I give every record on Popular a mark out of 10 (and if you’re registered, so can you). Here’s where, by the magic of polling, we look at the year as a whole. Tick any and all records you’d personally give 6 or more out of 10 to, an[…]

“Do They Know It’s Christmas” is significant in one way, and insignificant in another. First, it raised a lot of awareness and money and established the pop single as an excellent mechanism for doing those things. This was significa[…]

This was our first dance at my wedding, so certainly you can hear it, and use it, as sincere – but I’d be hard pressed to claim it’s meant to be taken that way. Or rather, sincerity is there in “The Power Of Love” if you[…]

This song marks a minor turning point in Popular: it’s the very last which I had absolutely no memory of ever hearing when I started the project. Plenty of later ones are forgettable – even more forgettable than poor Jim – but this […]

Asked to describe the I Feel For You album, Wikipedia offers “Genre: Funk, Hip Hop, Electronic dance music, soul, Rhythm and blues, Pop”. By a remarkable coincidence that is the exact genre of this single, too – a time-shifting styl[…]

Just as with “Careless Whisper”, “Freedom” finds George Michael working his way through a form: the upbeat, Tamla-style soul stomper. A fine thing to be doing, except this is almost twice as long as many Motown hits and it doesn’t use the e[…]

Bad songs earn bad reputations, but the particular disdain this one attracts is tangled up with people’s love for its creator. Everyone’s entitled a clunker sometimes but it’s galling when one becomes a great artist’s most popular song. A[…]

There are currently 15 songs to go before I reach the halfway point of my Popular project. Obviously it’s possible that I’ll slip back behind that point, but I doubt it, and in any case halfway deserves celebration.
So there will be a WEE[…]

Every songwriter seems to have one: the perfect tune they wrote at the very pre-dawn of their career, before fame came knocking. Does it bother Mick Hucknall, I wonder, that he’s never written a better song than one he wrote when he was 17? The[…]

In 1982, armageddon came to the pages of 2000AD. The Sov-Bloc, sworn enemies of Judge Dredd, invented a missile defense shield that allowed them to strike at Mega City One with impunity. They did so, having first maddened and weakened its already-dec[…]