There’s a big sticker on the front of Smile...It Confuses People that states ‘the singer who webcast to the world from her London basement’. It’s true, but it’s also false – that’s certainly what Sandi Thom did, but without the auspices of PR company Quite Great (Mariah Carey, Chris Rea) at her disposal, would she have made the ruffle that she has?

So all the fuss over Sandi Thom was manufactured. Gee, what a surprise. But does it matter? The truth is that it probably does – it’s quite doubtful that music this plain would break through to another level without the intriguing back story to support it. Put simply, Sandi Thom simply doesn’t do anything that deserves the hype she has generated on Smile...It Confuses People.

The single “I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair)” is confusingly allegorical, mixing in metaphors for 1969 (the end of the flower power generation) and 1976 (the rise of punk) around what is essentially an a Capella song in which she spends more time showing off her vibrato than singing with any real conviction. That’s the thing that’s most striking about Sandi Thom; she’s vocally limited, especially on numbers like the MOR blandness of “Castles”, in which she strains to hold notes.

Now the stories are coming out – in The Guardian, The Scotsman, and other respected broadsheets besides – about how manufactured Sandi Thom’s success has been. What’s worse is that Thom is standing by the bullshit spin that’s careening out of (the marketing people’s) control, with confirmation that professional songwriter John McLaughlin (Westlife, Billie Piper, and other ‘pretend’ stars) was heavily involved in the creation of Smile...It Confuses People. Shame then that they came up with such a below average set of tunes.