I always think Human League were a bit too knowing to qualify purely as pop. As much as I liked them, they had a bit of a Paul Morley vibe about them. Same with ABC.

that is an excellent sumation. and paul morely is a prick.

Well, of course it all depends on what you mean exactly by "pop", but when it comes to transcendent pop/rock you can not top Evan Dando and The Lemonheads for my money's worth. "Lovey", "It's A Shame About Ray", "Come On Feel The Lemonheads" and "Car Button Cloth" are all classics. I would also highly recommend his recent solo albums "Live at The Brattle Theatre" and "Baby I'm Bored", as well as last year's most excellent, self-titled Lemonheads album. Evan rules! :)

Pop music is hard to define but easy to recognise. I always think that in essence The Supremes were the quintessential pop group. A number of bands, like ABC, The Human League, the Pet Shop Boys, etc, play with the idea of pop, but the result of this is that they ultimately produced something altogether quite different.

Irony is the great enemy of pop. After punk, it became increasingly difficult to play pop 'straight', hence the whole Trevor Horn era (in the UK anyway) which was more about using pop in order to make statements about it.

Hey, I just managed to say all of that without once mentioning the word postmodern.

Dohhh.

Trevor Horn did Tatu though, didn't he? Who were, as I'm sure you'll know, entirely brilliant. A friend has a theory that if they were a little more underground and cool a lot more people would realise that their albums are entirely brilliant, and I rather agree.

Tatu are an incredible band. I've got nothing against the more ironic strand of pop at all. All that i'm saying is that it's a very different attitude.

It's difficult to talk about pop as some kind of unified concept given these obvious differences. Girls Aloud are perhaps the closest thing in Britain at the moment to the earlier Motown model. Too many others have screwed things up by insisting on writing their own material.

But, to stress the point, Tatu are amazingly good.

Give us a shout when you are in London, and let's have a racist pint for the sake of racism. Racist.

I always forget to mention Saint Etienne. They have so many memorable songs.