POP music has an amazing talent for creating controversy and publicity - the two go hand-in-hand like a pair of young Russian lesbians.

And, if you haven't noticed, a pair of young Russian lesbians are No 1 in the charts. The BBC is refusing to play their video, Richard and Judy have called for them to be banned and the Daily Mail has worked itself up into a moral lather and invented the term "paedo-pop" to describe them.

The Russians call themselves Tatu, which is an abbreviation of the phrase "ta dyevushka lyubit tu" - "this girl loves that girl". They're 17 and 18 years old, but look deliberately younger and their video was filmed two years ago. It features them wearing skimpy school uniforms and snogging in a shower.

The Mail is right. It is paedo-pop. It is designed to turn on dirty old men. Worse than that, it appears to reinforce the paedophiles' belief that they are doing nothing wrong: these girls are doing all the enticing with their provocative poses.

This is what was so disturbing about the Michael Jackson interview. He denied there was anything wrong with a 44-year-old man sleeping with a 14-year-old boy. All the boys wanted to do it, he said. It wasn't his fault.

But, just as Tatu's song All The Things She Said is selling well because of the paedo-pop controversy, Michael Jackson has started flying out of the shops again. Indeed, by the middle of this week Darlington's main music store had replaced the new album by the Pet Shop Boys on its most prominent rack with a Jackson greatest hits CD. Controversy causes publicity which sells product.

Which is why Jackson and Tatu exist. The Jacksons were manufactured by their father to make money, Tatu were put together by a Moscow child psychiatrist to make money (the girls actually have boyfriends and are just playing at lesbianki).

And the reason they do make money is because they are good. Michael Jackson in his early career recorded some brilliant pop music and Tatu's CD is exciting, tuneful Euro-pop. Their lyrics are not Shakespeare, and my co-columnist Peter Mullen would certainly not approve, but All The Things She Said is an interesting exploration of confused teenage sexual feelings which ends with a line about wanting to wash away the shame of being homosexual. Rather than exploiting the youngsters who are handing over their pocket money, the song is probably talking to them.

So while accepting there is something uneasily distasteful about the latest manufactured pop phenomenom, it should be remembered that Tatu have some things in their favour.

Best of all, they are proper pop music. Just like the Beatles and the Stones, the prudes disapprove of them. They come at a time when the charts are full of the banal aural bubblegum of Will Young, Gareth Gates, David Sneddon and even our own Zoe who have nothing to say for themselves and no emotional reason to say it.

They are manufactured to win over the easy listening ears of prime time TV watchers who do not want to be bothered to think; at least Tatu are manufactured to challenge - to have balls, one might say, if it weren't so controversial in this context.