Belinda Carlisle

The Carlise love expertise, see, is the kind that comes after you've crashed out of new-wave tearaways The Go-Go's, lost it, found it again by wailing, "Oooh, heaven is a place on earth", in a voice like Evian hydroelectric power station, and then planed into mid-life babies and houses in France.

The grooves of 'A Woman And A Man' shiver with a specific kind of clean, 'sophisticated', emotional frisson - the one you get standing on a Californian beach with a glass of chilled Chardonnay, while your loverman/woman caresses your soul/shags the girl next door. With its Seattle Philharmonic string sections swooning choruses, Belinda's lurve info surfs the peaks and troughs of adult contemporary heartquake, thrilled by the unpredictability of it all, but safe in the knowledge that it's really just another episode of Melrose Place.

"Love in the key of C/You're my life's sweet harmony/It's the key of 'Amazing Grace'," explain Belinda's songwriters. And they should know, for they are the top pros of bourgeois, power-ballad titillation, the backroom boys for the perfectly cloying combi of talent assembled here.

There's Nick 'Kajagoogoo' Beggs on bass. There's a cover of Crowded House's 'He Goes On'. Roxette, masters of bland raunch, are represented in the form of two songs from Per Gessle. The Bangles' Susannah Hoffs does backing vocals on the final masterstroke of low-brow Enya, 'My Heart Goes Out To You'. To cap it all Brian Wilson, the Brian Wilson, arranges and backs up on the sunkissed bossanova stunner 'California' with its so-bad-it's-genius couplet, "I remember I was in the tanning salon/When I heard that River Phoenix was gone."

Within its own terms of reference - Celine Dion after three white wines - 'A Woman And A Man' is a splendid achievement. It lingers lke Mum's perfume. And it wiggles the G-spot of mature, cerebrally disconnected sentimentally like a bastard.

Sob. Weep. Snigger.