Tom Ewing

GORILLAZ - "Dare"

(#1017, 10th September 2005)

It’s an irresistible coincidence that ten years after the “Battle Of Britpop”, Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn met again at the top of the charts. Brought together in a moment of media heat, in 1995 they were the faces of a trend both men wanted to outgrow. Gallagher in a literal sense; Oasis needed to become bigger than any movement. Albarn in an aesthetic one. There was a restless, dissatisfied, magpie quality to his artistry that was concea...

OASIS - "The Importance Of Being Idle"

(#1016, 3rd September 2005)

When I heard the news Oasis were reuniting, my first thought was, “thank God, an angle on the ‘Idle’ entry”. It’s not impossible that this might even end up only being their penultimate Number 1. It would be a surefire news story if “Wonderwall” finally got there, the charts’ existence these days in the eyes of the media being a way to retcon quirks of the 20th Century or update long-standing records.

Like - I suspect - a lot of...

McFLY - "I'll Be OK"

(#1015, 27th August 2005)

I still find McFly hard to appreciate, but in the comments for their previous No.1 I linked a piece which made the strongest case I’d seen for them as songwriters and musicians. One of the questions this piece asked was why critics had so little time for them, giving the impression of McFly as a 21st Century Monkees, a more-than-solid pop group tarnished by unfair perception. To this day you’ll find a few American rock fans of a particular vintage ...

JAMES BLUNT - "You're Beautiful"

(#1014, 23rd July 2005)

“Proof that one song is all it takes” says James Blunt’s Twitter biography. He knows what he’s known for, and in his post-superstar era he’s played his hand with great skill, cultivating a self-deprecating persona on social media as an affable gent who’s as sick of his big hit as you are. It makes him hard to criticise - if he’s not taking himself particularly seriously, why should anyone else?

The studied deployment of self-deprecati...

It's A Crazy Situation

I've suspended September billing (again lol), and can only apologise for the lack of updates. But here's a little preview of the "Importance Of Being Idle" Popular entry - some thoughts on the Oasis reunion...

When I heard the news Oasis were reuniting, my first thought was, “thank God, an angle on the ‘Idle’ entry”. It’s not impossible that this might even end up only being their penultimate Number 1. It would be a surefire news story if Wonderwall finally got there,...

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 listeni...

2PAC ft ELTON JOHN - "Ghetto Gospel"

(#1013, 2nd July 2005)

The pattern for recent hip-hop Number 1s on Popular - Nelly’s pair being the best example - has been the chart-topper as a kind of medal for services rendered, generally coming an album cycle after the artist’s more vital work. Mostly that’s a function of the low weekly sales of Number 1s at this point, so canny labels could time new releases and harvest the interest created by previous hits. Still, 2Pac is taking matters to an extreme here; “Ghet...

CRAZY FROG - "Axel F"

(#1012, 4th June 2005)

In 2004 I took on the worst project of my professional life; worst in the sense that it was miserable and time-consuming and also in the sense that I did it very badly. A certain mobile phone company wanted to know what their rivals were doing online to keep young customers happy and asked my bosses to find out; I had to sign up to all their various customer clubs and ‘online communities’ and report back. I ended up with a drawer full of cheapest-opti...

OASIS - "Lyla"

(#1011, 28th May 2005)

The long twilight of Oasis is reaching its end, at least in Popular terms. The 00s took them from the kings of English rock to a drab fixture and finally a running joke, bigmouths promising a return to form which never comes. This is almost the last we’ll see of the Gallaghers. But little has changed, in their sound or their context, since “The Hindu Times” in 2002: the rut which was obvious then is now the most inescapable fact about them. And that...

AKON - "Lonely"

(#1010, 14th May 2005)

This is going to be one of those annoying reviews which takes the billion-view signature hit of a highly successful artist and picks away at production choices which - objectively! - have been extremely successful. “Lonely” is not a one-hit wonder; it failed to tank Akon’s promising career; and the fact the guy dropped largely out of sight at the turn of the decade is absolutely nothing to do with his decision to marinade his biggest hit in an infur...

PREVIEW: Dan Dare And The Dame

Here's a little bit of Work In Progress for you from the first entry in the upcoming 2000AD blog. I've chosen this cos it's actually (well, tangentially) about pop music as well as comics...

Everyone else in 2000AD has a direction you get right away - MACH 1 and Dredd have jobs; Harlem Heroes and Bill Savage have an impossible goal; even in Flesh there’s an outrageous situation that you want to see resolved somehow. But what’s the point of Dan Dare, other than to be Dan Dar...

Fit And Working Again aka What I'm Up To (June '24)

Hello lovely patrons!

This is a catch-up post, covering present circumstances and future plans, including a NEW PROJECT and a shift I'm going to try in how I structure my blogging work (which will mean more early posts here, if it comes off). First, a personal bit.

You may have noticed - do Patreon actually tell you this? - that I didn't charge for this month. That's because, obviously, I haven't done anything for a while. What's been happening instead is that my son has been doin...

TONY CHRISTIE ft PETER KAY - "(Is This The Way To) Amarillo"

(#1009, 26th March 2005)

The success of Elvis’ reissues - a promotional gimmick which actually managed to hack the charts - made a strong case that the new pop of 2005 simply wasn’t able to capture the wider public imagination. This record makes it inarguable. The best selling single of the year - the only million-seller, a 7-week leviathan in an age of minnows - is a song which barely scraped the Top 20 in 1971, with a fictitious credit for the comedian in the video as the...

MCFLY - "All About You"/"You've Got A Friend"

(#1008, 19th March 2005)

McFly’s biggest hit, crossing the 500k sales barrier partly because it was the official Comic Relief single. The Carole King cover is doing most of the hard work on that front, with a video involving the lads helping out in Uganda, and the song stopping for a chorus sung by the kids they meet. It’s a clear-cut example of the kind of thing Comic Relief liked to do with its borrowed stars, and which eventually became the focus for criticism of the cha...

What I'm Up To, March/April '24 (Aardvark Aftermath Special)

Hello friends!

I was going to share one of these updates at the end of the month as usual, but it would just have been "I've been doing nothing except the fucking Cerebus blog posts" and now at least I can say "I've finished the fucking Cerebus blog posts"

This took over my writing time in ways that were - appropriate to the project - vaguely unhealthy. It's a tough comic to think about, I'm a bit shocked I wrote so much about it. It seems to have indir...

BENSON BOONE - "Beautiful Things"

Part of the Patreon-exclusive set of posts looking at current No.1 hits, even though there's been another one since this.

My day job involves analysing advertising, and one of the ads I ended up seeing most - cos it performed very well on the metrics we were using - was Budweiser’s Super Bowl commercial from about 10 years ago with the dog and the horse making friends. This ad particularly cooked part of my brain because of its hellish soundtrack, Passenger’s nasal p...

BEYONCE - "Texas Hold 'Em"

I’ve been faffing around on this one for ages - it was Number 1 for five weeks and now isn't and I still didn't write it. I finally realised I needed to just get the thing done before I listen to Cowboy Carter, which is going to move the discourse around this song, and this phase of Beyoncé’s career, forward another few steps anyway.

That discourse hasn’t been brilliant, it seems to me. It’s proceeded in a familiar, probably inevitable, way. Beyoncé releases a country...

#Let5D0It - The Shortlist

I promised (myself if nobody else) that I'd post my "final 100" contenders for Arron Wright's upcoming #Let5D0It challenge on Bluesky - my 50 favourite singles from 1954 to 1976.

So here they are - there's actually 101 tracks on the longlist, as something's in there that "shouldn't" be but I can't actually work out what. 

Fifty of th...

What I'm Up To, February '24

Hi! A monthly round-up of the activities YOUR patreon pounds are funding - and a general check-in. I'm well, happier and healthier than I was last month, and I hope you are too. Also! I went to New York for a client to help with their work on Super Bowl ads (if you thought they were nothing special, guess what? You are officially correct) and made a side trip to see my friend Maura in Boston, where I watched A WRESTLING MATCH (on TV) and it was great. I also bought a bunch of books, which mea...

STEREOPHONICS - "Dakota"

(#1007, 12th March 2005)

“Dakota” has a curious reputation. A lot of music fans I know see it as Stereophonics’ best song. That in itself is hardly unusual. But many of those people also see it as the band’s only good song. Which is odder - these guys have eight UK No.1 albums and twenty Top 20 singles; they are by any definition a massive band here, one of the biggest of their era. The fact almost nobody I know has a good word for them shows that some of the o...

Your Mom Called, I Polled Her (The World Cup Of 2023 Last 16)

With the 2023 poll nearly over I thought I’d run down the Peoples Pop Last 16, maybe even rank them. I came to almost all these new at the start of the poll so it’s just been the last month that they’ve grown and shrank on me. This is going to be live to everybody until the poll ends, then will be only for patrons.

Tracks arranged from worst to best, for a rousing and optimistic finale.

6

Billie Eilish - “What Was I Made For?”: Sor...

What I'm Up To, January '24

I want to do a monthly update post filling you in on where I am with various personal projects, including the ones you signed up to help me complete(!) This will hopefully be a regular check-in. Also, I vaguely mentioned ill health in various places and wanted to let people know that aside from a few recurring ailments - weird leg pains and so on - which I'm getting checked out, I'm considerably better than I was in December or early January.

Onto the projects!

NOAH KAHAN - "Stick Season"

This is the first of a series of Patreon-exclusive posts which are notes on current No.1s, intended to go up while they're actually at No.1. They won't show up on FT and I'm not prejudging myself by giving them marks or anything! Also, I apologise for the last 6 weeks' lack of content - I was ill for most of December and early January and not really able to do much, least of all write. Fingers crossed I'll get back to regular posting soon.

I decided to start writing about conte...

NELLY ft TIM McGRAW - "Over And Over"

(#1006, 5th March 2005)

There are meetings between genres where creative sparks fly and new hybrid forms can be glimpsed, like undreamed-of particles in a supercollider. There are also meetings between genres which feel more like high level EU summits - whatever happens behind closed doors, the eventual communiqué is a document of pluperfect blandness. Guess which one Nelly ft Tim McGraw is!

Outside the US, McGraw’s legacy probably rests on a Taylor Swift namecheck: wi...

JENNIFER LOPEZ - "Get Right"

(#1005, 26th February 2005)

There is a 2005 single, a huge hit, which many will tell you is producer Rich Harrison’s masterpiece. On it, cut-ups of funk breaks are rearranged at oblique angles in a 21st century update of James Brown’s rhythmic modernism, building an abstract sculpture of bone-rattling beats and slivers of jagged keys and horns. And the singer, turning in her own career-best performance, turns that beatspace into a jungle-gym, her song finding the gaps in th...