return to her old image and a new album of catchy chants - three cheers for Spears, says Bernadette McNulty
Regardless of its quality, the appearance of a new album from Britney Spears is cause for relief. At the beginning of this year, after the troubled singer was twice taken into hospital on a stretcher, surrounded by police and a baying army of paparazzi, it looked as if as the former Disney child star and most famous pop figure of the past decade would not make it to her 27th birthday.
Britney Spears has reverted to the flaxen blonde locks of her teenage "golden girl" days
What a difference a year makes. With new single Womanizer at the top of the US charts, an appearance on The X Factor tonight, and the release of her sixth studio album, Circus, on Monday, Spears is slowly but surely re-establishing her reputation as a pop singer, rather than a tabloid car crash.
Neil McCormick reviews Circus
In pictures: a decade of Britney Spears
Since she launched her career in 1998 singing …Baby One More Time in pigtails and a schoolgirl uniform, Spears has been frozen as a girl/woman in the public imagination. With her puppyish brown eyes and Barbie-doll blonde prettiness, she attracts male lust and female affection in equal measure.
Circus, in many ways, relies on the attributes that still make her such a potent pop figure. The album is the work of a backroom staff of writers and producers (including Max Martin, writer of …Baby One More Time) from whom Spears has, once again, managed to inspire some of their best work. The first single, Womanizer, is vintage Britney: a fizzy, dizzy playground chant that etches itself into your brain.
advertisementSpears's voice is, as ever, an odd thing. It is naturally nasal ...