Ooh ah Ga Ga, Ooh ah Ga Gaaaa…

I have to put my paws up. I’m a sucker for pop genius. My music collection is filled with an array of eclectic and bizarre guilty pleasures that friends would have me sectioned for if they knew that I owned them.

So when Lady Gaga first appeared on the scene, my initial scepticism was eroded by a succession of great pop moments – Telephone, Bad Romance, Paparazzi… But still, there was something not quite clicking.

The game-changer for me proved to be her performance at the Big Weekend event in Carlisle a couple of weeks ago, where she showed a depth and musicality that I wouldn’t have associated with LG before.

She reminded me of Prince in his mid-Eighties pomp, when everything he recorded was shot through with genius. Like LG, the Purple maestro was also mad as a fish, and his enigmatic presence coloured music at the time with a fresher palette, just at the time when he, Madonna and Michael Jackson changed pop for good.

We’re a good few years on from that, and now it’s time for Lady Gaga to take over that mantle, and the path to the throne starts with her new release, Born This Way.

Taking the next step from The Fame and The Fame Monster, Ms Germanotta has been trailing Born This Way for a long time now, at concerts and in interviews, and has been tantalising fans with snippets of tracks and individual songs appearing in all manner of places, from FarmVille to iTunes, in a masterfully orchestrated marketing campaign.

The record itself is a huge electro-disco burst of energy from start to finish. There is an sense on first listen that you have been subjected to an unremitting mirrorball-covered jack-boot march across your senses. But that is it’s appeal, to be honest: It is great, exhausting fun.

Admittedly, the producers she has brought in to assist in the gestation of these tracks, from Junior/Senior’s Jeppe Laursen to Mutt Lange and RedOne, put their own stamp on proceedings. The record is shot through with steely-edged industrial dance tracks and bombastic rock anthems.

But underlining it all is Lady Gaga’s inimitable, individual presence. Other reviewers and critics are caught up on her similarity to Madonna and, though the title track is unquestionably Express Yourself updated, there is some things that remain unsaid.

Yes, Lady Gaga is ploughing the same furrow as the female icon of the Eighties, but she is appealing to a completely new generation with her take on the same genre, who weren’t there to experience what Madonna meant back then.

There is a whole new generation, then, set to thrill to the same joyful pop rush that Madonna delivered in the Eighties, and who are going to experience the same immense cultural impact she had.

Critics also have to remember, it took Madonna four albums to come up with the definitive statement of her talent to that point, when she released Like A Prayer in 1989. Up to then, releases like Like A Virgin and True Blue were great pop records, but there was a good deal of filler in between the classics.

That is, it has to be said, what it feels is happening on Born This Way. There are songs that will be part of the pop lexicon for years to come, and there are some tracks that won’t be recalled so immediately in there as well.

That said, though, Born This Way is a joyful, ruthless pop-dance record that demands your attention and will make a lot of Little Monsters very happy. Gaga is going to have a very long career, folks, and pop music will be much healthier and interesting for it.

Robbie Williams: A nice bloke with a good voice who’s not on drugs anymore releases quite good album that you ought to buy

Been a little quiet of late, but bursting out of the blocks after what was, in all reality, a fairly okay performance on the X Factor, comes Mr Robbie Williams at the BBC’s Electric Proms.

In what was without doubt a great show, in front of an adoring crowd, Robbie confirmed what I had thought about him for a very long time – that he’s a genuine star with more class and quality than most people give him credit for.

With the press already writing him off before the run-in to Christmas and the – dramatic pause – battle with the reality TV production line of pseudo-stars, Burke, Boyle and Cole – Robbie would be forgiven for thinking that the only thing the media would really like to see him do is (a) overdose or (b) rejoin Take That after his relaunch nosedives.

I wonder whatever happened to hoping for the best for our pop kids – that they do well and sell bucketloads. I come from a heritage of the Smash Hits age, when everyone was brilliant and opprobrium was reserved for the dinosaurs of rock and pop.

But now, in this new century’s culture of manufactured conflict and petty hate machinations, what should we expect? The time for the headline that reads, “Robbie Williams: A nice bloke with a good voice who’s not on drugs anymore releases quite good album that you ought to buy” seems very far off. But not here – that’s why that is the title of the blogpost.

He’ll never have the gravitas to be a George Michael, but Robbie will be around for a very, very long time, irrespective of how much the haters papers are determined to bring him down before he’s even started on this round of the pop ferris wheel.

Anyway, back to the meat, and the show at the Camden venue earlier this week was simply brilliant. How much of that was down to the contributions of the Buddha of British Pop Music, Trevor Horn, and his wife and Oscar-nominated composer, Anne Dudley, who oversaw the production, and the presence of a string and brass section that added a huge lush layer to the proceedings, is open to conjecture.

You can’t deny, however, when a performer connects so easily with his audience, and can give a short showcase to new album tracks that easily stand with the rest of his back-catalogue with such confidence, that there is something magical about the lad.

So, the message is…

Stop being so bitter.

Love this pop life.

It’s called entertainment. Be entertained.

Let him entertain you…

Bodies in the Bohdi Tree (eh?)

Robbie’s Dharma initiative, or, at least, his return to the public eye after his “my X-files ate all the pies” exile in Los Angeles, has started this week with the release of his latest single, Bodies.

With its multiple layers of religious reference, with Bhudda’s Bohdi tree (that he contemplated in gratitude for a week on the path to enlightenment), Jesus dying, or not, for an unnamed “you”, and Gregorian chants (see Justin’s Cry Me A River for another reference point), Bodies is a proper pop melange, with a big ker-pow of a chorus sure to see the hands and voices raised when he gets back into the stadiums of the world. It’s also a little baffling.

Not even the somewhat tame and confusing video, with Bob in the desert with his motorbike, Bob with his pretty squeeze in a beachbuggy, and Bob’s performance segment in an airplane’s graveyard, really makes things any clearer.

I was hoping for something that put the song in some sort of perspective, but it just doesn’t gel for me. Bob is at his Bobbestness when he shines with a swagger like Kanye, as he has the smirk and the smarts to carry it off. Like this…

The dusty, slightly downbeat and fairly unfocussed video for Bodies has nothing of the class of this mini-movie from the same director, Vaughan Arnell. In Millenium, Robbie’s having a laugh. He knows you know it’s ridiculous, but, hey, what the hell, when the tunes are this good and the budget’s no object?

There’s none of this chummy, arms-around-your-shoulders charm in the desert – it’s all a little too… relaxed, like no-one’s really trying too hard to up their game.

Maybe this is the return from the wilderness, that the best is yet to come, and the Trevor Horn produced album, Reality Killed The Video Star, will push him back into the stellar space that his former That-mates currently inhabit.

I’m hoping, too, that the return of former songwriting partner Guy Chambers as well as having one of the key producers of the last 30 years will help put Robbie back where he belongs, at the upper reaches of the pop firmament, making cock-sure, cocky and confident statements, aurally and visually.

I’m just not sure this is as sure-footed a step as it needs to be to set him on the road to Bodhisattva.

See what you think…