I swear I never even knew what drugs were…UNTIL I HEARD MUSICAL YOUTH. The rumour swept round school sometime after their Blue Peter appearance: the song isn’t about a “cooking pot” at all, it’s about… the other ki[…]

Before I talk about Survivor I’m going to talk about me a little. Skip down a few paragraphs if you don’t care.
There. Now, I was lucky enough to have a happy childhood. And from mid ’82 to late ’84 it was at its happiest. Not[…]

(This entry is an edited version of this piece – it’s my favourite thing I’ve ever written for FT, about possibly my favourite Number One, and I felt I couldn’t improve on it.)
There is pop, and there is popular, and then the[…]

The lust for fame has always been a crucial pop motivation, but there are periods when that flame seems to burn more nakedly than others. In his classic book on the New Pop and, Like Punk Never Happened, Dave Rimmer is quite candid about the primary […]

So here’s one destination for punk: a jokey cover version of an old show tune, knocked out at the record company’s request and pushing Captain Sensible firmly down the woeful career path of the professional eccentric. Look more closely an[…]

One of my favourite old threads on ILX was a compendium of right-wing American cartoons, in which politics I found highly disagreeable were counterbalanced by craft and chutzpah. In fact my reactions were murkier than that – my horror at the opinio[…]

Ants largely jettisoned, Adam cast around for a new angle. It was a moment in pop history when sudden changes of image and sound were respectable – even expected for some stars. Compared to today’s performers who tend to cover bandwagon-jumping w[…]

“House Of Fun” finds Madness – one of the most consistent and successful singles acts in Britain – on a cusp. They’d made their name with busy, high-impact ska-derived records whose bristling arrangements and comical tou[…]

In the world of Marvel and DC Comics, the 100th, 200th (etc) issues of a title were considered real milestones. To maximise sales of these anniversary specials, the companies would often use them to launch particularly big storylines: deaths, marriag[…]

An awful suspicion lingers that Paul McCartney wouldn’t have tried something like this if it hadn’t been for “Imagine” doing so well the year before. Some partnerships and rivalries create reflexes that run way deeper than con[…]