Sophie Ellis-Bextor: 'Trip The Light Fantastic'

You’ve got to love Sophie Ellis-Bextor. With her unflappable poise, permanently arched eyebrow and that earl grey and buttered scones voice, she’s the Penelope Keith of pop. But despite the clutch of brilliant singles she’s released - ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’, ‘Mixed Up World’, ‘Move This Mountain’ – she’s yet to nail her very English charm to an LP’s worth of songs. In a pop landscape filled with charismatic, talented female stars (Lily, Amy, Mutya), 'Trip The Light Fantastic' might just be her last chance.

Nobody could accuse the lady of shirking a challenge. She’s bagged songwriting credits from a bevy of pop A-listers - Greg Kurstin (Lily Allen, All Saints), Xenomania (Girls Aloud, Sugababes), The Feeling’s Dan Gillespie-Sells - and she’s spent the last few months hawking two singles (The turbo-charged stalker-pop of ‘Catch You’ and the sun-dappled disco of ‘Me And My Imagination’) on any TV show prepared to frame her cheekbones. Her nonchalant lip-syncing always suggest the presence of a record exec off-camera pointing a gun to her head, but who can blame her when it’s Paul O’Grady’s superannuated audience that she’s performing for?

Fortunately, the hard work has paid off. Trip The Light Fantastic easily fulfils the promise of its fizzy singles. The paean to escapism ‘New York City Lights’ bursts with the same energy as Parallel Lines-era Blondie, while ‘If You Go’ sets a cascading melody to a shuffling samba rhythm. Crucially, Ellis-Bextor’s not afraid to trade good taste for a decent tune. ‘China Heart’, after a few drinks, sounds like Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Holding Out For A Hero’ set to a Hi NRG beat. ‘Love Is Here’, one of two co-writes with Gillespie-Sells, is essentially The Feeling covering a Donna Summer song. There are a handful of less impressive moments – ‘Only One’ tries, and fails, to prop up its insipid melody with jerky, Talking Heads-style rhythms - but the overall impression is of a confident, supremely elegant woman frolicking in a pool of glitter.

Her voice is as limited as Gordon Brown’s sex appeal, but it ensures that whatever cap she dons – guitar pop balladeer (‘Today The Sun’s On Us’), synth pop crooner (‘The Distance Between Us’), the world’s archest disco diva (most of the album) – she always sounds exactly like Sophie Ellis-Bextor. This is a good thing. When she declares, halfway through the album, ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want any part of your revolution’, you can’t help but wonder, just for a moment, how on earth those pesky Frenchies of 1786 managed to storm the Bastille without Trip The Light Fantastic as a soundtrack.