What I'm Up To (August 2024)

Hello! And hello to more of you than before - thanks to extremely generous recommendations from Andrew Hickey and Centuries Of Sound I have about 50 more patrons than I did a week ago. Welcome, all of you.

Most of the newcomers are free members, which means they're not seeing many full posts, but your interest is still very much appreciated. This is one of the semi-regular "catch up" posts I make to update you on my projects, and my life in general, and also maybe what I've been listening to or reading or watching.

Except I won't be doing any of those fun recommendation things this month, as since there ARE so many new people I'll just use this as a general intro post.

So - I'm Tom, I'm a pop and pop culture critic - I used to write for Pitchfork and The Guardian, but now just do big quixotic critical projects as a hobby.

From the Patreon perspective, the main one is Popular, my review of UK Number 1 hits - you get to see these early, and then they go up on popular-number1s.com - I put the Tony Christie "Amarillo" one up today. Patreon members are going to get all the next "season" of Popular early. So upcoming posts are going to cover James Blunt, the 'Britpop 10 years on' trilogy of McFly/Oasis/Gorillaz, then Pussycat Dolls, Sugababes and the Arctic Monkeys. Then a pause while I get all that up on the site. And then the season after, which will cover the sordid end of the physical sales era, including the lowest selling weekly No.1 of all time and take us into 2006.

The Patreon front page still lists the People's Pop Polls, which have come to a glorious end as the final poll of polls was won by... exactly the same song which won the first ever pop poll in 2020. (Donna Summer's "I Feel Love", of course). We had joy, we had pain, we had Brits at it again... but for now, at least, the polls are a finished project, so I need to update that intro section.

The other thing I'm working on, which isn't strictly related (yet) to the Patreon, is Discourse 2000. a critical history of the early years of 2000AD, which began as a cash-in on a hoped-for fad and ended up almost the last UK comic standing. I've written 18000 words of this so far and am oscillating between "this is great stuff, can't wait to put it out there" and "I make blogs for myself and if anyone else likes them it's a bonus". I'm having a bloody great time writing it, though. That will go up on freakytrigger.co.uk either in the second half of August or the first half of September.

And that's about it. One last thing - for the last few years I've only rarely billed patrons, as I haven't been posting enough. My threshold now is that if I've posted 4 things - Popular entries or "Crystal Ball" entries looking at current hits - I'll bill you. Otherwise, I won't (for instance, this month I only got 3 new pieces up, so I won't). This might change, particularly if I start looking in earnest at some of the audio ideas I've been kicking around. And I do plan to use this Patreon more anyway, but I've said that before.

With that, I'll leave you and go melt further into a puddle of sweat. Have a good month!