Alexis Petridis has a fascinating piece in the G on the resurgence of soft rock, and the re-emergence of “its fluffy-haired fans”.

“Two weeks ago, club night Guilty Pleasures - founded on DJ Sean Rowley’s previously verboten love for David Essex and the Doobie Brothers, Christopher Cross and the Captain and Tenille - pulled 1,600 people to London’s Koko. With Guilty Pleasures clubs in Brighton and Nottingham, two compilation albums, plans for a New York night and a TV show in the offing, Rowley has found himself helming a burgeoning soft rock empire, a state of affairs no one seems more startled about than him. ‘Where it goes next, fuck knows,’ he sighs. ‘It’s mad. It’s bonkers.’”

Petridis puts it down to alt-rock not sounding very alt any more, combined with an increasingly irrelevant music press going all mainstream. If alt is now MOR, what’s going to be the new alt? It has to be what was once mainstream, but is now reviled. Cue bouffant hair, power chords and Huey Lewis.

Me? I blame the iPod. It’s what made guilty pleasures - and Guilty Pleasures - possible. First, at 79p a shot it’s cheap to snap up all the tracks you didn’t have the courage to buy in Woolies back in the day. Aloha Hall & Oates, Rah Band and Level 42.

Second, music collections have ceased to be public. The CD rack might continue to be tacit projection of self for dinner parties, but it needn’t reflect the darkest recesses of your musical fetishes. They get to live on your hard drive, hidden away behind a password.

The only downside? If someone nicks your iPod, that “most played” list could get you bribed. I’ll fess up now: most played in the last week on mine is Girls Aloud’s Biology. The Arctic Monkeys are there just for the CD case.

Although I maintain the purchase of Five Star’s Rain or Shine was truly an example of the dangers of combining “listeners also bought”, one-click buying and a lot - a lot - of wine.

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