Five Reasons Why... the resurrection of V V Brown is a V V Good Thing

1. Her new album’s quite good, you know 

I mean, like, really good. It’s all very stormily electronic, very brooding and very kinetic. There are a lot of bits which make you go “Heavens above”. A case in point is The Apple, the first single: a bolshy groove which lurches and lollops before a joyously pummelling chorus heaves itself up from the electro-fug and scrawls in foot-high letters on the outside of the Ministry Of Pop: “GUYS I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING NOW AND BY GEORGE IT FEELS GOOD.”

2. Her new album’s also one in the eye for “The Man” and “The General Public At Large” 

Now I’m sure we’ve all done things we’ve regretted in the past. However, most people don’t have their mistakes recorded and then put on general release. Basically, if you work your way into tastemakers’ lists and then the public says, “actually, we’ve had quite enough of this tastefully retro post-Winehouse pop, thanks, we’re ready for synthesizers again”, then that’s pretty much your tilt at pop success done for. (It is the view of this parish that Travelling Like The Light, VV Brown’s 2009 tastefully retro post-Winehouse pop album, was conspicuously not shit, but people at large are completely useless and sadly enough it is people at large who buy records and decide which pop stars are elevated to the elysian fields and which pop stars are left to fight for a 10-minute performance slot after the turning on of Keswick’s Christmas lights. Democracy doesn’t work.) Think of Parade, Daisy Dares You, The Vines: they swung, they missed, they sank. If you get dropped by your label like a hot potato served with jus de smallpox, then you’re not only sunk but wearing concrete galoshes too. If you follow that up with endless promises of a second album which is then shelved indefinitely, you might as well stick your bags in Davy Jones’ locker, get comfy on Davy Jones’ sofa, and book your kids a place at Davey Jones’ Community High School – you’re never coming back from the abyss. You’re irredeemably toxic. Certainly, it looked a bit like VV was going to go that way too, what with the Marks & Spencer’s modelling thing. (Yes, I know Bryan Ferry did it too, but he’s Bryan Ferry. People have got away with murder with worse excuses.) That VV’s album is so ace after a couple of punts to the teeth is a testament to VV’s tenacity and the fact that she pretty obviously loves pop music, which is always an attractive trait in a pop star.

3. The video for The Apple 

In which VV Brown plays a geisha and makes an old Japanese chap young and sexy again with a magic potion. That description doesn’t really do it justice. Just watch it.

4. A brand new V Voice 

Gone is sweet, flutey-piped VV Brown. Here instead is a thrusting, assertive yowl, pitched somewhere between Grace Jones’ signature “hello darlings, I’m here and I’m fabulous” mewl, the operatic end of Annie Lennox’s range, and Gandalf when he gets pissed off at Bilbo and says he’s not just some conjuror of cheap tricks and makes the room go all dark and bendy. When VV sings, “Don’t patronise me”, in this new voice, the only response can be, “Righto, won’t be doing any patronising then."

5. She can do so much better than modelling for Marks & Spencer anyway 

The new album is so good that VV should be aiming for her own line of John Lewis kettles AT THE VERY LEAST.

Five Reasons Why... A*M*E is fairly A*M*A*Z*I*N*G

1. She just sort of ‘gets’ the whole pop star thing

Some pop stars get it, others don’t. Madonna and Robbie ‘get it’. Olly Murs and Pixie Lott do not ‘get it’. Pop stars who ‘get it’ tend to realise quite early on that the bits which aren’t ‘the tunes’ are actually very very important too, so set about cultivating an image and that. Pop stars who don’t ‘get it’ go through a similar stage of development, but tend to outsource it to people who’ve never actually met them and who make most of their sartorial and artistic choices by doing a blind trolley-dash around All Saints and Topshop. Then they make bad videos and boring album artwork because they’ve managed to become a team captain on an ITV2 comedy panel show and don’t really care anymore. A*M*E is firmly in the former camp.

2. Play the Game Boy and Need You 100% are both very ace

The first is a vaguely 8-bit-ish affair with an oddly lurching but propulsive groove and is very very good indeed. It sounded very very good when I heard it in a three-quarters-empty student union on a wet Sunday night, which is a mark of just how very very good it is. That Need You 100% was number one for three weeks straight makes writing a defence of its merits relatively academic, but it’s still worthwhile to point out just how weird a hit single it is. There’s so much space within the relatively sparse production for that bassline to bounce around, and there’s a handclap breakdown (!!!). Handclap breakdowns were temporarily ruined by every skinny-jeaned indie band formed between 2005 and 2008 with the intention of exciting sunstroke-afflicted 13-year-olds at Reading and Leeds, so A*M*E and Duke Dumont’s redemption of the trope is very welcome indeed.

3. She’s absolutely tiny

Having briefly met her when she played at Newcastle SU as a support act for Lonsdale Boys Club (Long, Stale Bores Club more like L.O.L.) I can exclusively confirm that A*M*E is between 5 feet and 5 feet 2 inches tall. That’s shorter than the average postbox (5’ 4”).  More to the point, this means that while being not quite as great as, for example, Foxes right now, A*M*E is a full 18 inches shorter than the artist formerly known as Louisa Rose Allen. This means that while Foxes scores a highly respectable 3.2 Pop Units/inch³, A*M*E bests her with a stratospheric 4.78 Pop Units/inch³. Can’t argue with maths.

4. Her zine, The A*M*E

The only reason I actually went to see A*M*E was because of the strength of The A*M*E, a 30-odd-page publication which includes such luminating features as an advice page with Ken Kofi, wherein the ex-secretary general of the UN/special friend of Barbie dispenses his worldly advice (to a girl whose boyfriend is ribbing her for being fat: “Are his jokes good? I love fat jokes”; to a girl with acne: “We suggest cleaning yourself more”). There’s also a weird 90s nostalgia page which praises the decade which “had pop legends like Debbi [sic] Harry” (Blondie were on hiatus from 1982 to 1997 but never mind). Music in the 90s “had structure… versus [sic], a mid eight”, which certainly helps to explain why since Y2K hit the charts have been filled with amorphous 20-minute-long drone rock and acid jazz freakouts. “It was good honest music”, says A*M*E, banging her shoe on the desk and crying hot, angry tears over the time when she found out that while Shakira’s hips may not have lied, her shins and collarbones were fucking turncoat bastards. The A*M*E is almost entirely pictures, but then so is Harper’s Bazaar and people still buy that. Must be a London thing.

5.  “You got my heart running faster than Usain, boy”

Is that line from new single Heartless good? Is it bad? I have literally no idea. The way A*M*E says it not once but TWICE suggests to me that she thinks it is, but then I’ve been had by pop stars before (Pixie Lott; VV Brown; Shakira's kneecaps). 

5 Reasons Why... Gaga could do with a couple of months aboard the good ship Calm The Fuck Down.

1.       The whole ‘Isn’t Gaga a bit mad’ thing is wearing thin. Being slightly crackers was Gaga’s USP (see: the Kermit coat; arriving at the Grammys in an egg; having prosthetic horns sculpted onto herself), but now it all seems a bit forced and contrived. Frankly, she pales in comparison to the very genuine mental instability of ex-Corrs guitarist Jim Corr, who now splits his time between sailing and attempting to convince anyone who’ll listen of the veracity of any number of conspiracy theories. You name it, Jim believes it: that 9/11 was an inside job, that “Edwin Poots The Northern Irish Sickness Minister wants to chemically lobotomise the citizens of NI and dramatically increase cancer and sterility rates by adding Sodium Fluoride to the water supply”, that the government is artificially inflating the price of Freddos. Possibly it was the strain of having to be the ugly, boring one in the Corrs who got the piss ripped out of him on SM:TV every week which pushed him over the edge.

2.       The album artwork for Born This Way. “OK guys, I’ve got a vision for what the new album cover’s going to look like.” That’s great Gaga, shoot. “So it’s a black background...” Yep, good, black. Sleek, sophisticated, modern, understated. “...and there’s this motorbike...” Brilliant! Rock ‘n’ roll! Rebellion! This is going to be amazing! “...and then in the middle of the handlebars, we badly Photoshop a picture of my face.” Er... right. We’ll sort that out. “Oh, and can you make the actual title of the album look like something from the front of a straight-to-DVD sci-fi release? Cheers.”

3.       She might then have the time to have some ideas of her own. Picking up tidbits, magpie-like, from other artists is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody does it. Elvis Costello nicked his look wholesale from Buddy Holly. Paul McCartney took his head-wobbling ‘ooooh’s from Little Richard. Likewise, the little nods to Vogue-era Madonna were fun at the start, but just rewriting ‘Hey Jude’ (see ‘You & I’) and stealing Annie Lennox’s idea of dressing up as a man who looks a bit like Elvis simply will not do.

4.       Encroaching jazz-fusion horror. I doubt anyone who saw Gaga at Radio 1’s Big Weekend last year was thinking, “I’m bloody sick of ‘Bad Romance’, I hope she only does about 90 seconds of it and then wastes half an hour doing Nat King Cole covers clumsily customised to be about the royal wedding.”

5.       As this is the last print column, here are some other people I hate. Fred Durst; Phil Collins (divorced his wife by fax); Pitbull; Flo Rida; The Voice’s Danny O’Don’t-Know-Who-You-Are-Pal; Olly Murs; The Script; Mumford & Sons; The Courteeners; Viva Brother; Liam Gallagher; Jim Morrison; Frank Turner. And finally, if I ever get the chance, I swear I’ll kick David Guetta so hard in the groin that his cock and balls resemble the blade of a tiny shovel and two mini cheddars.

5 Reasons Why... if Jessie J doesn't just cut it out right now we're going to have words.

1.       Oversinging to the point that she sounds like she’s been harpooned. While Jessie J obviously has pipes, I think we can all agree that the best use of them is not to take one syllable, grasp it by the hair, drag it across broken glass and smash its face into a bare brick wall until it breaks down, weeping for mercy.

2.       THE VOICE. There are a great many things wrong with The Voice –tedious emphasis on ‘authenticity’, will.i.am, disdain for ‘gimmicks’ (except for MASSIVE SPINNING CHAIRS) – but Jessie J is probably the most irritating. I’m willing to forgive her using the word “fantabalusive”. I kept my mouth shut when she got that hideous purple dip-dye. However, I cannot sit idly by and let her mouth along to whatever song is being sung while waggling her fingers and winding her neck roundabout. That she feels the need to gurn along is indicative of this seismically awful belm’s attention-seeking mentality.#

3.       She’s a patronising bellend. After breaking her foot last summer, Jessie J told everyone that she had “a different respect for people who don’t have legs”. Not content with patting amputees on the head, she decided to pat herself on the back. She continued: “Just after I broke my foot, I was in my living room and I put on Beyoncé’s ‘Save The Hero’, like, 'If I'm not around, who saves the hero?' And it made me realise, like, I need someone now. You give so much as an artist, you give, you give, you give.” On this evidence she’s so self-absorbed I suspect she’s made of seven or eight different types of sponge. As if this weren’t enough, her response to the riots last summer was to tweet that she was “off to the studio. If I can’t help physically. I’m going to write about it.” Admittedly, she had a broken foot, but surely she could at least strap a broom to the front of a mobility scooter. If riot clean-up duty was good enough Ricky Wilson from Kaiser Chiefs, then by Jove it’s good enough for her.

4.       Laserlight, a.k.a. the point at which Guetta reached the bottom of the barrel. It’s not a compliment when David Guetta ropes you into something, since his recruitment approach seems to be ringing everyone in the phone book. It’s even less of a compliment when the track itself sounds like he cobbled it together at half past five on a Friday afternoon while desperate to shoot off early for a pint.

5.       She’s not nearly as cool as she thinks she is. Jumpsuits have been shown, time and again, and to be unacceptable fashion pieces outside of a gymnasium. If they don’t work even on properly cool practitioners like Grace Jones and Anthea Turner, there’s no hope for Jessie J. It’s a sad indictment of her cool levels that she makes will.i.am look like James Bond. That’s will.i.am, the man who said, “I don’t have tactics; I got Tic-Tacs, ‘cos I stay fresh. Holla.” Holla indeed, will.i.am. Now hit her with a lead pipe and I’ll give you a fiver.

5 Reasons Why... Robbie leaving Take That again is a national tragedy.

1.       Without him, they are a charisma black hole. We all saw Gary’s innate tediousness on X Factor. Howard Donald gives Ed Sheeran a run for his money in the bore stakes, which is saying something since Sheeran’s head looks like it’s being crushed by the sheer weight of his dullitude and his eyes appear to be attempting to crawl off opposite sides of his face and leap onto someone more interesting. Robbie once managed to reduce a friend of mine to tears simply appearing on Top of the Pops and doing that thing where he spins the microphone round in one hand. Jason of Orange couldn’t do that. He’d drop it and then write an apologetic note to the sound guy saying sorry for not treating his equipment with respect.

2.       Robbie’s mini-set was the best bit of their gigs last year. It takes something extraordinary to upstage a 60 foot tall robot called Om and the sight of Jason Orange riding a unicycle, but introducing Robbie back into the band by giving him 15 minutes in which to stick a rocket under proceedings and tremble the knees of tens of thousands of mums was a masterstroke. If there’s a better five-song set than ‘Let Me Entertain You’, ‘Rock DJ’, ‘Come Undone’, ‘Feel’ and ‘Angels’, I’ll eat my hat (it’s a hat made of nachos so I will quite happily be proven wrong here).

3.       Staying with ‘the lads’ might stop him making more of his own albums. Since Escapology, his career’s been an unmitigated stink-fest. Rudebox sounds very much like the work of a man who at roughly the same time went crackers, grew a massive beard (sure sign of madness and loneliness – see below) and decided to hunt UFOs.

4.       Progress wasn’t half bad. By some distance Take That’s best album since the glory days, Progress was a thumping, techno-flavoured addition to the Take That oeuvre, and in ‘The Flood’ boasts both a fantastic, soaring lead single and probably the best rowing-based video in pop history. It was a gauntlet thrown down to all the young bucks threatening to knock them off their perch, and one which has yet to be picked up, though I’m not sure Niall from One Direction has the upper body strength to pick up anything heavier than a tea towel.

5.       Nobody wants to see Gary get all fat and beardy again. Gary’s from my home town, and while in his post-solo-career-failure twilight zone, he moved back into his mum’s house for a bit. In an attempt to go incognito, he grew a massive beard and started wearing jogging bottoms. A friend of my brother’s saw him in the pub having a steak dinner, stood up and shouted, “IT’S GARY BARLOW!” at him. Gary looked up at him sadly, down at his bloated stomach, then back down at his steak. Don’t let this happen to him again. Just give £5 a month to Barlow Relief and help bribe Robbie back into the gang. You can make a difference.

5 Reasons Why... Pixie Lott can bore off.

1.       She has no discernible personality whatsoever. Judging by her interviews, she has absolutely no opinions on anything at all. If you touched her, she would feel like a dense mist. Breathe the mist in and you’ll smell that disinfectant they use in hospitals. She’s essentially the Qui-Gon Jinn of pop.

2.       The video for ‘Kiss the Stars’. Lott’s latest single is a very poor show, even leaving aside for a moment the ropey eurotrance synths and, in “Put the plug in the socket give me all your power”, its inclusion of quite the least appealing sexual innuendo in pop since 50 Cent asked us to lick his lollipop. The CGI budget appears to have been about thirty quid, most of which was spent on sandwiches; the heavily polygon’d dancers have wandered straight out of FIFA 97, and there are close-ups which make her look like she’s falling backwards through a time vortex from a mid-70s episode of Doctor Who. Most horrifyingly of all, she has her hair in a high ponytail which makes her look exactly like X Factor reject Katy Brucknall, the one with a voice that could bend a girder at fifty paces and a quite alarming Messiah complex. I thought I’d expunged her, but back she comes, rolling into my brain strapped to a flaming Catherine wheel. Cheers Pixie.

3.       Her Twitter feed is both boring and infuriating. Many pop stars have names for their Twitter followers: Marina has her Diamonds; Cher Lloyd has Brats; Sir Alan Sugar has his Sugar-tits. Pixie Lott has, in the most excruciating, cutesy, funky-primary-school-teacher way, her ‘Crazy Cats’. This kind of sickening infantilism was meant to have been purged from the charts when the Tweenies’ second album bombed (sources close to the band reported tensions in the studio due to musical differences between Milo and Fizz). I did think Lott was quite cool before I started following her, but the amount of pictures of fried breakfasts she tweets have rather ruined her mystique.

4.       She stole VV Brown’s career. Lott launched herself – and I say ‘launched’ in the same sense that during sieges in the Middle Ages, dead cows and horses would be launched into enemy camps in order to spread disease and weaken them for attack – at roughly the same time as the extremely lovely VV Brown. Brown was armed with ‘Shark in the Water’, named the best single of 2009 at the 5 Reasons Why... Awards (known internationally as the FRYs). Lott had a cracking set of pins. Poptown wasn’t big enough for the both of them (literally – VV Brown is about 6 foot 3). Lott went on to the top 10 and a starring role in Fred: the Movie, the main joke of which is that the main character is slightly sped up and screams a lot. VV Brown modelled for Marks & Spencer. Poor old VV.

5.       She won’t return my calls. :’(

5 Reasons Why... Nicola is the best Girl Aloud by roughly a billion miles.

1. Well it’s not Kimberley or Nadine, is it. No, it isn’t. Not while Nadine worked with Boyz II Men on a cover of ‘Back for Good’ which was deemed not good enough for an album which limped into the charts at number 114. Not while Kimberley’s Wikipedia page features this sentence: “In May 2011, Kimberley Walsh was named as the new face of Right Guard’s Xtreme Dry Range”. Poor Kimberley. That’s possibly the saddest sentence I’ve ever read, and I’ve read Watership Down.

2. Or Sarah Harding. I have no idea what she’s been doing since the end of the group’s last tour, but if she’s anything like me she’ll have been sitting watching Pointless all day in her pants, checking on the later career of ex-Burnley superstar Graham Branch (the Scouse Rivaldo is now coaching West Kirby Panthers, if you were wondering) and pottering round Morrison’s trying to fathom what the difference between ketchup and catsup is (still no idea). These are all activities which have done precisely nothing for the advancement of pop. If she’s not going to bother being a pop star, less deserving sorts will capitalise. Nobody wants Mike Posner getting his foot in the door. SORT IT OUT, HARDING.

3. Or Saint Cheryl, the patron saint of kicking toilet attendants in the face. Wor Cheryl has a fairly extensive rap sheet: allegedly racially motivated assault, two very dodgy albums and her insistence on employing Will.I.Am, thereby encouraging him to think he has something to offer humanity, are heinous to put it mildly. Add to that the charge of making Ashley Cole think that another human being could be capable of loving him, and you’ll understand why she should be run out of town by a pitchfork-wielding mob.

4. Nicola is ace... Cinderella’s Eyes is a great album, a riot of different influences which pings and fizzes all over the pop spectrum. That ‘Beat of My Drum’ didn’t spend three months at number one is a pop travesty on a par with Dane Bowers and Victoria Beckham’s ‘Out Of Your Mind’. Apart from her assorted qualities, the fact that the professional cretin and walking anti-obesity campaign Chris Moyles called her a “sour-faced old cow” is reason enough to root for her.

5. ...against all the odds. She is from Runcorn, a town I know all too well. If you’ve never been, ensure this description is the closest you ever come to it: numerous biological studies have suggested that the locals are genetically closer to reptiles than humans. The only amenities in town are the bingo hall and the theatre, where everyone goes to watch endless repeats of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and talk about the good old days when Ralf Little would occasionally visit the bingo hall. Her career isn’t just a victory for pop; it’s a victory for the human spirit in the face of the most unfortunate circumstances.