Buggles – Elstree
Or: How I Learned to Stop Fearing Martians and Love Synthesisers.
Pet Shop Boys – Integral
You've had your chance, now we've got the mandate. If you've changed your mind, I'm afraid it's too late.
Mint Juleps – Docklands
Girl Power, a decade early: it's the brilliant Mint Juleps.
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 […]
Marc Almond – Meet Me in My Dream
I don’t know whether it’s getting older that does this to a person, but the ten years between Soft Cell‘s Non Stop Erotic Cabaret and Marc Almond‘s Tenement Symphony seem to […]
Eddi Reader – Nobody Lives Without Love
Sometimes a record hits you so hard the very first time you hear it, sending you reeling with the emotional punch it’s just dealt, that you spend every subsequent listen […]
Propaganda – p: Machinery
If you happened to be born in the early 1970s then you probably had the curious pleasure of hitting puberty just when it seemed most likely that you would be […]
Frances Ruffelle – God Watch Over You
At this time of year it’s always good to count our blessings and spare a thought for those less fortunate. In the wake of tabloid headlines announcing that yet another […]
Philip Jap – Save Us
For many years I’ve traded on being a walking 1980s encyclopaedia, and then the other day a pal destroyed my entire world by mentioning an artist I’d never heard of […]
Dollar – It’s Nature’s Way (No Problem)
It’s rather odd how Dollar tend to be little more than a footnote in 1980s pop history. When great duos of the decade are discussed it’s always Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, […]
Louise Goffin/Terry Reid – 5th of July
Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said, “For a song to fall into the Popvoid once may be regarded as a misfortune, for it to happen twice looks like carelessness”? On […]
Tight Fit – Secret Heart
In pop, nothing stings quite as sharply as the unexpected interruption of an unbroken run of top 5 singles – but sometimes you just have to admit that Hot Chocolate […]
Sophie Ellis-Bextor – Starlight
Here’s a good example of how to cope when your record company loses absolutely all interest. I present to you the story of Sophie Ellis-Bextor and the Last Laugh. Sophie’s tale is a […]
Betsy Cook – Love is the Groove
Sometimes, even when you make a really great album, have a bit of a marketing budget, get a modicum of radio play and have a label willing to put out […]
Into the Popvoid 