There has rarely been a better example of right time/right place than in the fledgling solo career of Sophie Ellis Bextor. Simply by keeping Victoria Beckham off the top of the charts last year with Groovejet, she won goodwill from people who were inclined to overlook the fact that her music is as disposable as Posh's. There has been a second top-five single, Take Me Home, and album and lifestyle features positioning her as the youngest, hippest third of the disco trinity that includes Beckham and Kylie.

But where does that leave her as an artist? She has her own ideas about how she would like to be pigeonholed, saying: "I don't want to be sophisticated, I just am." Evidently unaware that sophistication is one of pop's "don't go there" zones, she fashioned her first solo show into a remote, polished spectacle. The stage set was chrome and black, the female string section could have stepped out of a Robert Palmer video, and Bextor herself was an aloof figure who sang with a detachment bordering on frostiness.

That could have been a means of compensating for her average voice, a serviceable purr that matches the songs' anonymity. Take Me Home and the twinkle-toed Groovejet apart, the set lolloped along at the same middling pace throughout, strings sawing indefatigably. Murder on the Dancefloor was distinguished by lush orchestral keyboards, like the best of recent Kylie, though it was difficult to square the title's image of disco mayhem with the unapproachable duchess singing it.

But maybe that was the point. Manifestly lacking Posh's common touch, Bextor went the opposite way, giving us a glimpse of how the other one per cent live. Having accepted the inevitability of meeting her public ("They're endearing, but I'm not going to bend over backwards to please them," she has said), she went about it with regal grit. When she moved it was in tiny controlled steps and when she spoke it was only to announce the "penultimate" number. Oddly, it was hard not to think of Gary Numan. Bextor's look and sound may conform to 2001's pop ideal, but her chill detachment is closer to alienated Gary than ingratiating Kylie.