British pop, as we know, is a brutal business - and even more so if you're a girl. Despite the seeming glut of great chart sounds around at the moment, we know that scrupulous record execs only really back the winners. And the winner, now and for the forseeable future, is Kylie.
Everyone else - like Lisa Scott-Lee, Emma Bunton, Javine, Holly Valance - fill up rosters, get Minogue's cast-offs, occasionally strike it lucky, but ultimately won't last the distance. The bigwigs know it, we know it - hey, even the girls know it deep down (come on, Rachel Stevens doesn't really think she's the Brit Beyonce does she?)
The bizarre, hand-on-hip'd, adenoidal exception to this rule is Sophie Ellis Bextor. Never has someone seemed less bothered about getting on stage and singing songs, and yet here she is, perhaps the only UK pop bitch with the sass and suss to compete with the arse from Oz. She's promoted like a winner. Her press release is a rundown of territories conquered. She's been given the quality material - collaborating here with Blur's Alex James, Bernard Butler, and pop hitmakers Rob Davis and Gregg Alexander - which is always a good sign that the suits think you're a sure thing.
This is all great, of course. After all, of all the people to be in this position, you'd hardly have expected it to be Posho Bextor would you? This is a girl, after all, who 'went dance by mistake' on 'Groovejet'. She doesn't even really like this music (you can take the girl out of theaudience...)
Nonetheless, she's thrown her lot in with Pet Shop Boys-tinged H&M-approved disco-pop, and you have to say she does it a lot more consistently on 'Shoot From The Hip' than Kylie did on the patchy 'Fever'. Opener 'Making Music' is a full-on electro stomper. 'I Won't Change You' is 'Groovejet' all over again (no bad thing really), while 'Party In My Head' - despite some excruciating lyrics - is appealingly slight, swoonful '60s beatpop. The Alex James track, 'Love Is It Love', is bargain-bin Latino house, but it'll sound great on the floor after a few WKDs. Typically, it all goes Top-Shop-on-a-Wednesday-afternoon bland in the second half, but that's to be expected really.
The key track is the gorgeous Bernard Butler number. 'I Am Not Good At Not Getting What I Want' is an elegant Dusty torchsong, which Bextor sounds, for perhaps the first time, really comfortable singing. She should do a whole album of this stuff - it might truly make her the star her record company obviously thinks she is.
