Vote now in the Popjustice Readers' Poll
Plus a SIIGHTS chat and more
Hello to you,
I’ve changed the online version of this newsletter to a serif font (don’t think it changes how the emails look, sadly) and you know what serif fonts mean: things are getting SERIOUS. It’s only fitting — pop music is a serious business, and I’m a deeply serious human being.
One very serious aspect of pop music is the Popjustice Readers’ Poll, an annual-when-I-remember opportunity to fill in an online form. Later in this newsletter you will find a link to vote in this year’s survey.
You’ll also find an interview with SIIGHTS, who were great value on Zoom when I spoke with them. The interview contains a portion regarding Hozier which I think may be one of the greatest exchanges of my entire career.
How do you think these emails are going? I’m enjoying writing them (except last week’s Top 45 Singles of 2022 one which, being a list, was an appalling experience) and I hope you’re enjoying reading them. I don’t think the Newsdump is very good, I might get rid of that. Or maybe I should just put in more effort to make it good.
In any case thanks to everyone who’s emailed me since I’ve started doing these. I do owe a few people replies; I’ll see to these when I’m ‘catching up on my correspondence’ later this week. I hope that by now everyone who took me up on my Christmas card offer the other week has received their cards.
This intro really tailed off didn’t it?
PX
Newsdump
The latest ‘pop music is changing due to things’ piece concerns the way bridges are dying out. (The Guardian) If you put this one alongside all the recent stuff about key changes dying out, it’d be great if by the end of 2023 there could be a whole journalistic ‘song’ about trends in pop, ie a piece about intros, a piece about verses, a piece about choruses, etc etc etc, then this piece about bridges followed by the piece about keychanges, and then another one about outros.
Look, LadBaby really really didn’t want to release more music, and you really need to understand that he absolutely does not want attention, but, oh, well, only if he really must. (Metro)
People were not allowed to camp out overnight for Louis Tomlinson tickets. (BBC)
United Kingdom entrant Freya Skye came fifth in Junior Eurovision. Her song, Lose My Head, was quite good. Not really good! But quite good. Good enough. Well, good enough to come fifth. (France won.) (Junior Eurovision)
More AI-generated songs are making their way onto streaming services. (Music Business Worldwide)
A decent roundup of people going mad for the White Lotus theme (including The Killers come onstage to it) but no news on which artist will do the vocal rave-up version. (The Guardian)
Don’t worry, the Pantera reunion tour will continue despite Rex Brown getting Covid. (Digital Music News)
Vote in the 2022 Popjustice Readers’ Poll; win a sensational prize
The Popjustice Readers’ Poll is back in 2022 and as well as allowing you to exercise your democratic right it also gives me something to post during the content deadzone between Christmas and New Year, so it’s a double-thumbs-up scenario.
I’ve limited it to 21 questions and this year there are some new categories, including:
Pop entity (NOT QUEEN) who should be next to ‘do an ABBA Voyage’
I'd trust this popstar not to touch my thermostat
Dance act or producer most likely to turn in a version of the White Lotus theme towards the end of January, nine weeks too late
Voting closes at midnight on Christmas Eve.
One person, selected at random, will win the item I found in my shed this week. As suggested in the headline I do believe this to be a sensational prize, if only in the sense that the feeling of disappointment is, in a way, a sensation. See later in this email for more details on what precisely was found in my shed.
New Music Friday:
Leah Kate reimagines a 2000s classic
It might ruin the surprise a bit to explain right here precisely which iconic (actually iconic, not iconic in the Jane-McDonald-covering-Cake-By-The-Ocean sense) song Leah Kate ‘interpolates’ in this single because it really does come out of nowhere and you go from ‘WHAT’ to ‘HOW DARE SHE’ to ‘THIS IS HOW THE 6 MUSIC DADS MUST HAVE FELT WHEN ALEXANDRA BURKE DID HALLELUJAH’ to ‘ACTUALLY, FAIR PLAY, THIS KIND OF WORKS’ to ‘THIS IS INCREDIBLE, SORT OF’ in the space of about six seconds.
Alright, spoiler alert, it’s Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, except changed to “I just can’t get you out of my bed”. I know, I know, this sounds terrible. Maybe it is? But also it’s mainly brilliant?
Also out this week:
New releases usually drop off in the weeks before Christmas but I’ll be honest, things have really dropped off this week. A song from a Reliable Banger Purveyor arrived in my inbox this week and I immediately earmarked it for Song Of The Week but it turns out it’s not actually out this week at all. At least that’s something to look forward to. Unless it’s never coming out and was just sent to me as a Christmas gift?
FLO’s Losing You very much does what it sets out to do!
I Will Wait by Raissa goes off just when it needs to, ie at the 1:22 mark. If a song’s not doing the business by 1:23, it’s not doing its job properly.
“They can’t take away my dignity,” Whitney Houston once sang. See if you agree with that statement when you’ve had a listen to the snappily-titled album I Wanna Dance With Somebody (The Movie: Whitney New, Classic and Reimagined). It really is quite something.
New Music Friday roundups don’t really work on a Monday do they? We’ve all moved on by this point.
Can get you out of my shed:
Mysterious, potentially haunted porcelain Britney Spears doll
I’ve been in my garden shed, and think it’s important you know I found a porcelain Britney Spears doll.
What can I tell you about this item?
I bought it on Etsy, I think. It was many years ago anyway
One thing I can say with some certainty is that I had been drinking that evening
She’s lost a shoe
The weird thing is, it’s actually really good, even if it does give off a general vibe of ‘possibly haunted’
Hang on, I’ve just looked this up on the internet and they seem to be on eBay for like a hundred quid or something, so now I’m thinking twice about giving it away
HOWEVER if you would like to welcome Haunted Britney into your home in 2023, don’t forget to vote in the Popjustice Readers’ Poll.
Interview:
SIIGHTS on taking their time, existential wobbliness and a big-looking 2023
When SIIGHTS released Fake It in October, it struck me as precisely the sort of moment I would, once upon a time, have gone a bit berserk about on the Popjustice blog.
So I suppose the band are one of a handful of reasons for me wanting to start these emails, and after I included them in last week’s Top 45 Singles of 2022 list I thought it’d be good to get Mia and Toni on a Zoom to say hello.
So I did get them on a Zoom, and then I did say hello, and then they and I said some other things to each other. Including:
Fake It was at Number 17 on the end of year list — do you think you were too high or too low, or just about right?
Toni: I think to be fair there's some great songs in there. But no, I think it was the perfect place.
Mia: Also there were one or two songs that we actually hadn't heard of in the list, so we were looking them up because we always love finding new music. We loved the Phoebe AXA song.
I’ve searched my inbox and the first press release I received about your music was from 2017. That’s quite a long time ago, isn’t it?
Toni: I don’t even remember what’s been going on, we’ve been through a whole pandemic since then. Everything back then was like discovery, but in 2020 the music we were starting to make felt like the first ‘statement of SIIGHTS’. After that we could really hone what we wanted to say and how that would look and sound.
Mia: And because everything shut down and kind of forced us into a new kind of studio phase, we ended up writing and creating all new material through lockdown. We had time to really think about what we wanted to say and be.
What do you want to say and be?
Toni: We write songs that are detailing the emotional experiences of the humaneness of life, but we want to touch on those in fun and real ways, in a way that makes people feel less alone.
Mia: Sometimes when you’re writing something, and you feel it’s very personal to you, and it’s very intense to you, it can be a bit scary to put it in a song and write those lyrics out. But sometimes, those are the songs that other people most connect with and find meaningful. I think that can sometimes make someone feel a little more understood or help them understand themselves better. And hopefully slightly less alone.
So there's something there about meaning and connection but at the same time isn’t life ultimately meaningless, and aren’t we all ultimately alone?
Toni: That’s the question! We’re super-curious people. I mean we’ve explored a lot — we met in LA, Mia’s Irish and I’m Scottish, and along the way we've noticed we’re all so vastly different but there's always a thread of something so simple that connects us all. Is it that we truly are all just wandering with no clue what we're doing? That question of whether we’re all just alone — that internal journey we have — is such a huge thread. It’s such a weird, intimate, scary thing.
Is this all basically about making music for an existential meltdown? Life’s not easy is it.
Mia: No it’s not!
Toni: Music’s an escape from that in a lot of ways. We’re not going to deny it’s rough out there but we’d like people to know that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, or to feel that there’s somewhere to go when things are bad.
What were you each doing in LA, when you first met?
Mia: Well, I was on tour with Hozier…
So you were going round from place to place selling tights to people?
Mia: What?
You were on tour with a hosier?
Mia: With Hozier!
Just a little joke there to lighten the mood.
Mia: This has actually got me thinking about merch.
You could sell SIIGHTS TIIGHTS.
Mia: That is VERY cool. Anyway I was on tour with Hozier and I was songwriting for a couple of days…
Toni: …and so was I, and we had a mutual friend out there, and the two of us just hit it off.
In that first press release in my inbox, there’s a claim that 2017 is going to be a big year for SIIGHTS. What’s the plan for 2023?
Toni: That’s funny. It’s been such a journey since then. I feel like we're just getting started, I've never felt more excited or more ready. In 2022 we signed with Sony, with Insanity, and there’s so much music coming.
Is the next single top secret?
Toni: I think we should give a little exclusive right now. It’s called Stay A While.
Mia: Next year, we just are aiming to have so much music out.
Toni: We’ve got music coming up after the next EP that’s, like, built for festival stages, and stages everywhere. It's going to be really fun.
You can keep up with SIIGHTS on Instagram. They’ve just released an acoustic version of Fake It, if that’s your kind of thing.
21st Century Popjustice:
Ian Campbell-Wray edition
This week’s reader playlist comes from Ian Campbell-Wray, who promised to “put a bit of an Australian slant on it” which, inevitably, means his playlist includes Jessica Mauboy.
He describes his playlist as “a collection of pop and RnB songs from Australia and New Zealand, mostly artists who haven't hit the big time commercially. They punch above their weight class with talents I hope resonate with Popjustice readers around the world”. He adds that he’s thrown in some Kylie and Lorde for good measure.
Thank you Ian!!
FAQ
Where are good songs made?
FRYARS has an idea.
What’s the greatest song of all time?
The upcoming Zara Larsson one, probably.
Have these emails moved to Mondays now then?
I don’t know, I quite liked the feel of a Monday mailout last week but it’s hard to get any sort of rhythm going around Christmas isn’t it?
Speaking of chaos, what’s the bestworst Christmas music I can be listening to right now?
I’m more than happy to recommend my own playlist, I’m Streaming Of A Shite Christmas. It starts with (I’d Like To) Give You One 4 Christmas by Hot Pantz — which I memorably heard blasting out to a toy shop full of children a few years ago — and goes downhill from there.
Some of the songs have fallen off Spotify since I first compiled the playlist. The Christmas version of The Ketchup Song is, sadly, no more, and Mr Showbiz’s Showbiz Christmas has also disappeared, although the video lives on via YouTube. Even now I feel that melodically and sonically Showbiz Christmas is far better than you’d really expect it to be, and it’s certainly better than it actually needed to be, but the video is reassuringly grim.
You mentioned music in shops — what’s B&Q’s Christmas playlist like this year?
Not bad actually, they were blasting out Pet Shop Boys’ It Doesn’t Often Snow At Christmas when I was buying lightbulbs this week. I also feel like the ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD Ed Sheeran and Elton John Christmas song from last year is on its way to Christmas Classic status — I recently noticed three Quite Old people singing along to it in a stationery shop.
That sounds moving.
No, stationery.
Have you thought of a way to sign off your newsletters? Possibly something that is sort of the same but slightly different each week — like, you’ll have a format for the signoff, but each time there’s a slight variation?
I feel like I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.