But the same sudden collapse can just as easily afflict “proper” bands, particularly since, unlike Hear’Say, they’re expected to come up with their own material. Take the poor old Pop Stars winners Hear’Say: their first album went straight to No 1, but the follow-up – I’m sorry, its title escapes me, as it probably does you – dis- appeared without trace, followed shortly after by the group themselves.Many gloated over Hear’Say’s downfall, claiming they weren’t a “real” band anyway. And still they got to make another album!That kind of dispensation, how-ever, disappeared from the music industry long ago. Much of that time, however, would be spent touring and doing promotional work in support of the last album, so the sophomore effort was bulked out with either ropey cover versions, or, particularly in the psychedelic era, lengthy “Jazz Odyssey”-style jams such as “Revelation”, which took up an entire side of Love’s Da Capo, or the “Grape Jam” offered as a bonus second disc with Moby Grape’s Wow.

Any fool, runs the logic, can luck into a momentary success, but developing that breakthrough into a career takes something more. In some cases, that fateful first brush with the zeitgeist doesn’t actually come until the second or third album: when A&R legend John Hammond insisted on persevering with Bob Dylan after his debut album sold poorly, the singer became known around Columbia Records as “Hammond’s Folly”.That, of course, was in the era when artists were given time to establish themselves over the course of three or four albums. Feels like Home is an album so wary of challenge it seems scared of waking its audience up.The “difficult” second album has become an acknowledged part of rock’n'roll lore, a rite of passage singers and bands must go through in order to establish themselves as proper artists. How could anybody dislike Norah?Which is part of the problem when it comes to delivering that all-important, and often terminal, follow-up album. When an act tries so hard not to offend, they risk denuding their work of the more interesting, questionable elements that might actually attract listeners.

You can tick all the boxes: pleasing on both eye and ear; great roots credibility, courtesy of absentee father Ravi Shankar; veneer of sophistication bestowed by jazz ; and an inoffensive, unassuming manner that places no undue demands on listeners’ affections. Norah Jones has become the queen bee of this new constituency, her reputation secured by word of mouth (and, truth be told, a massive marketing campaign). She seemed to come from nowhere, with a style so resolutely ignorant of pop’s passing trends that it simply failed to register on most observers’ radars. I still hold to my initial impression: it is pale magnolia music for wine bars.
It is largely a reaction to the increasingly infantilised state of modern pop and rock.

There are now at least two entire generations (that which came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and that which came of age in the 1980s) for whom pop music remains a consuming interest but who find little to interest them coming from today’s corporate pop machine.For many of these musically disenfranchised older listeners, jazz, blues, and folk offer alternative means of indulging their hunger for a popular music which doesn’t treat them like kids. By this time next week, Norah Jones will probably be nestling atop the album charts with Feels like Home, the follow-up to her multi-platinum, Grammy-grabbing Come Away with Me Jones’s success took the industry by surprise. Spain helps to keep me grounded, and the people give me better advice than I’ve ever had.”‘Apropa’t’ is out now on Warp. If my scooter goes wrong, I have to wait weeks for it to get fixed.