Liberty X, The Regent, Ipswich <br></br>Har Mar Superstar/The Rogers Sisters, Night and Day, Manchester

This is why I really love pop

Liberty X were sick and tired of everything when they called you last night from Glasgow. But it's gonna be so different when they're on the stage tonight. Because the super trouper beams are gonna blind them. Then they won't feel blue.

I think I've mentioned before that I invariably have something better to do on a Saturday evening than watch what TVGoHome's Charlie Brooker called "Plebdazzle TV". As a result, I couldn't tell you if one of the five former Flopstars was a salt-of-the-earth postman, or whether another one bravely overcame childhood leukaemia to be here tonight.

Where? Ipswich. I've never been to Ipswich before. I doubt Liberty X have either, unless the lads are travelling football supporters. This is so stereotypically Suffolk it sounds like a regionalist gag, but I miss the start because my train collides with a cow.

The Regent is an old-fashioned town theatre, an inland end-of-the-pier. The posters in the lobby are for James and the Giant Peach and Buddy. It's a variety venue with a variety audience. Old people clap out of rhythm, young people wave glo-sticks.

Since deciding to disregard the rejection of the Popstars panel, Liberty X have taken an admirably Route One approach to success. Public interest flagging? Stick the girls in PVC catsuits. If Hear'Say had thought of that, they might not be waiting tables on the midweek shift at Little Chef. You know what they say. He who laughs last didn't get the joke.

None of Liberty X are drop dead gorgeous – they don't have a Myleene, or anything. Instead, they have a Kelli, a Jessica and a Geordie lass called Michelle. She's the one, by the way. The one who, if you were watching Blind Date – supposing for a moment that you, er, had nothing better to do on a Saturday evening than watch Plebdazzle TV – would make you idly shout "Pick her!" Oh, and they have the boys – could you spot them in a police line? – Kevin and Tony, whose names (with all due respect to my brother and my best friend) sound like the kind of guys who would be doing the picking.

"Hello Epps-wetch!" says Kevin, or maybe Tony. I'm guessing he's Scottish. "Are you having a good time?" Well, since you ask... I dunno.

Liberty X get undressed more often than a King's Cross hooker, now in co-ordinated silk cocktail dresses, now in hideous orange jumpsuits. The film show over their heads is surprisingly arty: Koyaanisqatsi-ish aerial views of traffic, hi-speed crowd scenes, waves crashing in black-and-white. They never stop smiling. They can sing and dance, kind of. The music hustles and bustles, until there's a sudden STOP.

"This is our new single." And this is why I'm here. "Being Nobody" is a carbon copy, conceptually, of Sugababes' "Freak Like Me". They even got its creator, Richard X, to twiddle the knobs, welding another soul hit (this time Chaka Khan's "Ain't Nobody") to another synthpop relic (The Human League's "Being Boiled"). Who would have believed, 25 years back, that the cheap beeps of the League's then-avant garde Fast Product obscurity would be rockin' a hall full of Tweenie tots? This is genuinely why I will always love pop: once in a while, crazy shit like this happens.

The video, if you haven't seen it, shows the quintet being fabricated on a human production line. I like to take this as proof of a collective self-awareness in Liberty X. And self-awareness is always a good thing.

If you thought they couldn't get any more cabaret, they whip out the silver-topped canes for "Just A Little". They ain't super, but they're certainly troupers. How much can Liberty X keep milking all this? Just a little bit, just a little bit more. Today Epps-wetch, tomorrow the world.

The Rogers Sisters are the latest thing to emerge from NYC's punky-funky No Wave revival. On a scale of Sleater Kinney (funkless) to Luscious Jackson (funktastic), they're exactly halfway, dead level with Le Tigre. The sisters themselves, Jennifer (vocals, guitar) and Laura (drums), are cool enough, but the show is stolen by Hawaiian bassist Miyuki Furtado (I know what you're thinking, and the answer's no). He falls to his knees, shudders like a Zanussi on spin cycle, and jerks around like a four-string Wilko. He used to play in polka bands, and when you hear his very un-rock approach to time signatures, it figures. As a finale, the Rogers try to butter up the Mancs with a cover of Joy Division's "Shadowplay". Sweet.

If you thought Jarvis Cocker was an unlikely sex symbol, wait until you see Har Mar Superstar, a diminutive pot-bellied Minneapolitan with the remnants of a mullet and a penchant for stripping down to his Y-fronts. If Har Mar – he claims his passport says Harold Martin Tillman, but everyone seems to call him Sean – can get laid, it's surely the ultimate triumph of the will.

"Text your friends and tell them I'm fucking awesome!" Whatever attributes Tillman may lack, confidence isn't among them. Tonight's show is one long, slow strip-tease from his red silk robe down to his black g-string, to the prefabricated soundtrack of his You Can Feel Me album. And here's the juice. I know what you're thinking: kitschy in-joke.

But You Can Feel Me is glorious: a dozen hook-filled slices of digital disco and future funk (1981-style), characterised by Gonzales-esque megalomania and an obsession with sex which constantly recalls the world's most famous Minneapolitan, Prince.

Besides, he can sing (fantastic falsetto on tonight's cover of Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke"), he can dance (audacious Northern Soul back-drops during "Elephant Walk"), and he doesn't give a flying one: by the end, he's gyrating his man-breasts and hairy back on the bar-top like he's Cher in the "Dead Ringer For Love" video. And I'm texting my friends.

s.price@independent.co.uk

Liberty X: Oxford Apollo (0870 606 3500), Tue; Brentwood Leisure Centre (01277 230 231), Wed; Portsmouth Guild (023 9282 4355), Thur; Cambridge Corn Exchange (01223 357 851), Sat; Wolverhampton Civic Hall (01902 556 556), 30 March; Nottingham Royal Centre (0115 989 5555), 31 March