In the grand scheme of things you'd have chosen to accept the mission of a political debate with George Galloway before you undertook the taking of pop to the indie heartland's of the Northern Quarter, but when you're The Modern - a band that lives, breathes and shits pop - it's the only mission they could take.

Designer Magazine had seen the Modern a few short weeks before where they'd took a provincial town like Preston, but that was always going to be little more than a battle compared to the full blown war that was the stranglehold of guitars and scalls in Manchester. Ok we exaggerate a little, for a simple display of flashing lights and hair straighteners had the indie gayer down the front forgetting the poppers for 3 minutes and throwing shapes to the electric sound of pure pop heaven as "Jane Falls Down" kicks in with all it's glorious pleasure.

It would be easy to focus in the Alison Goldfrapp-esque vocalist Emma Cooke (from this point on known as Emma Modern", but he Modern are about the whole package rather than one individual member. For every boy falling for Jones there's a dozen or so other boys swooning at the walking haircuts behind her, the sort of haircuts which made 80s Duran Duran look like they'd just stepped out bed with a bad hair day.

Songs like "Discotheque Francais" and "Sometimes" are made up of the best bits of the Human League, Duran, A-ha, Madonna, Dead Or Alive and Bananarama with not one pop nugget wasted. If this really is pop eating itself then the Modern are the musical form of Mad Cow Disease....slowly and surely they will take the nation and those pop sounds will rattle around your head day and night. The Modern are pop perfection!!!

Alex McCann