There is a select club of pop stars who seem to spend their lives under siege by the media. You don’t have to be female to join up — as Michael Jackson will vouch — but it helps. Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey are founder members; Victoria Beckham is chairman of the board.

While their levels of talent and commercial success may vary, they all have the uncanny ability to attract censure. No matter what they do — to their music, to their image and especially to the people who orbit their less-than-private lives — it automatically prompts a chorus of extreme disapproval.

Britney Spears has acquired full membership of the club with the release of her fourth album, In the Zone. It has been greeted with universal disdain in America, where reviewers have taken a dim view of the progression that the 21-year-old Spears has made from virginal schoolgirl to “certified nymphomaniac”, as the Boston Globe put it.

Here in Britain copies of the album were so late being distributed to the press that rumours have started circulating that this was a deliberate ploy to delay the inevitable rash of bad reviews until after the record was in the shops (a PR practice invented by film companies who sometimes keep critics away from certain movies until after they have opened).

Instead, the pre-release campaign has involved Spears appearing on every chat show that will issue an invitation — from Richard and Judy and GMTV to the audience-free zone of Woman’s Hour — where she has defended herself for the heinous crimes of smoking, drinking, posing semi-naked on magazine covers, writing sexually suggestive lyrics, bonking Justin Trousersnake and, apparently, dropping a bottle of slimming pills on the floor at Heathrow airport.

“Has Britney Spears gone completely mad?” asked The Sun last week in a story which criticised her for taking her younger sister to visit “New York’s sleaziest transvestite club” and for dwelling on the subject of pleasuring herself in one of her song lyrics (albeit not at such length as The Sun felt it necessary to linger over the issue). This aberrant behaviour was, the paper said, all part of the singer’s “desperate” bid to shed her former teen pop image.

But what really started the current bout of Britney bashing was that kiss with Madonna, a moment of carefully calculated madness designed to reap a whirlwind of publicity, much of it sure to be hostile. It was the kind of stunt that reminded you that however much one might wish to sympathise with the plight of members of the negative-PR brigade, they do bring a lot of it on themselves.

A former member of the club herself, Madonna continues in her role of agent provocateur on the opening track of In the Zone. “Hey Britney, you say you want to lose control — come over here I’ve got something to show you,” she barks huskily in Me Against the Music, the current single which, despite a torrent of publicity, failed to reach the top of the chart this week.

While this is Madonna’s only physical contribution to the proceedings, her shadow looms over the entire album. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and whatever you may have heard about it, In the Zone is actually a pretty dynamic collection of dance-floor grooves blatantly presented as a displacement activity for sex. And who could complain about that? The thrills may be pneumatic and the mood about as romantic as a date with a girl from an escort agency. But when you have a performer as enthusiastic about her work as Spears, aided by a cast of contributors and collaborators that includes Moby, R. Kelly, Cathy Dennis and the Matrix, you can certainly relax in the knowledge that you will be getting a high-class job.

Some of the backing tracks are an absolute blast. (I Got That) Boom Boom, featuring the Ying Yang Twins, incorporates a jolting, hip-hop percussion track embellished every so often by a mad snippet of bluegrass banjo. Outrageous taps into that Missy Elliott-goes-to-Diwali vibe, with a barrage of Middle Eastern-sounding chants and a lyric that cuts to the chase with a mischievous zest: “Outrageous — my sex drive/ Outrageous — my shopping sprees.”

Whether accompanied by the strings and twanging surf guitar of Toxic or the flutes and violins of Early Mornin’, Spears sighs, croaks, squeaks, groans, breathes heavily and otherwise does anything short of actually singing the sort of lyrics that come straight from a phone-sex manual. “It’s so hot in here. . ./ Don’t stop ‘cause I’m halfway there,” she moans in Breathe on Me, a number that harks back to the era of Donna Summer, the original disco tease.

While it may be a little emotionally one-dimensional for some tastes, In the Zone has an undeniable momentum. And guess what? In America its first-week sales are surging ahead of new releases by Michael Jackson and the Beatles. Maybe for some stars there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

(Arista/BMG)

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