POP music is, by its very nature, a cyclical (if not cynical) thing. So there's a certain irony to the coincidence of next week's first Pop Idol Live concert on Monday occurring just one night before a show from The Monkees on Tuesday.

The Monkees, for our younger readers, were arguably the first ever manufactured boy band. Hugely successful at the time but scorned by hipper observers as the "pre-Fab Four", they were an entirely fake band put together for a TV show from around four hundred hopefuls, including Stephen Stills but not, despite urban myth, Charlie Manson!

Things have come on a bit since then, not least technologically, and there were reportedly some ten thousand hopefuls for the televised Pop Idol. Stop me if you've heard this before but there were 13.9 million viewers for the final last month and 8.7 million of those viewers voted for either Gareth Gates or Will Young, more people than voted for the Tories in the last General Election!

Now Will is at Number One and selling in unprecedented quantities and all ten of the finalists are due to play at a sold-out concert at the Manchester Evening News Arena on Monday. Yet only little girls and gay men buy this stuff, don't they?

"Whether you loved or loathed Pop Idol, you can''t deny that it became a talking point for the whole country," pontificates Simon Cowell. "You had five year olds and 75 year olds talking about it. You had people interested in music again.

"Everything we did on Pop Idol we tried to do for the people watching," he argues. "We're trying to make decisions based on what we think the people will like."

On the other hand, observers like left-wing comedian Mark Steel (see Comedy listings) are left baffled by the success of the whole thing. "It's like a scam merchant doing the three-card trick with the cards face up!" he protests.

To further muddy the moral waters, you have old lags like Roger Daltrey saying: "I hate what Pop Idol has done to the business," when surely The Who are still only getting away with playing live based on their past glories and should have been wound up as a brand-name decades ago.

Fellow Pop Idol judge Pete Waterman, on the other hand, goes as far as to argue that the show is actually "anti-Establishment. The record industry hated everything in it because they see just how closed-shop the industry really is."

Confused? Cowell isn''t. "It's what I''ve always known - trust the public," he crows. "I think pop needed this."

Pop Idol Live is at the Manchester Evening News Arena on Monday and Saturday, March 30, at 7.30pm. The Monkees, with Davy Jones and Mickey Dolenz, are at the MEN Arena on Tuesday. Please call 0161-930 8000 to confirm ticket availability.

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