Is Paloma Faith the most irritating pop star ever?

I’ve suspected for a long time that Paloma Faith is the most irritating pop star around. Worse than Adele carrying on like a moose with all its PMTs coming at once. Worse even than Sam Smith with his cruise-ship mooing dressed up with Satanist accessories from an Ann Summers shop.

Her voice, her dress sense, the daft things she says… Faith is all those words that end with a ‘y’ that give me the ick when used of women: ‘feisty’, ‘kooky’, ‘ditsy’, ‘spunky’. She’s a variation on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl – the Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl.

If there’s a wrong-headed, ill-sorted, addlepated opinion to be had, Faith will have it. In her recent autobiography, MILF (which she has changed from the usual vulgarism to the even more irritating ‘Motherhood, Identity, Love, F*ckery’), she can be found blaming feminism – rather than her own foolish choices – for the bad aspects of her life: ‘Feminism leaves us women at a loss… left us overworked and over-demanded upon as a punishment for wanting equality.’ As one irate reviewer said on Amazon: ‘A woman complaining of being a single parent while being a multimillionaire with one of her complaints being that she has to “give her nanny a pay rise”. This is not feminism.’

But there’s so much folly to choose from when it comes to Faith. Her whole oeuvre is a smorgasbord of silliness, a moveable feast of mind-blowing foolishness. To read her X timeline is surely the nearest thing one can get to taking those tours of Bedlam that proved so popular until they were banned in the 18th century. But it’s such a very banal and socially acceptable form of lunacy. ‘People say I’m mad all the time like in the media and stuff’, she recently said on Fearne Cotton’s podcast. Faith’s is not that divine, inspired madness we associate with great singers from Maria Callas to Amy Winehouse. Rather, it is the banal, self-regarding ‘specialness’ of a ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here…’ mug.

See how she whirls and twirls on social media, like Baby Jane Hudson in a hall of mirrors. Whether warning people not to ask for photographs with her or babbling about her ‘half-Muslim children’ in the wake of the recent riots, the same note of semi-literate self-obsession is a constant. If Faith were an ailment, she would be tinnitus.

There’s not one opinion she holds that doesn’t appear to have been run before the Woke Committee. She once wrote an anti-Brexit song from the perspective of a regretful Leaver (‘I’ve been a criminal, I made a mistake… I’m living in my worst fears / begging you back through tears’). Last year, she wore a ‘climate-change dress’ to perform at the king’s coronation concert (because nothing says ‘rebel’ like being a monarchist). She presented a man, Dylan Mulvaney, with Attitude’s first ‘Woman of the Year’ award, commenting that her ‘blood boils’ when thinking of what ‘the transphobic press and social-media trolls’ have put Mr Mulvaney through by pointing out that he’s a bloke.

There are so many instances of Faith making an exhibition of herself out there that it’s hard to decide the supreme example of her apparent imbecility. I personally favour the Instagram post where she appears to be literally ‘milking’ herself – to give to some less abundant woman, apparently. I’ve seen a lot of virtue-signalling in my time, but milking oneself to give to the poor beats all.

Her attitude to X has been amusing since Musk decided to – quite understandably, as he owns the thing – tweet his opinion of the UK riots. All of the celebs and commentators who rail against Musk but struggle to tear themselves away from his creature have made several kinds of fool of themselves lately (‘The resistance stayed in Paris’, one self-deceiving dunce pointed out when challenged). Faith was no exception. ‘As someone dedicated to justice, fairness and equality, I am deeply troubled by Elon Musk’s recent comments. I am vehemently anti-racist, anti-fascist, and X / Twitter has become misaligned with these values therefore I’ve decided to leave the platform’, she wrote last week. In fairness, unlike the other Musk-hating clowns, Faith has actually quit and managed (at the time of writing) to stay away for a whole five days, so credit at least to her for that.

If as a political being she leaves much to be desired, as a pop star she’s even worse. Her personal style is that of the unloved child of Camila Batmanghelidjh and Shirley Temple. Her voice is that of a goat with a tender part tangled in wire. She is very theatrical, though. One thing that’s striking is how little acting work she’s had over the years, despite the fact that she’s actually quite good at it and clearly keen – poignantly, the section on her Wikipedia page about her dramatic work ends with: ‘She also voices Portia the goth poodle on 101 Dalmatian Street.’

Faith’s natural attitude is petulance. Tellingly, her first recognised work was a song called ‘It’s Christmas (And I Hate You)’. Over-sharing is her comfort zone, and not just with breast milk. Of course artists always frack their emotions, but a lack of skill renders it little more than potato-printing. I’d liken the experience of listening to several of her songs in a row to the Monty Python sketch wherein two policemen pay a visit to the Whizzo Chocolate Company to make them answer for their horrible confections, featuring ‘Crunchy Frog’, ‘Ram’s Bladder Cup’, ‘Cockroach Cluster’ and ‘Anthrax Ripple’.

Why do I loathe her, to pin it down? Well, it’s not because she’s a squeaky-voiced, attention-seeking show-off – that would be self-loathing! It’s because Faith is the embodiment of the modern celebrity type who somehow sees itself as a rebel while every branch of the establishment believes the same as them.

When I was young, I disliked right-wingers because – among other things – they judged people through the prism of race, despised the proletariat, believed that men’s feelings were more important than women’s rights and wanted to ban things they didn’t agree with. But this is now a good summing up of the contemporary left – and Faith embodies all of these vices that believe themselves to be virtues.

Her interviews and pronouncements appear to be a mash-up of self-help books and inspirational memes, all this couched in a supposedly fearless honesty. ‘I just have an inability to lie’, she says. But far better to be an entertaining liar than an alarmingly boring repeater of ‘my truth’, if that truth is simply a string of duck-billed platitudes. Not being dull should be the first duty of any pop star.

And so we come back, as we often do, to Amy Winehouse, our lost girl, the greatest singer of the 21st century, no matter what it has yet to show. When she died, it was principally a great loss to those who knew and loved her; secondarily, to us, her fans. But her death was a gift to inferior girl singers with Cockney accents. As Keith Caulfield of Billboard starkly put it: ‘Because of Amy, or the lack thereof, the marketplace was able to get singers like Adele, Estelle and Duffy.’ Or as I think of them, all the clammy little afterbirths, with all of the blood and tears but none of the art and soul. Adele is the biggest of these; Paloma Faith the worst. Let us hope she’ll be the last.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.