Cheese! ... Tony Blair meets Noel Gallagher. Photograph: Rebecca Naden/PA
Maybe the spring air is going to their heads, but our pop stars are getting terribly political of late. It wasn't enough that Blur drummer Dave Rowntree jumped on the Blair bandwagon just as the wheels were coming off, now Right Said Fred frontman Richard Fairbrass says he intends to run for Mayor of London to combat the evils of the congestion charge and the smoking ban.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for I'm all for ill-informed purveyors of early 1990s novelty pop having their say. That's the way of things in your modern western liberal democracy. It's just that when pop and politics mix it often ends in an ugly mess.
Pop has established that war, war is stupid and that, yes, it's good for absolutely nothing (apart from, you know, curbing Nazi genocide and stuff) but this is where the limitations of popular music are revealed. The conventions of pop lyrics mean that complex political reality gets boiled down to mindless sloganeering.
Ocean Colour Scene's Profit In Peace demonstrates the level of thought we've come to expect. "And all those who got a tired face/Don't wanna fight no more". I can confirm that when in possession of a tired face (a daily occurrence round these parts) that fighting is the last thing on my mind. But what have we learnt here?
The problem is that very few pop stars have the intelligence or sophistication to deal with the subtleties and shades of grey in politics and they usually end up like Niamh Connolly, (the Father Ted character based on Sinead O'Connor), writing songs about how "the Catholic Church in Ireland secretly had lots of potatoes during the famine and they hid the potatoes in pillows and sold them abroad at potato fairs".
Maybe Fairbrass and Rowntree will prove me wrong. Maybe they will become giants of the political playing field. But people become pop stars exactly because they are shallow vapid attention-seekers who need a slap in the mouth every moment they draw breath. And whatever lazy cynicism circulates about politicians' motives things surely can't be so bad that we are looking to the charts for The Great Leap Forward?
