Who wants their MTV?

In advance of next week’s MTV awards in Belfast, we bring together a special edition of the Album Club to scientifically predict which artist will walk away with the Best Song gong

BY THE TIME you read these words, it should be fairly clear who Ireland’s next President is going to be. Well? Did the pollsters get it right? Or have they got egg all over their extrapolative faces this morning?

The trick to polling, we are reliably informed, is to get your sampling right. Here at Ticket Album Club HQ we have been working day and night to fine-tune a set of algorithms that will enable us to predict to a tee the public’s voting intentions in an affair of much greater moment altogether: the Best Song category at Sunday week’s MTV Europe Music Awards in Belfast.

In order to minimise margin of error we have targeted a cluster of listeners whose demographic and sociocultural profile is richly representative of the Euro-populace at large. None of your phone-in nonsense. None of your ring-500-landlines-at-random spoofology. We have spent weeks subjecting a host of individuals to a screening process of such rigour that only three were left standing by the end: a television newsreader, a theatre director and a rock frontman.

And what have these surefire representatives of the continent’s pop-loving peoples had to tell us? First, that things are trending heavily towards Lady Gaga, who – barring a late surge from Jennifer Lopez – is poised to pick up the grand prize on the night. And second, that Katy Perry and Bruno Mars need hardly bother turning up for the ceremony.

LADY GAGA’S, WELL, QUITE GAGA

"I love the fact that she's a bit mad," says Sharon ní Bheoláin as she casts her first preference for Gaga's Born This Way."Actually she's more than a bit mad, she's mad as the moon. And I love that. I think madness should be embraced in pop music because it's so bloody sterile. She's edgy."

But what of the song itself? Is it up to much? “Well, the treatment is a little bit unusual, there’s a little bit of the unexpected. It does fulfil the pop song formula: big anthem, universal theme – you’re all wonderful, you’re all special, you’re all God’s children, that kind of thing. But it’s strong, it’s edgy, it’s catchy.”

Born This Wayplaces second on Grace Dyas's list. "Gaga's just a real artist. Her music's probably all manufactured like everyone else's but I like the stuff she talks about, I like her ideas, I like her music."

Dyas was blown away by Gaga’s appearance on the Oprah series finale back in May, where the 25-year-old made the subversive move of playing a shoe-themed piano. “She had me in floods of tears. She did this big amazing spectacle of a performance. I thought to myself, ‘You’re brilliant!’”

REAL DEAL OR CON ARTIST?

But what of the argument that Gaga’s antics distract from the indifferent quality of her music?

Mik Pyro is having none of it. "I've seen footage of her doing a solo performance. She was playing a classical piano arrangement of one of her songs, I think it was Paparazzi.She's a phenomenal piano player. And technically she's a fantastic singer. Her lyrics are much more complex and meaningful than a lot of the pop music that's been around. Some of the stuff she's saying in the songs is very profound. I think she's one of those great subversive pop artists like Madonna or Michael Jackson. She's kind of in that league, because I think pop music at its height is subversive, it has to question orthodox value judgments that are out there. And even just in terms of the production, a lot of her music is very forward-thinking."

But what of this particular song? Turns out Pyro is actually not all that gone on it. It just happens to be second best out of a less-than- stellar list. "It's very similar to Express Yourselfby Madonna. It's not her strongest anthem. And yeah, a lot of her songs sound like other songs, but that's the way these days because we've run out of melodies!"

Pyro's own pick of the bunch would be J Lo's On The Floor. "I'd put that song top because I don't really like any of her songs but I heard that song and it's obviously a reinterpretation of the Lambadasong that was a hit years ago. But I think the production is amazing on it. I heard it in a club and I thought it was probably the best thing she's done. It's a pretty interesting pop production."

On The Flooris ní Bheoláin's second favourite. "The beat is amazing. I challenge anyone not to move their hips in a certain way when that song comes on. I don't think it's physically possible not to boogie or move with that beat, it's brilliant. The treatment is also interesting. You've got a bit of 1990s techno music, you've got Pitbull's rap and then you've got the classic pop with the big rousing chorus as well."

ADORING ADELE

Dyas, for her part, can't bring herself to rank On The Floorany higher than third place. The clear winner for her is Adele's Rolling in the Deep.

“I really love her, her voice is brilliant. She’s kind of a shameful secret because she’s not cool, at least not amongst the people I hang around with. Because all the kids sing her in talent competitions!”

Dyas also laments the fact that Adele has become a painfully cliched synonym for Break-up Music.

“It’s the kind of thing whenever people are having break-ups or general romance troubles, you’d have a ‘Were you listening to Adele?’ moment. You feel like saying, ‘Don’t go whipping out the Adele, I can’t cope with that’.”

For ní Bheoláin, Adele's ubiquity has actually made her painful to listen to. "Technically her voice is phenomenal. But I just think it suffers from over-exposure. Every time you turn on the radio it's Adele. She gets my number three purely on the fact that her voice is amazing, there's a lovely gravelly texture to it, kind of a jazzy thing. But the overexposure is a problem and also the fact that every five-year-old entering a talent competition will sing Adele. And that's wrong. I don't think anybody under the age of 35 should be allowed to sing Adele. It's a bit like Mary Byrne, that big boomy voice. You should be a certain age and a certain weight to sing Rolling in the Deep!

MEET THE CLUBBERS:

Sharon ní Bheoláin is a newsreader with RTÉ television
Mik Pyrois lead singer with Republic of Loose
Grace Dyasis director of the recent theatre hit Heroin