With “Pray” I made the case for Take That being – visually at any rate – something new in British pop. But they could do tradition, too – “Relight My Fire”, a confident consolidation of their stardom, put down careful markers on two different strands of pop heritage. more »
Tom in Popular • 30 Comments
Huge weepy thanks to Bob, Pete and Sarah for immortalising us in song. And thanks to commenters past and present for making it worth immortalising.
Tom in Popular • 111 Comments
At this point, what differentiates the hip-hop that tops the UK charts from the stuff which peeks in lower down is legibility: not too much slang, metaphors spelled out, a flow any kid could follow. At a time when the public face of rap in Britain was Snoop Dogg on the front page of the Daily Star – “KICK THIS EVIL BASTARD OUT!” – the material crossing over commercially wasn’t likely to cause any moral panics. So the “harder edge” promised by DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince on their final album, Code Red, was highly relative. more »
Tom in Popular • 52 Comments
The formula for 90s Eurodance was well established by now: strobe-lit dancing to urgent beats, big-voiced singers, a rap somewhere in the middle to change up the pace. It wasn’t the most thoughtful of music, but done well it had a real kick. And “Mr. Vain”, latecomer though it was, does it very well. It’s one of the most direct Eurodance hits, and one of the most aggressive. Eurodance lyricists could tend to pseudo-profundity, or calls to spiritual awakening: there’s none of that here. more »
Tom in Popular • 44 Comments
The original “Living On My Own” was a highlight of 1985’s uneven but likeable Mr Bad Guy album, one of the tracks where the disco backing had enough muscle to carry Mercury’s imagination. That track rides on a steady, ambulatory pulse, creating the space for Freddie to run free, scatting and shrieking. For its 1992 remix, on the posthumous Freddie Mercury Album, the skibbedy-bobbedy stuff was pruned back and the mix focused on the track’s whoops and war cries, leading off with a swaggering yodel. And then for this release – carrying the song to the top of the charts – “Living On My Own” was remixed further, turned a little more sombre, that triumphant opening shout replaced with a slow synth build, in case we’d somehow forgotten that Freddie Mercury wasn’t with us any more. more »
Tom in Popular • 25 Comments
From my perspective, Take That’s ubiquity was as sudden as a snowfall and apparently as permanent. This viewpoint – 20 years old, indie-leaning, straight, male – was quite irrelevant, and quite wrong: I simply had no tools to conceptualise what the band were doing and what they might mean. I don’t think I even knew what a “six pack” was, for example. For the likes of me, a clip kept circulating – the boys in an early promo vid, in leathers, having – from memory – some kind of jelly fight. Don’t worry, the clip told us, this is camp at best, these are himbos. This will pass. more »
Tom in Popular • 39 Comments
Gabrielle starts as she was to go on: a voice apparently soaked in personality singing songs with a total absence of it. Gabrielle’s throaty, worldly tone marks her out as this year’s version of that recurring chimera, the Great British Soul Hope. The GBSH – last seen on Popular in the form of Lisa Stansfield – tends to play out in a broadly similar way each time. A girl, or guy, or group with good voices and the best intentions enjoys early success, but the toxic mix of acclaim and dull material does for them. more »
Tom in Popular • 50 Comments
Pop reggae wasn’t invented in Gothenburg, more’s the pity. Back in 1983, UB40 had made a record celebrating the Jamaican music they grew up loving, and discovered that a lot of other people had loved it too, and even more loved the idea of loving it so long as it was filtered through the curatorial larynx of Ali Campbell. Labour Of Love made the band a fortune and froze their career: gentle weddings’n’parties reggae was what they did now. more »
Tom in Popular • 57 Comments
Of all the hundreds of microgenres that make pop the funnest kind of butterfly collecting, perhaps the greatest is Swedish Reggae. The first person I heard talk about Swedish Reggae was Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields at the end of the 90s, but by then its heyday was long gone. It was a holiday romance, opposites attracting, never really meant to be – a union of the sun-hardened authenticity of reggae and kitschy Scando popcraft which couldn’t truly produce anything lasting, or could it? more »
Tom in Popular • 47 Comments
Short version: Popular will be back on Friday and back to a regular schedule.
Long version: more »
Tom in Popular • 20 Comments
All the UK number ones since 1952, reviewed in order and rated by whim. As featured on Radio 2, The Times, Metro, Paul Cornell's LiveJournal, etc etc.
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