professed to hate the record but listening to it I don’t believe him for a second: this sound[…]

Few acts have got poorer from doing Motown knock-offs – at least since Motown themselves stopped doing stomp-stomp-clap (which would be round about now). The stomp here much outweighs the clap, and the big chugging riff just ups the stomp even […]

An answer record of sorts to “San Francisco”, but this time a place – or placename – chosen for its delicious phonemes, not its youth-historical weight. So the longing that suffuses “Massachusetts” is really un-pla[…]

After the write-up of “Release Me” I got several comments and emails from Engelbert fans. They ran along familiar lines: Engelbert is a superb performer, he has a remarkable voice, his fame and renown will far outlast your puny blog.
The […]

The history of Britain’s summer hits and the history of British holidaymaking go together like sand and towels. The key factor is the balance between function and description, place and pleasure in pop – these days the summer hit template[…]

On the I Love Music message board, someone just asked for a definition of “schlock”. I answered, because I wanted to be in the pub and not at work, “anything that you only like when you’re drunk”. I don’t like this[…]

I used to hate this song. If you’re a reader who skips to the mark first you’ll have realised that I still don’t like it much, and you might want to check the bit in bold for the rationale. But I used to hate it. I identified it as […]

A song about wimpiness and non-intervention, whose subject seems to infect its delivery: close harmony as a coccoon, a kind of pretty disengagement from the beastly world. It’s a cover version of a record that’s only three years old but i[…]

In a sense the UK’s relationship with the Eurovision Song Contest mirrors its attitude to ‘Europe’ as political entity: a conflicted, pendulum-swing mess of amused contempt, cynical superiority, desperate attempts to play catch-up a[…]

The sort of song “Something Stupid” is depends very much on who’s singing it. Sung as a solo it’s a more bitter than sweet dispatch from that relationship relegation zone known as the ‘long game’, the limbos betwee[…]