I’m serious.

Don’t be fooled by the heavily treated Minnie Mouse vocals and Music-esque robotic disco moves of songs like ‘Radar’ or ‘Piece Of Me’ or ‘Break The Ice’. The in-da-club burlesque thrust of the album (not to mention the cover art, featuring Brit perched on the lap of a suspiciously male model-looking priest in the confessional) clearly references Madonna’s 'Erotica' era. The difference is, one never got the feeling that Madge was anything other than 100% in control. If gay disco icon Laura Branigan played out secret ID/Freud ‘n’ Jungian dominance-and-submission fantasies in an endearingly daft soft-focus video for the 1984 proto hi-NRG anthem ‘Self Control’, Britney, by contrast, sometimes looks like she’s trapped inside one of those taboo role-playing dreams and can’t wake up, stumbling from one ante-chamber of the subconscious to another. For all the state-of-the-art urban production, there’s something distinctly unsavoury about 'Blackout'. The word that comes to mind is disassociative. Brit’s bump ‘n’ grind suggests the gyrations of an abuse victim locked inside a behavioural pattern loop that damns them to seek the cruel comfort of familiar degradations. And yet, the truly bizarre thing is, the music is top notch. Tunes like ‘Heaven On Earth’, ‘Get Naked (I Got A Plan)’ and the Glitter Band-doing-‘Happy Together’ hybrid of ‘Ooh Ooh Baby’ are all satellite phone sex updates of Donna and Giorgio’s ‘Love To Love You Baby’ that could fit right in with any Derek Jarman re-envisioning of 'Satyricon'. There are no slow jams, no syrupy weepies, no don’t-cry-for-me-Argentinas. In fact 'Blackout' is, against all odds, a damn fine downtown electro artefact, even if it does make you feel like taking a psychic bath after a night in its company.

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.