So ten days ago, majorly-hyped pop contender Frankmusik was dropped in a field in Scotland, with only twenty quid and his Blackberry. He was then asked to make it back to London while playing a succession of gigs that constitute his tour. More accurately, of course, Frankmusik’s been dropped in a field with twenty quid, his Blackberry © ® (TM) and a major cross-platform marketing campaign, driven by virals and street teams, including mailouts to all major news sources, a pair of Channel 4 cameramen updating his Myspace with clips of his continuing adventures on a daily basis, and GPS tracking his every move and uploading it to a map on his personal website while potted-summaries of his days are blogged by some or other backroom boyo on his official website.

Given that Frankmusik’s entire sonic output seems to be based on major labels seeing the success of “YouTube Sensation” © ® (TM) “The Nouma Nouma Song“, and trying to copy it, perhaps it’s appropriate that in their heads, they associated him with virals. After T Mobile beat the Island suits into the Guinness Book Of Records for “the largest conflagration of idiots dancing at Liverpool Street Station,” there’s was nothing for it but to send Frank across Blighty on a well-sponsored shoestring.

According to the accompanying press release: “After years of media-trained manufactured pop Vincent [Frankmusik] is taking the genre apart and letting fans look at its insides.” What? So Vince is going to let fans sit-in on the Universal meetings where they argue over what ethnic balance of the members of The Saturdays will achieve maximum demographic penetration? Oh… I see.

This is also high stakes for the man under the microscope. The way things are looking, it may be Frankmusik’s last best chance at corralling some proper public support before he’s unceremoniously dropped. He acknowledges as much in one of his pieces to camera, displaying remarkable candour in talking about how he feels Frankmusik won’t succeed – and how his back-up plan is to move to America next year and start again under a new name. In fact, Vince [Frankmusik] comes across as a fairly self-aware, basically likeable, oddly depressive character, struggling to understand what he’s being moulded into (even if he has a dire way of yodel-singing his own name at the start of these clips).

Half the time he got by with a little help from people who have their own vested interests. There’s “Adele and her flatmate,” who just-so-happen to work for Galaxy FM. There’s Paul Griffiths, lord of kawaii-haven Babycakes who lets him do an in-store in Manchester. There’s some completely-unplanned Tinchy Stryder brand-synergy in Norwich. And so on, until yesterday Vince finally wended his way to London for the apex - a packed single launch at Dingwalls. Video screens flashed up edited highlights packages. On other side-screens, we were treated to pictures of Frankmusik in black and white, standing next to random people, presumably snaps from the tour, though his short-back-and-sides hairdo and querulous stare made it look rather like these were before-shots the media had procured of the proverbial “crazed lone gunman” in some Russian school-shooting. Frank was understandably keen to show he won’t be bought and sold: “There are people out there who think I didn’t do this. I’d like to see them do it with even with a load of money. Fuck them.”

Unfortunately for him, all his tour has proved is guerilla-anything stopped being exciting the day Dominic Masters entered the London Underground armed with a megaphone and a thimbleful of talent. Now that guerilla-marketing has brought us the drumming-gorrilla, every adman in the city has been unshackled to poke us with their “great ideas” for “changing the dynamic between consumer and product”.

Here are some predictions for the next big fame-reality collisions.

•    The Pussycat Dolls are locked in a room with only an internet connection and forced to live off what fans send them for a year – Pizza, toiletries, etc. By month three, the public has lost interest in their output and they’re essentially scraping-by as webcam-strippers.

•    In association with Heinz, Gareth Gates cycles Blighty armed only with a can opener, and has to persuade the public of successive towns to donate tinned Heinz products to live off of, as payment for town hall gigs/panto-shows.

•    In an effort to rejizz his flagging career, Murph from The Wombats is used by Renault as a human crash-test-dummy in a series of town centre safety demonstrations, which are then cut together into a TV ad. Fans get to choose the music that’s playing on the car radio as he undergoes his harrowing ordeal by logging onto a special site, that also transmits messages from fans up onto an LED above the wall he’s heading towards at terminal velocity.

•    Leon Jackson has a camera implanted in his forehead, and fans who log onto his MySpace are given the opportunity to control his movements via an android CPU plugged into his cerebral cortex. Leads to much ’stop hitting yourself’ hilarity.

•    Frankmusik records an album with the drumming gorrilla and the “Chocolate Rain” boy while having sex with Paris Hilton.

GAVIN HAYNES