When i was in China earlier this year, there was no getting away from one of my favourite ever pop stars, Ayumi Hamasaki. Although her music is widely liked, it’s her image that dominates. As in her native Japan, where a friend in Tokyo claims to have seen thirty-six different Ayu adverts in an hour’s journey to work, her face is everywhere. A life-size poster army of Ayumis is plastered all over the Shanghai metro and, she’ll be delighted to know, her visage graces the front of almost every hair salon / brothel throughout the country.

She really is quite unique. Her career reads like a version of Pygmalion - a girl who genuinely couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance and spoke painfully slowly in a strange nasal drawl was picked up in a karaoke bar by Max Matsuura, head of Avex records, and turned into the biggest superstar in Japanese pop history. The difference being that, in My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle turned into Audrey Hepburn in the end but, as her fantastic debut album, A Song For XX, showed, at the end of her transformation process she still couldn’t sing, still couldn’t dance and still spoke in the voice that got her teased at school. None of this stood in the path of her march to glory though, and she has progressed enormously on all fronts since, developing a strong, if unorthodox voice, writing all her lyrics and several of her finest songs. All her albums are worth owning, 2005's immense My Story included, but LOVEppears stands as the finest example of the kind of exuberant music people associate with the J-Pop tag I’ve ever heard. Boys & Girls is on it.

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Ayumi Hamasaki - Boys & Girls