ISAAC GETS HIS GROOVE BACK

Soul great Isaac Hayes is going to need all his strength for the year ahead, which will see him rejoining the revitalised Stax label that made his name and recording his first new album since 1995. He had a rough 2006. Not only did he depart his decade-old role as the richly toned Chef with an eye for the ladies in South Park after the ever-offensive cartoon mocked his religion, Scientology, but, a couple of months before that, the 64-year-old suffered a mild stroke.

"It could have been serious, but I'm getting better," the voice of Shaft tells me, his slow speech sounding like his familiar loverman persona rather than anything more grave.

After launching the careers of Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Booker T & the MGs, and Hayes, Stax folded in 1976 but is being relaunched by a Californian music group, Concord, just in time for its 50th anniversary.

"It's a homecoming for me," says Hayes, who fell out with the label over royalties in the mid-Seventies. Stax subsequently went bankrupt. They have, he says, "straightened all that out. The label's a different place now." He'll be writing new songs ("I think you'll like them. I can't say much about them, but they're hip tunes") and he'll play a prominent role in a new Stax documentary, Respect Yourself, which reaches UK cinemas on 21 August.

Before then, he performs at the Shepherds Bush Empire next Friday, the first chance in two years for a London audience to hear his epic, strung-out reworkings of classics such as Walk on By and By the Time I Get to Phoenix. "What I have to say can't be said in two minutes and 30 seconds." And because of his health, songs such as the 16-minute Joy could take half an hour. "I can do everything I used to do, I just take it a bit easier." Bring a cushion.

OUTGROWN THE SAVAGE GARDEN

It doesn't matter how big you are, it seems there's no such thing as being untouchable in pop. As the falsetto-voiced frontman of the glossy Australian pop duo Savage Garden, Darren Hayes (below) sold some 25 million records in the late Nineties. Now without a record deal, he's been forced to dip into his own pocket to fund the release of his next solo album.

Hayes's solo career was overshadowed by the emergence of a rival also gunning for female fans who'd outgrown boybands, Justin Timberlake. After his record company refused to put out his second solo work in the US, he was forced to go it alone.

Now he's starting from scratch - and sounding humble but positive about it. "All the things I took for granted were taken away from me. It was the beginning of an amazing process," he says.

Hayes is even paying for the effects-packed video to his comeback single, On the Verge of Something Wonderful (out 6 August). "It's still a big operation and if it goes wrong, I've probably lost my nest egg. But I feel good about it."

He probably feels good that he no longer needs to be a pop idol for the ladies. At the peak of Savage Garden's success he realised he was gay and divorced his wife, whom he married at just 23. Now 35, last year he came out publicly and married animator Richard Cullen in a civil ceremony in London - "When I was in Savage Garden, I absolutely did not want to be gay. But I just knew with Richard."

The new record, This Delicate Thing We Made, is a 25-track double album, part pop, part concept work about time travel. Released on 20 August, it has plenty of good tunes but some strange moments too, not least How to Build a Time Machine, which concerns his exalcoholic father's history as a domestic abuser. There's disco-friendly house on Step Into the Light as well as bizarre chipmunk robo-funk on Bombs Up in My Face.

It's new starts all round for Hayes.

AN EARLY LISTEN TO...
Athlete
Beyond the Neighbourhood (Parlaphone)
The days when Deptford band Athlete were a jolly bunch, just out for a simple sing-song, seem a long way off. Their second album, Tourist (a No 1), was jammed with Coldplay-style everyman ballads, and this follow-up strives for even more gravitas.

Due out on 3 September, it begins with a solemn instrumental and then keeps the tearful moments coming. Even the more lively comeback single, Hurricane, is terribly serious about global warming.

Aside from the wispy Flying Over Bus Stops and the hints at a slightly surprising trip hop direction on Airport Disco and The Outsiders, these are big songs designed for big spaces. If Hurricanes is the giant hit it should be, they'll be joining Snow Patrol in the arenas soon.

NEW ON THE NET

It has surprised everyone what a big hit the song Foundations by quirky Kate Nash (left) has become. It might even reach No 1 on Sunday so her debut album, Made of Bricks (Polydor), has been rushed forward to 6 August to cope with the sudden demand for her spiky pop tunes. If you can't even wait that long for more music, giving your email address to www.katenash.co.uk will earn you a free download of a remix of her track Caroline's a Victim.

Elsewhere in the world of unexpectedly successful female unknowns, Glaswegian singer-songwriter Amy MacDonald had the highest new entry this week with Mr Rock and Roll. Her debut album is available in the iTunes store a week early now, at the frankly ludicrous price of just £5.49.

If you're sick of Rihanna's 10-week No 1 by now, you might as well get sick of the next huge chart-topper early. That would be Beautiful Girls by fat Jamaican teenager Sean Kingston, which gives a reggae swing to Ben E King's Stand By Me and is so infuriatingly catchy it lodges in the brain like an icepick. It's not out until 3 September, but if you're mad enough to pre-order his entire debut album you can have it now at www.seankingston.com. Or you could type his name into YouTube and watch the endless video tributes already out there.