Last night, I was driv­ing home from Don­caster. As I got to Derby, I was get­ting a little bored of Radio 1, so I star­ted flick­ing through — late night radio tends to be quite good, even if it is dis­pro­por­tion­ately chat shows over music. I stumbled upon Delerium’s Silence, one of my favour­ite songs a couple of years ago — I heard it for the first time in a tat­too stu­dio in Burnham-on-Sea, albeit a ridicu­lous techno remix of it. So, I star­ted warb­ling along, com­pletely fail­ing to hit any of the high notes Sarah McLach­lan reaches. The song came to an end, and I reached for the dial, but Katy Perry’s voice stopped me.

It’s not par­tic­u­larly a stand-out voice. It’s not as deep as Amy Winehouse’s, or as heav­ily accen­ted as Lily Allen’s — in fact, I’ll admit the reason I kept the song on is because her voice was easy enough to sing along to. I reckoned that by the second or third chorus, I’d be able to join in. So I sat there, sweaty-backed, stick­ing to the seat, mum and sis­ter asleep in the back, and cracked open the win­dow a notch. Without really listen­ing to the lyr­ics, I star­ted hum­ming along, and then the chorus kicked in. The beat’s quite catchy, although not par­tic­u­larly music­ally com­plex. It’s pretty heav­ily syn­thes­ised, but I used to be into my trance and dance, and still enjoy a bit of UK gar­age and bass­line. Still, I wasn’t really expect­ing the lyr­ics to be quite so — controversial.

I don’t know if you remem­ber the big ker­fuffle after the first gay kiss on UK TV (Coron­a­tion Street, 2003, if you’re inter­ested), but who would have thought that five years down the line, when the Amer­ican Chris­tian right still insist that “damn” is cen­sored on TV, a song would come out with the line “I kissed a girl and I liked it”? Now, I’d love to be able to say that this is a song sup­port­ing gay rights, but it simply isn’t. It’s a blat­ent and des­per­ate plea for atten­tion in an over­crowded mar­ket. But don’t let that make you think that the song’s not worth listen­ing to. It’s a catchy, fun, upbeat sum­mery song. And if noth­ing else, it’ll piss off your grandparents.