JJ BARRIE – "No Charge"

2 May 2008

I was aware of this song long before I heard it – as a young boy it was quoted at me by my Dad should I ever object to tidying my room. Since my room was rarely tidy, I became very familiar with the central notion of “No Charge”. […]

DESTINY'S CHILD – "Independent Women, Part 1"

4 July 2015

It’s hard not to let what Beyoncé Knowles was become swamped by what she is. A veteran, an icon, a woman enjoying a remarkable critical peak, an earner, second only to headphone mogul Dr Dre on current musical money lists – Beyoncé, as she […]

ABBA – "Dancing Queen"

13 May 2008

In my teens I read a science fiction novel with a startlingly elegant twist. (I won’t mention the book’s name in case you come across it yourself.) It was about a brilliant scientist who vanishes: the book’s protagonist goes looking[…]

THE TROGGS – "With A Girl Like You"

29 December 2005

In Incredible Hulk comics there’s often a scene where the ’emerald man-beast’, cast out from human society, finds something of fragile beauty – a flower, maybe, or a baby deer – which he then accidentally crushes with hi[…]

WHITE TOWN – "Your Woman"

4 February 2014

In 1997, talking about music on the Internet means USENET, a Gormenghast of diverging and reconnecting fora whose goblin tribes gleefully rampage through each other’s chosen lairs: a thread will start on alt.music.prodigy, then careen into alt.[…]

THE BOOMTOWN RATS – "Rat Trap"

13 August 2008

“Rat Trap” is billed – in the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles, no less – as the first punk No.1. I couldn’t recall it – my memories of the Rats themselves were vague; Geldof I knew for later good works. So I a[…]

DJ OTZI – "Hey Baby (Uhh, Ahh)"

8 March 2016

So the cruddiest number one of 2001 lands at the top in a week when a lot of people were not caring about music. And certainly, spending £1.99 on “Hey Baby” is one of the more aggressive ways you could find to not care about music. The song is a[…]

THE BEATLES – "Eleanor Rigby"/"Yellow Submarine"

30 December 2005

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[…]

BEYONCÉ – "Crazy In Love"

24 January 2020

History in the making,” says Jay-Z in the intro, and he’s been proven right. As I’ve said before, there’s a temptation with Beyoncé to treat her big moments as inevitable steps in a process of becoming. Her control over her career and image […]

ATB – "9PM (Til I Come)"

5 November 2014

The story of breathy trance* hit “9PM (Til I Come)” begins with producer ATB bringing his girlfriend to his studio to check out his instruments. And it continues with him ignoring her and working on an awesome guitar sound until he looked at his […]

BAZ LUHRMANN – "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)"

29 October 2014

“Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” is an artefact from the Pre-Cambrian of social media, a fossil ancestor of today’s viral hits. You could go further: by making the jump into offline culture, it’s a kind of missing link to them. Native[…]

AALIYAH – "More Than A Woman"

30 October 2016

The Queen Of The Damned soundtrack, released later in 2002, is a fearful pile of tosh, a body count of nu-metal second-raters which illustrates a dilemma the film didn’t totally resolve: just which children of the night was this thing aimed at – […]