


Florrie – I Took a Little Something
From the file marked "Why Isn't This Person a Huge Star Yet?", it's the quite brilliant Florrie.

Girls Aloud – Miss You Bow Wow
The tricky art of going out on a high and how almost no-one gets it right.

Gossip – Move in the Right Direction
Hot Gossip.

Saint Etienne – Tonight
Surrender to the sound.

Rachel Stevens – Nothing Good About This Goodbye
Niall asks the most important question in pop: what happened to Rachel Stevens' career?

Ladyhawke – Paris is Burning
Cast your mind back to 2008/09; 80s synth pop revivalism was at its height and it seemed every act (new or established) was trying on a shiny synth style in […]

Agnetha Fältskog – Wrap Your Arms Around Me
Going solo must be absolutely bloody terrifying, don’t you think? It’s no wonder Nadine Coyle was so reluctant to let Girls Aloud go given that the battlefield of music is littered […]

Inga Humpe – Do I Have To?
It’s time to talk about cover versions, and specifically why they happen so often considering they pay for someone else’s swimming pool and not your own. Pop stars sing the […]

Tracey Thorn – It’s All True
In 2007 I was living in Bristol and had recently left Virgin Megastores for the indie pleasures of Fopp Records – not a place that was especially receptive to my […]

Nicola Roberts – Gladiator
When the lads down at CERN have finished with that Hadron Collider business they might want to turn their attention to more pressing matters, namely the inexplicable commercial failure of […]

Golden – Anglo American
I think one thing I’ve established over the last couple of months is my love for classic English girl voices, and specifically girls who sound like they’ve been plucked from the […]

Cicero with Sylvia Mason-James – Live for Today
In America there is something called the Mason-Dixon line, which essentially marks the cultural border between the North and the South. In Britain – in pop terms – we have […]

Kelly Clarkson – Catch My Breath
There’s a slightly strange phenomenon in pop that I like to call Crap Single From a Greatest Hits Syndrome and it is surprisingly common. Many such collections are marred by the inclusion […]

Susanna Hoffs – My Side of the Bed
A certain type of person will thrill with anticipation when they look at a song’s credits and see the names Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, because they know that unless things have gone horribly, […]

Girls Aloud – On the Metro
Polydor HQ, late 2012. Picture the scene: Girls Aloud have just sent Twitter (a.k.a. the gays) into meltdown with the “accidental” leaking of comeback single Something New. Cheryl Not-Cole is […]