No means no

What the hell happened to Enrique Iglesias? One minute he was serenading Jennifer Love Hewitt at a deserted gas station, and now suddenly he's propositioning tarts like Calum Best on a three-day bender.  No more, "I can be your hero baby", Enrique would like it to be known that "Tonight I'm fucking you".

All those women who once swooned to his romantic ballads, are now imagining themselves trying to find their other shoe and making an appointment at the STD clinic. These days. it seems you have to have an edge if you want to maintain your place in the charts.

Brian McFadden has obviously been taking notes, since he's staging his latest comeback attempt with a surprising new single that couldn't be further from the good old days with Westlife. To them, 'edgy' meant dismounting their stools before the key-change kicked in.

Aside from the production, which sounds like a weird fusion of hillbilly and techno (technobilly, anyone?), the song is striking for its dubious message. He claims it's a lovesong to his girlfriend Delta Goodrem, although it's hard to imagine the squeaky-clean popstrel being overly enamoured with the lyric "I like you just the way you are, drunk in the back seat of my car". Delta's idea of a wild night would be grilling the tofu steaks before throwing them in a stir-fry.

Delta may like the song, but plenty of other people are disturbed by the message at its heart. Brian seems to like getting his girl so drunk that he can "do some damage", suggesting that he's not averse to spiking someone's Bacardi Breezer to get his end away.

Brian's horrified that his innocent "tongue-in-cheek" song has been taken out of context, claiming "I am shocked at these ridiculous accusations about my new song. For the record I wrote the song about how I love it when Delta has a drink -- which is very rarely -- and she's dancing."

On the plus side, at least the controversy has got him back in the papers - a side-effect that I'm sure never occurred to him when he was writing it. And although he claims not to be promoting date-rape in the track, my ears are still going to need to speak to a counsellor after nearly four minutes of abuse.

Anything she can do...

With his ex-wife Kerry Katona dominating the red-tops in a PR campaign that would have Max Clifford touching himself inappropriately, it's easy to forget about Brian McFadden. Although, if I'm completely honest, it's never been particularly easy to remember him either.

As part of the world's most popular boyband, he did little more than stand left-of-centre to stop his smaller bandmates from falling over. Perhaps inspired by Kerry's own career-sabotaging decision to leave Atomic Kitten right before they hit the big time, Brian walked away from Westlife to focus on his family. But within six months he was walking again, this time away from his wife.

What Brian had actually meant by 'focus on his family' was 'focus on his solo career' - and he got off to a great start with a number one single he cowrote with Guy Chambers. But public interest faded pretty quickly, and by the time his debut album's campaign was finished, so too was his relationship with Sony BMG.

Ever the optimist, Brian trotted out the age-old euphemism for 'I was dropped by my label' by claiming that they had simply parted ways because he wanted to have creative control over his music.

Since then, he's been based down under where he's continued plugging away at his music career and singer-songwriter Delta Goodrem. Now, with his third album on the horizon, he's hoping to take the world by storm.

With a cool new 'electropop' sound, and an appalingly naff title, Wall Of Soundz could be Brian's ticket back to the top. After all, as he says "People are loving the music... and they're thinking 'This doesn't really sound like Brian McFadden'." Which is probably a good thing for everyone concerned.

Although his sophomore release was limited to Australia (since Brian 'chose' not to release the record in Ireland or across Europe where people might have some fleeting familiarity with him), Brian thinks this one could be big: "My last album suited certain places. This is the first time I feel like I can take a record everywhere because it suits radio everywhere in the world at the moment."

It's easy to scoff at such blind self-belief, but as his ex-wife's media transformation has proved, there's no limit to the amount of successful comebacks that one person can enjoy.