“Release Me” spent 56 weeks on the UK charts, but its position in modern pop history is as a footnote – the single that kept The Beatles’ “Penny Lane”/”Strawberry Fields Forever” off number one, an inju[…]

Of course this isn’t her song (that would be “Downtown”). It’s Charlie Chaplin’s song – the royalties from it helped pay for the final, flop film it starred in – which may explain why it sets its cap so firml[…]

My feelings about the Monkees and their music are entirely entangled with my feelings about their TV show, and childhood TV in general. Pop music wasn’t a big deal in my house growing up, and I had no real idea of the Monkees as ‘a band&#[…]

I give marks out of 10 to every single on Popular. Here’s where you can say which entries you’d have given 6 or above to, and discuss the year in general in the comments. Here we have 1966, a year of many high marks including the project&[…]

The worst thing about “Green Green Grass of Home” is how close it comes to being OK: for two verses the band is tight and Tom is as close as Tom gets to ‘restrained’, and the record is shaping up nicely. Carry on for another v[…]

A couple of years ago, I was in a karaoke pub. “Good Vibrations” flashed up on the screen and a confident, 40-ish businessman stepped up to sing it. He was immediately nonplussed by the intro, and as the song continued it became obvious t[…]

Marvel Comics of the mid-60s had several innovative competitive advantages over their competition. A small company, they ran a tight and unified creative ship, which allowed for competition and crossover between titles and gave everything they did a […]

The lullaby pace hides a strange mix of emotions: encroaching doom, self-conscious nobility, hustling chivalry and honeyed reassurance. It’s a manipulative song – the guy’s off to war and he wants to get the girl before he goes &#82[…]

You can still hear records that sound like this in the charts occasionally, because the big late-90s Britrock boom was built on this template and some of that generation of bands have lingered. It seems to be a model that guys like Richard Ashcroft, […]

DIGRESSION:

For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project:

“This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous[…]