31 August 2006 In what's surely a salutary lesson to social media managers everywhere, the most viral pop-cultural catchphrase of 2006 turned out to be the unlikely "I'm bringing sexy back". Its blend of total conviction, wilful meaninglessness and the bantz trigger-word 'sexy' just seemed to hit a sweet spot, at least with radio DJs … Continue reading Justin Timberlake – ‘SexyBack’ →

17 August 2006 I Never Knew That Was A Cover Version: An Occasional Series. The chorus and title of Cascada's 'Everytime We Touch' are taken from a 1992 soft rock hit on the continent (number one in Norway!) for Maggie Reilly, who featured here a long time back as the singer of Mike Oldfield's 1983 … Continue reading Cascada – ‘Everytime We Touch’ →

15 June 2006 My stomach doesn't lie: it sinks like a U-boat at the prospect of listening to these two dreadful individuals again. Still, I can muster some positives. The phrase "Shakira Shakira!" is the only good thing Wyclef Jean has ever done. Shakira herself has moved on from the plodding soft rock of her … Continue reading Shakira ft. Wyclef Jean – ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ →

8 June 2006 Paraphrasing only slightly, I remember the general mood about 'I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)' on the Internet message boards of summer 2006 being along the lines of KILL! SCREECH! BURN! HATE! I was living off foreign at the time, in a country where the song … Continue reading Sandi Thom – ‘I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)’ →

13 April 2006 Here we get a week's break from Gnarls Barkley's 'Crazy' before it returns to the top of our chart for a further seven weeks. Clearly Shayne Ward wasn't the one-and-done output of later X Factor iterations. We'll even see him at number one again after this, so he obviously built a solid … Continue reading Shayne Ward – ‘No Promises’ →

6 April 2006 For those who were aware of it in 2006, how long before the shine of 'Crazy' wore off for you? Certainly it soon outgrew its initial impact and became ubiquitous to the point of tedium. That summer I was at a wedding reception that showed a video montage of the bride and … Continue reading Gnarls Barkley – ‘Crazy’ →

23 February 2006 At what point in time did the chicken fillet roll replace the breakfast roll as Ireland's favourite meat-based deli-counter sandwich? Maybe this is something else we can pin on the late-'00s collapse of the Irish economy. Breakfast Roll Man, as immortalised in David McWilliams' pop economics primer The Pope's Children, stood for … Continue reading Pat Shortt – ‘Jumbo Breakfast Roll’ →

5 January 2006 We've had chart-toppers foisted on us by Hollywood movies, Australian soaps, Irish radio comedy skits and Scandinavian ringtones: why get het up about a popular prime-time British TV singing competition turbo-charging a mainstream pop single to number one? Loads of people did get het up about The X Factor, though - perhaps … Continue reading Shayne Ward – ‘That’s My Goal’ →