N'Joi'd that

 

Sourced in

Isn't she lovely?

After N’Joi, Saffron fronted - front being the operative word  - this Republica tune that I file with a lineage of excitable go-for-it ladette pop (Icona Pop, "I Love It", Pink "Coming Up", Spice Girls's "Wannabe", Ke$ha "Tik Tok" / "We R Who We R", Martin Solveig + Dragonette "Hello", Ting Tings "The Drums", right through to Charli xcx)

Even more delightful in this mode I think

Too exuberant and boisterous to be glamorous, too insolent to be elegant 

Lily Allen hovers on the edge of this lineage, as a spiritual sister, a cheeky monkey, but her tunes are a bit too chill and leisurely in tempo yet also laden with meaning, lyrics-wise. Too fraught with grown-up anxieties and recriminations, too, whereas these girls are out to party and have not a care in the world.

Of course that's pretty much where Charlie XCX started her career, so it's make a nice loop of party-hard girl-pop

“Ready to Go” is a very calculated record - let's merge dance and Britpop - but for all that a perfect slice of mid-Nineties energy - a time when things were a lot better than we tended to think at the time  (all that pre-millennium tension bollix, darkness shtick) compared with the next three decades of steady descent into hell

N-Joi, I've never found anything else by them quite as exciting as "Anthem"

But the Untouchables had another amazing moment

Shattering ecstasies

Part of its own mini-lineage of 'distraught divas' tunes - Johnny Jungle "Flammable", Omni Trio  "Mainline" , Acen's "Trip"

Talking of being "taken away" and shattering ecstasies

N'Joi played an important role in my life insofar as they were one of four rave acts playing live at a major conversion moment in my journey towards becoming a raver. The headliner, in fact, so I would have been peaking when they came on....