You couldn’t have come up with the blueprint for Robots in Disguise if you’d sat down and thought about it. Take it to a committee and see how quickly you’d be thrown out of the room to peels of sneering laughter. But Robots in Disguise exist and more people they wind up the better.

Essentially they are two girls, the improbably-named Dee Plume and Sue Denim, who are signed to The Sneaker Pimps’ Splinter label. They’ve got atrocious Ziggy Stardust-like mullets, they wear matching bacofoil jerkins and perform in front of a giant model of an ancient sci-fi b-movie computer. And they sound like a cross between Kraftwerk and The Shangri-La’s.

They also seem to believe that they are actually robots - they speak in that silly robotic way that bad actors in low-budget Children Film Foundation productions in the 70s used to when they were pretending to be under the control of some mysterious power. They write songs about what it’s like to be a girl robot trying to find a boy robot to snuggle up to (or, in the case of ‘Bedscene’, shag senseless) and do stupid running-on-the-spot dances and they do all this so brilliantly badly that you can only love them unreservedly and wish that all those other sensible ‘proper’ bands would take themselves a little less seriously.

If you want to be really anal and trainspotty (as we obviously do) you could say Robots in Disguise sound like a cross between Pizzicato 5 and early 80s synth-pop duo Eddie & Sunshine, but that don’t mean nothing to anyone really, so we’ll just say that they are the apex of low-resolution, high-camp pop and you’ll either absolutely love them or hate them. Rarely has something so unutterably wrong seemed so right.

Sue Foreman