Britain's Best Pop Band (Ever?)

No no, not Girls Aloud ferchrissakes (of whom, no doubt more in the not-too-distant future) but Ladytron who I saw at Birmingham Academy 2 last week.

I've never been to the Academy before, but it's like a big warehouse with "2" being a small annex to the side, housing probably no more than about 500 people. How sad and perhaps symbolic that Britain's Best Pop Group (Ever?) (TM) should be shunted to the railway sidings of live venues while they remain (rightly) feted as visionaries across the pond?

First up were support band, Sheffield's Pink Grease, thought highly of amongst some, and managed by one of Add N To (X) (well, something's got to pay their bills apart from the royalties from that Orange ad).

Pink Grease put a lot of energy and confidence into their show, their music seeming an at-times awkward hybrid of garage rock, new romanticism and pop-punk. The Sigue Sigue Sputnik revival starts here, then. As a live spectacle they worked, and they have at least a coupla good tunes - when they learn to sing and play their instruments properly they could really be on to something.

Two boys, two girls, each one could be a model (but aside from their Levi ad, only one, Helen, actually was), with various ethnic backgrounds, dressed in sleek uniform but armed with nothing more than a love of retro keyboards and a knack for terrific pop choonage - what's not to love about Ladytron?

The attempts of the media over here to pigeonhole the band into the electroclash genre is pointless and misleading - here is a band offering organic pop of the highest pedigree and yet all we seek to do with them is marginalise.

Ladytron are Abba without the beards, The Beatles minus those maudlin songs about the old and the lonely, a smarter, hipper, better-looking Human League (and possibly the only band in pop's history who could have improved upon 'Open Your Heart') and in Bulgarian geneticist Mira Aroyo they have a sex symbol who synthesises the aloof and the alluring in the most electrifying fashion since Debbie Harry in her 70s pomp. With her brown boiler-suit and short-cropped black hair she could have walked off the set of Gerry Anderson's UFO; and with those eyebrows she is the Thunderbird puppet it's OK to want to fuck.

Ladytron fizzed through an hour-long set of the best of their two albums to date, and still had no room for the likes of the fashionista funk of 'Nu Horizons'; the pulsating title-track from sceond CD Light and Magic or their celebrated cover of Tweet's (Oops) Oh My (which I'm reliably informed will be an extra track on their next-but-one single Evil).

The polaroid camera appeared to be the accessory of choice amongst the crowd as lovestruck post-modernists wafted their developing prints at each other while grooving to the retro-electro choonage it's OK to enjoy yourself to.

Seeing as we quite happily bomb countries because the Americans tell us to, it seems rather rude not to follow suit and embrace the Ladytron to our collective Brit bosom. They're smart and sexy, with a clarity of vision and purpose that has helped them create pristine pop perfection from their own single-minded formula. They're brilliant and there's no-one else like them, and there never will be.

Which is why you can mock all you want but I maintain Ladytron are Britain's Best Pop Band (Ever?) (TM).