Imagine if someone took all the clever, post-modernist stunts of '80s pop and applied them to the current music world. Imagine how 'Pop Idol' would be if Paul Morley replaced Simon Cowell on the judging panel. Imagine a chancer who's clearly in love with the idea as well as the sound of disposable hit singles, and who's noticed that "David Sneddon" rhymes with "Armageddon".
If any of this sounds remotely appealing, the debut album from Richard X may be one of the best things you've heard all year. X, of course, is no stranger to the charts himself, having used his bootleg mash-up skills to first make the Sugababes insanely fashionable and successful with 'Freak Like Me', then doing something broadly similar with Liberty X on 'Being Nobody'. These kind of mixes looked as if they'd exhausted their novelty value the best part of a year ago, but Richard X plainly doesn't care. His default trick - an old R&B tune for the vocal melody, an '80s synthpop favourite (usually The Human League) as the backing - gets a further outing on 'Finest Dreams', fronted by Kelis. And, miraculously, it still works.
Perhaps X's music is so effective because he seems to have an innate understanding of what makes great pop. Yes, he's fascinated with the '80s, with some rather kitschy celebrities ('Popstars' reject Javine Hylton turns up as well as Liberty X), with ironic gimmicks that involve Mark Goodier announcing, "The best album in the world ever!" on 'Mark One'. But he's also gifted enough to ensure the music, for the most part, is worthy of the concepts.
So Javine's 'You Used To' and old Massive Attack singer Caron Wheeler's 'Lonely' are slick, sweet, electro-soul that suggest a UK counterpart to American R&B. 'Rock Jacket', meanwhile, is a thumping instrumental built around the guitar riff from Spandau Ballet's 'Chant Number One' that sounds like a Bacofoil-coated update of big beat.
It's one of those albums, really, in which you can find whatever you want. If the shiny and ephemeral pop music doesn't appeal, ageing record collectors will delight in the presence of Deborah Evans Strickland (the posh deadpan woman from those old Flying Lizards singles), who bloodlessly emotes 'Walk On By' while seagulls go haywire in the background.
Indie fans, on the other hand, are directed to 'Into You', which pits crooner-for-hire Jarvis Cocker against a playback of Mazzy Star's 'Fade Into You'. The resulting duet between Cocker and Hope Sandoval is, against the odds, one of the most emotionally resonant songs of the year; the point where Richard X's trickery conjures up a beating heart out of depleted materials. A man, we suspect, who has nerve, wit, a lot more talent than first appears - and some tremendously good lawyers.
