About Freaky Trigger
Freaky Trigger is a website dedicated to smart, informal writing about pop culture – music, film, TV, food and drink, books, art, science and anything else we fancy writing about. We’re not particularly cutting edge, but we’re generous, affable and curious.
We started Freaky Trigger in 1999 – it was purely a music site for the first few years, gradually expanding its remit. Until 2005 it included the much-loved music blog NYLPM, whose contents form part of the site’s extensive archives.
WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE GET UP TO
Freaky Trigger is a team effort – most of us are based in London, and most of us socialise together on a fairly regular basis. More than 100 people have written for FT in the ten years we’ve been running, and the site has around 20 contributors. Tom Ewing is the site’s founder and publisher, Pete Baran and Mark Sinker are editors, Alan Trewartha does the back-end stuff (and wrote the Widget Logic plug-in which the site uses), and Steve Mannion (aka Ghost Food) designed it. The site is hosted on a Positive Internet server. We use and endorse WordPress.
FT rolls happily along on a diet of whatever its contributors want to talk about, but we do generally have a few bigger projects on the go. The most prominent is Tom Ewing’s Popular blog, which reviews every UK #1 single from the beginning. We’re also currently counting down our Top 100 Tracks Of All Time and talking about every MR James ghost story.
BEYOND FREAKY TRIGGER
We also produce shows for radio: we’ve done three series of an eclectic show for Resonance FM called Freaky Trigger And The Lollards Of Pop, whose content reflects the magpie approach of the website. Mark Sinker and Eli Sessions have also produced two series of A Bite Of Stars, A Slug Of Time, And Thou – a highly acclaimed show celebrating the history of the science fiction short story.
We ran a club night known as Club FT and then Poptimism throughout the 00s, in Oxford and then London. This included the occasional ‘Club Popular’ night at which only UK number 1 singles were played. Poptimism spin-offs also included Kat and Pete’s Hand Pump The Volume and Club Action nights.
Most years we perform a series of culinary experiments in London under the banner of Food Science Day, in memory of friend and contributor Liz Daplyn.
ADVERTISING, CONTENT AND REVIEW POLICY
If you just want to start a conversation with us, skip this section and go to the next one. If you’re promoting something, please read it. Thanks!
Advertising and PR: We have no advertising on Freaky Trigger (apart from unavoidable ones via using google for search) so please don’t bother asking us to run any. We also don’t source content from PR agencies or pluggers so don’t offer us any virals or “exclusive” content – but by all means let us know about awesome things you’re doing.
Reviews: Most of our reviews are of films, food and drink products, books, etc. rather than music, and we’re not an MP3 blog. So don’t worry about sending us free CDs and music, but if you have other freebies you want to offer us, get in touch. Alcohol and pork products especially welcome.
Contributors: We’re not currently actively looking for new contributors so if you’re desperate to write for Freaky Trigger your best bet is to move to London and come to the pub with us a lot! This doesn’t apply if you’ve written for us in the past, or if we’ve invited you to write for us (drunkenly or otherwise!).
All Freaky Trigger content is copyright the contributors. Link to it, quote it, don’t nick it please.
CONTACT DETAILS
We’d love to hear from you about the site or any content on it. We have thriving comments boxes and welcome new voices there, or we’re at freakytrigger@gmail.com if you want to email us. If you want to get in touch with an individual writer, use the site address and we’ll pass your details on.
We’re on Twitter (@freakytrigger).
We’re always happy to hear about freelance writing, radio or DJing opportunities. And we’re always happy to entertain visitors to London who like the website in any of a vast array of Trigger-approved drinking spots.
Thanks for visiting!
Thanks for putting the about page up Alan!
Wasn’t sure where to drop it in. Not sure this is the best solution – but if it’s aimed at new visitors they’re more likely to notice it than the regular crew who might see past it
I think this is a good solution and positioning – can we get it so it displays on all posts, as I think the reason for it is to inform googlers who have arrived at a post they think is good but have no idea of the context.
might be better if it actually reads “About FT”, as it currently reads more like “About | Music”
I googled Mr. Ewing after reading today’s Rio review to nitpick the article and came across this site, more specifically the Why We Hate Indie Kids posting. Freaky Trigger has left me speechless. I have a new favorite site. I never liked Rio that much and had little impact on me. Though friends gave it to their girlfriends Rio came out roughly the same time as Roxy Music’s Avalon and I couldn’t get the Roxy album off of my turntable. I was just diagnosed with swine flu and Freaky Trigger made my day.
I just found this site by accidentl while looking to see where my own site appears in google search. I must say that I think that it is rather good (your site not mine) I found it by doing a search for ‘how to write a song’, which is the name of my site (.co.uk)and it came up with the springsteen article. I particularly like the idea of someone hating music, because; having been a musician for the past million years I must agree with the lady who’s views reflect this standpoint. the only reason that I continue to create music is the fact that I cant seeem to kick the habit. I am hoping that one day I will be cured; as the bacon… (silly joke wont bother)all the best – Vince
FERGIE MAYNARD.
HAVING A BIT OF A PROBLEM GETTING MY E.MAIL TO ANDREW BROUGH AS HE REQUESTED.
HE IS CONTRIBUTOR NO 62 EVERLASTING LOVE THREAD. I`VE REGISTERED NOW. MAYBE THAT WAS THE PROBLEM. FREAKYTRIGGER@HOTMAIL.COM WAS UNDELIVERABLE FOR ME. HOPE @GMAIL IS THE SITE ADDRESS. REGARDS FERGIE
resonance repeated one of your programmes yesterday, tuesday 12th Oct.
What was the 2001 Space Odyssey lounge remix? Insane!
Anyone know where the description “Pop music fanzine featuring reviews, commentary and opinionated nonsense” originates – it’s all over various web indexes, inc google, as a summary of FT
Is anyone else having trouble with getting Freakytrigger through Google Reader? The feed there doesn’t seem to have updated in over a month, though the RSS on the site itself is up to date.
YES :-(
i’ve tried a lot of fixes, but it looks like maybe our hosts are actually blocking update requests from google
feedburner alternatives
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FTarticles
http://feeds.feedburner.com/CommentsForFreakytrigger
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreakytriggerPopular
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreakytriggerPopularComments
wish I knew why google reader can’t see the rss feeds updating, but if you indirect via google’s own feedburner it works :-(
Just wondering why my avatar has disappeared. If I post without logging in it’s there, but when I’m logged in it’s gone, and there doesn’t seem to be an option in the ‘Edit My Profile’ menu.
gravatars are keyed to your e-mail address, so you probs just need to update the e-mail in your profile to match the one you use when not logged in.
Aha!
I believe that it is not so,
a haha ha nice try.
Currently undeleted because I love big blocky Cyrillic rather too much.
It only says “download the books of Malakhov”…. who or what Malakhov might be I have no idea…